LITTLE ROCK — As Nebraska announced it was marching out of the Big 12 (now 10) and into the Big Ten (now 12), officials left in the Big 12 added that the departure of one or two schools does not destroy a conference.
Nothing could be truer. Nebraska’s move, as well as Colorado’s move to the Pacific-10 (now 11, but probably growing this week), was an improvement for those schools, but they could have been replaced.
Those schools chose to stop laboring in the big orange shadow known as the University of Texas, the school that first ran the old Southwest Conference and more recently the Big 12.
Texas’ Board of Regents will meet Tuesday to decide if it will hang 10 and ride the boogie board from Austin tothe West Coast and the Pacific-10 with Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State following like lost sheep.
Mike Holder, the Oklahoma State athletic director, reportedly sent an e-mail to a UT regent that said he hopes his school ends up with Texas when the dust settles.
He should have signed off with a sheepish baaahhhhh.
Truth is, if Texas decides to bolt, then the Big 12 is stone cold dead. The Longhorns are that rich and that powerful, and Athletic Director DelossDodds has played this whole thing perfectly. He and most of the UT Nation have long desired to rub elbows with Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, UCLA and Southern California.
There is a touch of irony in the fact that Stanford and USC are private schools. When the Southwest Conference broke up in 1990, it wasn’t to get Arkansas out of the league, but to get rid of Rice, TCU and SMU, private schools that at the time brought little to the financial table. Baylor was saved by Ann Richards, who was Texas’ governor and a Baylor graduate.
The Big Orange sat back and orchestrated the demise of the SWC without getting any mud splattered on its image.
The same thing may be happening now as the landscape of college athletics is changing at warp speed compared to the 12 to 18 months Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said it would take when he first announced his league was looking to expand.
Within a week of Pac-10 Commissioner Larry Scott saying he would explore expansion, the league had expanded to 11 and is not stopping there. The NCAA dictates a league must have a minimum of 12 teams to have a championship game.
That’s the only say the NCAA has over expansion. It is an organization that works for all its members, not vice versa.
Delany has since said his league may grow in phases. But if it becomes the Big 16 (after cherry-picking four schools from the Big East or Atlantic Coast Conference)and the Pac-16 becomes a reality, then the SEC will almost be forced to find four schools that bring a combination of academics and athletics.
It would need to because the BCS would change and conferences with 16 teams would petition to have two automatic berths and a possible at-large for those money-rich games.
Texas A&M would be a perfect fit for the SEC, and it would give the Aggies a chance to finally stop being little brother in a state of 27 million.
SEC Commissioner Mike Slive has said he has a plan, but quality counts.
A&M is a quality school. So is Missouri. If Slive decides to expand west and not raid the ACC, those would be two good additions.So would Kansas and Baylor, and just like that, you are at 16 without changing a time zone.
Slive may want geographical balance and might ask the SEC presidents to vote on two from the west and two from the east. However, Slive will be hesitant to be a zone buster and go after ACC schools if the Big Ten pick-pockets only Big East schools.
If the SEC took those four schools mentioned, Slive and the SEC would save four quality schools and add to the SEC at the same time.
It looks as if there will eventually be four super conferences with 16 members, and that the Big 12 will be long gone and the ACC and Big East will merge.
Only time will tell if that will be a good thing, or just a greedy thing.
Sports, Pages 27 on 06/13/2010