Here's the thing about the plucky, upstart schools clambering up the ladder of college football's highest echelon: Their time has come. That is, it's time to peel back their fingers and let them fall.

For major-college football leaders to acknowledge the sport's modern reality—not only the money pouring in, but the desperate, destabilizing conference-jumping it's sparked—they must deal with the leeches in their midst. Football's leaders must confront the schools that Ohio State president Gordon Gee derided in a deliciously...