BYU wouldn’t accept. The AAC offers no more to them than did the MWC which they left. They want P5 or nothing.
I'd take BYU and get rid of TAMU in a heartbeat. At least the Mormon weirdos come with a nice place to take a fall weekend trip.
I’d be ok with UAB, they have had a little bit of press after pulling a Jesus. Spoiler I’d prefer no one
Spoiler The superconference that wasn’t: How the Pac-16 plan changed college sports By David Ubben 2h ago 39 Larry Scott was sitting in an Oklahoma City airport lounge, waiting to board a plane. He was in the midst of a tour of multiple Big 12 campuses when he glanced at the television and saw a breaking news report. Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott is in Oklahoma City as we speak, on his way to pitch multiple Big 12 schools in person on the prospect of forming the Pac-16. He couldn’t help but look over his shoulder. “That was a bit of an eerie feeling,” Scott told The Athletic. He joked with a few other members of the Pac-10’s traveling faction to break the tension. “It was like we were on an episode of ‘America’s Most Wanted’ or characters in ‘The Fugitive,’ ” he said. “That was uncomfortable to see so much scrutiny and focus on where we were, who we were talking to, a lot of rumors circulating. … I learned a lot about how easy it is to track someone. That was not something I welcomed, but I realized it goes with the territory. It’s a reflection of the passion and intensity of feeling people have around these issues and their importance. “It was eye-opening.” So, too, was Scott’s plan. In the summer of 2010, conference realignment monopolized the conversation across college sports. Scott had been in charge of the Pac-10 for less than a year when he embarked on a bold plan to raid the Big 12 and build a superconference. Creating the Pac-16 would have decimated the Big 12, which formed in 1994 when Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor and Texas Tech left the Southwest Conference and joined the Big 8. The Big 12 had less than two decades of history but boasted four of college football’s biggest brands in the Longhorns, Aggies, Oklahoma and Nebraska. Scott aimed to invite Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and Colorado, making his league the biggest conference in college sports. “There was a lot of momentum, a lot of excitement about it,” then-Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw said. “It would have become an absolute superpower.” It also would have devastated the Big 12’s leftovers. For those with a road to an invite, the Pac-16 offered an intriguing proposition. It piqued the interest of everyone who might find their university inside the diamond-encrusted fences Scott described for prospective new members. Texas and Oklahoma could stay at the top of big-time football, and their campuses could begin rubbing elbows with academic elites like Stanford, Cal and UCLA. “There were a lot of moving parts. It was an uncomfortable time,” then-Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds said. “We had some campus pressure to go to the Pac-10. They had destination cities like San Francisco and Seattle.” As Texas mulled a decision that would shape the future of college sports, nearly every campus across the Pac-10 dealt with discord between athletic departments and university administrators. The rest of the Big 12 launched political battles. Baylor, Kansas, Kansas State and Iowa State took to calling themselves the Faithful Four. A study conducted by Baylor that summer projected the university would lose at least $20 million annually in revenue if the Big 12 disintegrated, and that didn’t account for decreases in future ticket sales or fundraising. Nebraska, a fit in the Big Ten, thought about its own departure from the Big 12, which had turned more Texan than athletic director Tom Osborne preferred. Texas A&M yearned to break free from its century-long, three-legged race with Texas. Missouri’s flirtation with multiple conferences sowed distrust throughout the Big 12’s membership while the entire conference flirted with implosion. “It was chaos,” said reporter Chip Brown, now a columnist for Horns247.com. Texas held the keys to unlocking anarchy across the country. Though Texas’ ultimate choice was inaction, its time spent deliberating changed the future of college sports. Almost a decade later, every conference in America still feels the ripples. Texas’ decision took center stage in conference realignment in the summer of 2010. (Erich Schlegel / Getty Images) In December 2009, the Big Ten threw college sports into upheaval with one sentence, stirring up dust that wouldn’t settle for almost three years. “The (Council of Presidents/Chancellors) believes that the timing is right for the conference to once again conduct a thorough evaluation of options for conference structure and expansion,” read a statement released by the Big Ten. Two weeks later, Missouri governor Jay Nixon made Big Ten expansion a relevant issue in Big 12 country. He also made everyone in the conference keep one eye on the nearest exit, just in case they needed it. “I’m not going to say anything bad about the Big 12, but when you compare Oklahoma State to Northwestern, when you compare Texas Tech to Wisconsin, I mean, you begin looking at educational possibilities that are worth looking at,” Nixon said at the time. “If they want to talk, we should talk, and we should listen.” In truth, Nebraska’s football history made it a more attractive candidate for the Big Ten, outweighing Missouri’s ability to deliver the Kansas City and St. Louis television markets for the already lucrative Big Ten Network. It had launched in 2007 and immediately delivered a still-growing windfall of cash. Meanwhile, Scott resigned as the CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association in March 2009 and signed on as the commissioner of the Pac-10 that July, replacing the retired Tom Hansen. Early in his tenure, he made his way to all 10 of his conference’s campuses for what he called a “listening tour.” “As part of that process, expansion as a possibility came up,” Scott said. “We were very focused on how we were going to achieve the best results possible with our upcoming television negotiations.” That meant likely adding a championship game. Scott was also set on following the Big Ten’s lead and launching a Pac-10 Network. He believed a Pac-10 with a larger footprint and additional big football brands would command far more money, both in selling rights to broadcast games and in achieving distribution for the network. In Scott’s retelling, the Pac-10 concurrently explored a 12-team and a 16-model, but only one prompted a media frenzy. “As we analyzed it, we realized it could lead to nationally moving toward four 16-team conferences or something like that,” Scott said. Scott and the Pac-10 weren’t the only ones who forecasted that kind of response. The idea prompted fears at campuses nationwide. “We certainly heard that,” Scott said. “We heard all kinds of opinions (laughs) from some