College football is trying to drive me away but I cling to it, a besotted and slightly pathetic suitor who can justify all manner of betrayals.

A four-team playoff system that blatantly favors a handful of traditional powers?

I dismiss this as a lovesick husband might when he comes home and finds a Dear John letter taped to the TV remote control. Probably it’s just an ill-conceived joke. And anyway I can surely talk her out of it.

Besides which, my alma mater, the University of Oregon, has played in two national championship games in the past dozen years despite lacking the cachet of Alabama or Ohio State or Notre Dame.

(Yes, the Ducks lost both games, as my Beaver and Husky and Bronco friends, relatives and, in the case of the latter mascot, spouse, delight in pointing out. But you can’t win a national title without actually playing in the national title game is my juvenile, but no less true, retort.)

A rule that allows athletes to receive six-figure payments for NIL — the use of their name, image or likeness?

Well, sure, this too lends a likely advantage to a relative handful of well-endowed programs (the U of O, thanks to the largesse of Phil Knight, among them). But players ought to earn something other than a scholarship for their toils, after all, considering they risk injuries that can afflict them for the rest of their lives, a risk hardly any of them will offset with multimillion-dollar professional contracts.

I’ll concede that even my great affinity for college football has been severely tested by what was, until recently, its most dramatic change — the dreaded transfer portal, a purgatory which favorite players frequently enter, only to emerge again clad in the uniform of, perhaps, a despised rival.

But even though I’ve muttered a passel of profanities at the seemingly endless litany of transfer portal announcements involving Duck players (and not only in football), I have ultimately come to accept it, as I might adjust to an annoying habit that suddenly crops up in a person I care for deeply.

And yet, just as I was becoming inured to the transfer portal and its catering to the whims of teenagers, college football tendered what might be the most serious threat yet to our relationship.

If the playoff system is a Dear John letter, then the defection from the Pac-12 Conference of UCLA and Southern Cal to the Big Ten conference starting in 2024, announced in late June, is akin to finding not a letter from your wife, but your wife herself, engaged in adulterous hijinks with your best friend.

And with one of your favorite beers open on the bedside table.

The ramifications, it seems, will be far more dramatic than the loss of two schools which have been conference rivals of the Ducks for more than half a century.

The Trojans and the Bruins, having in effect entered the team version of the transfer portal, might well have doomed the Pac-12.

Speculation is rampant that the conference either will dissolve as other schools, including Oregon, seek refuge in another league, or be left so depleted as to lose its status as one of the so-called “Power 5” conferences.

Oregon has been mentioned as a candidate for multiple conferences, including the Big Ten and the Big 12.

It would be passing strange, to be sure, to have the Ducks travel to, say, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Columbus, Ohio, and Iowa City, Iowa, for conference games.

But if I can adjust to having Oregon’s leading running back swap his Duck helmet for USC’s cardinal and gold — Travis Dye was the highest profile of Oregon’s transfer portal losses this offseason — I suppose I can get used to the Ducks competing in a different conference.

But there is one potential effect from this conference shakeup that, were it to happen, might actually sour, in a significant way, my fondness for college football.

My fear is that the Civil War will go away.

What I mean is the annual football game pitting the Ducks against the Oregon State Beavers.

(I understand that the two schools agreed to drop the Civil War name in 2020, but there’s nothing legally binding about that decision, at least not for me, and I will continue to refer to the game, and all other sporting events pitting the Ducks against the Beavers, as the Civil War.)

The Civil War is one of the older, and most played, rivalries in college football. The first game was played in 1894. There have been 125 meetings, and the game has been played every year since 1945.

Oregon has won 67 times, Oregon State 48. There have been 10 ties.

For me, the Beavers are the biggest rival, and by a vast margin.

No victory is more satisfying, no defeat more agonizing.

I can’t conceive of Oregon having a football schedule that doesn’t include the Beavers.

The schools needn’t be in the same conference to play one another each year, of course. And although it would bother me if the Civil War moved to, say, September, as a nonconference game, rather than its traditional place as the last league game, usually in late November, I can at least condone that change.

But no Civil War at all, even for one year?

No nervous hours waiting for kickoff, imagining the awful scenario of the Beavers gathering at midfield to celebrate a rare triumph over the Ducks?

No immense relief when Oregon romps to another win?

College football has disappointed me frequently over the past few years.

Undoubtedly it will do so again.

But canceling the Civil War, an event as inseparable from my concept of Oregon as public beaches and Crater Lake and Tom McCall and alpenglow on the Wallowas and Elkhorns?

That’s one transgression I simply can’t forgive.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.