So long as the Civil War series of sporting events against Oregon State University continues, I can accept the University of Oregon’s shift next year to the Big 10 Conference with equanimity if not indifference.

The annual games against the Beavers matter to me immeasurably more than whether the Ducks are playing Indiana rather than Colorado.

I’m no more likely to travel to West Lafayette than I am to Tempe or Tucson, so the conference affiliation for Oregon — my alma mater — is of little consequence to me as a spectator.

My TV remote can make the trip to Rutgers as easily as to Stanford.

But dropping the Beavers from Oregon’s schedule would be a travesty.

Based on my perusals of a fan message board to which I subscribe, quite a lot of Ducks consider Washington the most despised rival, particularly in football, by a wide margin the most popular sport.

But as a native Oregonian, and one who has favored the Ducks since I was old enough to recognize the difference between uniforms of green and yellow and those slathered with black and orange, Oregon State is for me the key game each year.

The only game whose outcome alone determines for me whether the season, whatever happens in the dozen or so other contests, is a success.

There have been an awful lot of games between these two universities, which are just 40 miles apart.

In football, the Ducks and Beavers have battled 126 times since 1894. Only six college football rivalries have been contested more often.

No two schools have played each other more often in men’s basketball, with 363 games.

I tend to pay attention to Civil War contests in other sports — volleyball, baseball, softball — that I don’t otherwise pay much notice to.

I would, then, feel bereft were the Civil War series to go away, even temporarily. An autumn without the football game would be something akin to an October where the tamaracks refuse to change from green to yellow.

And although I would have preferred that the two universities remain in the same athletic conference, as they have been for more than a century, switching the Civil War to a nonconference game would be a minor change compared with eschewing it altogether.

Oregon’s migration to the Big 10 — which likely will have 18 teams next season, never mind its name — is the latest and most dramatic in a series of seismic shifts in college sports, all of them driven by football.

Which is driven by money — and specifically money that TV networks pay conferences for the right to show their games on the gridiron.

This bothers me.

Not the money, per se. Millions of people watch college football, and universities should be compensated handsomely for participating in the spectacle.

But it troubles me that financial matters have led to the creation of “superconferences” such as the Big 10, which is growing by plucking the richest bits from the Pac-12, leaving a desiccated carcass of a conference that’s more than a century old.

Still and all, blaming the University of Oregon for accepting the Big 10’s offer, as quite a few pundits have done, is the product of either hysteria or hyperbole.

The reality is that U of O officials chose wisely — and not only from the perspective of the football program.

Joining the Big 10 will also help to ensure that the university maintains its rare status as in which athletics do not divert public dollars that otherwise would go to what should be any university’s chief mission, which is teaching people to think, not tackle.

Oregon’s athletic department doesn’t receive any money from student tuition or the university’s share of the state budget.

This is not the case for most public universities — including Oregon State.

In 2017, for instance, OSU’s athletic department siphoned $4 million from the university’s academic budget.

This discrepancy didn’t dissuade a state legislator, however, from making inane comments during an interview with The Oregonian in the wake of the U of O announcing it would move to the Big 10 next season.

Rep. Paul Evans, a Democrat from Monmouth, said, among other things: “Do major institutions exist to provide an education and have collegiate athletics as a part of it? Or have we now just accepted that the cart’s in front of the horse and the sports wing of the college wags its tail and the rest of the institution has to follow along?”

A valid question, to be sure.

Except Evans is posing the query as a way to condemn the University of Oregon for a choice that almost certainly will benefit rather than harm its academic position.

“Somebody somewhere has to say, ‘Is this really the values we want to be presenting to the rest of the country?’ ” Evans said. “When you go shopping for a new conference for money that doesn’t flow to the whole university, just the athletics side. What the hell are we doing?”

Evans is referring, of course, to the U of O.

But he would do better to pose that question about Oregon State, since that university, not its counterpart in Eugene, is favoring sports over academics by way of the athletic department subsidies.

Those ostensibly tainted dollars that Evans cited, the result of the U of O “shopping for a new conference,” are the dollars that keep the university’s academic department financially whole, as it should be, and not partially shackled to the vagaries of televised athletics, as at OSU.

By moving to the Big 10, the U of O will receive $30 million as its share of TV rights the first year, with an increase of $1 million annually until a new contract is signed. Oregon would have received about $20 million under the contract Pac-12 officials were trying, belatedly, to finalize.

Had Oregon State been as attractive to the Big 10, it begs credulity to imagine that OSU officials wouldn’t have said yes. But the Beavers, who have had modest success on the field compared with the Ducks over the past quarter century, simply aren’t as attractive as a potential new member of the Big 10.

Evans also ought to remember that the U of O didn’t prompt the wave of Pac-12 defections. It’s been a year since UCLA and Southern Cal announced that they would join the Big 10 in 2024. Then, a couple weeks ago, Colorado agreed to move to the Big 12 Conference the same year.

Those pending departures left the Pac-12’s remaining nine universities, their conference dwindling and lacking a comparable TV contract, scrambling.

If Evans’ outrage is sincere, then he should be directing his wrath toward the Pac-12 leadership that, when the musical chairs of TV contracts suddenly paused, were left without a seat.

Oregon officials, facing the same potential fate as Oregon State and the remaining Pac-12 universities, recognized the opportunity they had, and they took it. As did the University of Washington. To do otherwise would have been fiduciary folly.

Evans made another comment to The Oregonian, one that he also clearly intended to be a slight to the U of O but which, it seems to me, does something closer to the opposite.

“They’re doing it for money and they need to own that,” Evans said, referring to the U of O’s move.

Why wouldn’t they own it?

Why wouldn’t they celebrate a decision that bolsters their university’s athletic and academic operations, and that helps avoid the need to rob from the Peters of Oregon’s tax rolls to pay the Pauls and Paulines who wear the yellow and green uniforms?

Oregon State University isn’t as fortunate.

I don’t like that. I wish the Beavers had been invited to join the Ducks in the Big 10. OSU could wind up in a lesser conference and with a TV contract share that is a pittance compared with what it has relied on.

But the U of O can hardly be blamed for the Beavers’ plight.

Moreover, it’s irrational to suggest, as it seems to me Evans does, that Oregon officials ought to have chosen to wallow with Oregon State in financial mediocrity lest leaders in Corvallis, and Beaver fans, feel left behind.

Evans and I do agree, though, about one thing.

He wants the Civil War games to continue.

Unlike the matter of conference affiliation, that rivalry can, and should, be separated from the cold figures on a budget spreadsheet.