that thought it was a blueprint for the future of college sports and we’d be ahead of the game. And from others that thought it would not be a positive step and have lots of unintended consequences. That was part of our due diligence. It was good to hear. That was healthy for us.” When Scott laid out the specific 16-member plan to his membership, he described the response as positive. That was largely true at the CEO level full of university presidents and chancellors. They would be making the decision on any invitations. But within the league’s group of athletic directors, the response was far different. For smaller athletic departments like Washington State, there was concern about being lost in the shuffle competitively in a 16-team league. Like the Big 12, the Pac-12 didn’t operate under equal revenue sharing, and the Cougars had already been living with budget gaps between programs like their own and those in bigger markets like Los Angeles. “I was at the table, and as I recall, it was not a direction we were real excited to go,” said then-Washington State athletic director Bill Moos, who now occupies the same job at Nebraska. “Among the ADs, it was heavily in favor of not going to 16.” Presidents and chancellors on both sides were excited about the academic and revenue potential of a 16-team merger, but the realities within athletic departments gave pause among those whose sole responsibilities lie within athletics. “You’re putting them on airplanes coming against the sun after volleyball, basketball. Half their games would have been on the West Coast,” Dodds said. “That would have absolutely killed our kids to get home at 6 a.m. and then have to go to class.” Scott continued his pursuit of the 16-team model, quietly making overtures to prospective future members in the Big 12 and selling them on the same vision he believed in. Rumors of instability in the Big 12 began to get louder, but most of the national conversation centered more around the threat of Missouri and/or Nebraska joining the Big Ten. Texas was the summer’s biggest and most crucial prize, and the Pac-10 also zeroed in on Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and Colorado. Texas A&M was a potential partner, but SEC membership was something many university power brokers had coveted for decades, as was a split from rival Texas. Still, Texas A&M entertained early discussions from the Pac-10. The Big 12 moved its 2010 spring meetings from their usual spot in Colorado Springs to the Intercontinental Hotel in Kansas City. For four days that June, administrators from the 12 members filed in and out of tense sessions with no promises from any of the schools fielding overtures from other conferences. Dozens of media showed up at the hotel, a departure from the usual sparse attendance at the event. Dan Beebe had joined the conference in 2003, leaving his post as Ohio Valley Conference commissioner to become Kevin Weiberg’s deputy. During his tenure as commissioner, Weiberg, who declined an interview request for this story, pitched the idea of a Big 12 Network to membership. It fell on deaf ears. He left the conference in 2007 and served as vice president of the Big Ten Network, which grew into a rousing success. Beebe replaced Weiberg as commissioner. He made early attempts to introduce equal revenue sharing and a grant of rights that would prevent members from leaving the conference. “They decided not to do that. Had we done it then, we could have kept the whole 12 together,” Beebe said. “I was Kevin’s deputy and I had to get everybody to play nice in the sandbox together. I think I might have overestimated my ability to do that.” Beebe and Scott had sat in a meeting room in May 2010 with leaders of all 22 of their institutions and discussed teaming up with to combine their media rights, agreeing to a nonconference scheduling plan in at least the revenue sports and shopping the package to the highest bidder. That deal never materialized, and the Big 12 remained vulnerable during a period of transformation. The Big 12 was under siege from both the Big Ten and the Pac-10, while Texas A&M’s interest in the SEC was among the most poorly kept secrets in the conference. There was little Beebe could do. He hadn’t been able to pass any of his ideas, and his conference’s most powerful schools insisted on committing to their own independence rather than handcuffing themselves to their brethren. On June 3, the afternoon of the third day of Big 12 meetings, one report changed everything. Chip Brown, then of Orangebloods.com, posted a story that would define the week and further sow distrust within the room. According to his report, the Pac-10 planned to invite Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Colorado, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State to form the Pac-16. Texas A&M, he wrote in his initial story, was a wild card. For the next two weeks, Brown became the center of college football media, all from his kids’ playroom. “I had just had my daughter, I was still married then and I remember telling my then-wife, ‘I need you to pretend like I’m at Wimbledon. And rely on your mom for help,’ ” Brown said. He began the summer with three reliable sources. A few weeks later, that number ballooned to more than a dozen. He worked his way through calls every day, but by the time he finished, the situation changed enough to necessitate another round of calls and another attempt to secure an update. “I just remember trading information with various officials in the Big 12 and outside the Big 12 to find out what was going on,” Brown said. “Once people knew I had information to trade, I was making and getting calls, and then it’s basically, ‘I’ll tell you what I know if you tell me what, you know.’ ” Brown barely ate. In the two weeks between his initial report and Texas’ final decision, he lost 12 pounds. He said Orangebloods grew from 9,000 paid subscribers to 11,000. Brown, who joined Orangebloods in 2008 after a decade at the Dallas Morning News, became a mainstay on ESPN’s “College Football Live” and “SportsCenter.” His first bombshell report changed the dynamic inside the room at the Big 12’s annual meetings as word spread that the rumors of half the conference eyeing a westward departure were true. Meetings on June 3 were scheduled to end at 5 p.m., with Beebe and another representative set to answer questions from a crush of media lining the halls of the hotel. Meetings didn’t break until well after 6 p.m. When the doors finally opened, Beebe made a break for the elevator, taking no questions. Big 12 meetings wrapped on June 4, and nervous, desperate politicking ruled the next two weeks. Nebraska president Harvey Perlman left Kansas City and didn’t hear what he needed to hear to assure the Huskers’ security in the future of the Big 12. There was no doubt what Nebraska’s focus was next. “It causes my stomach to be unsettled thinking back to how I felt on some of those days,” McCaw said. During the week, panic and intrigue swallowed up the Big 12’s home office in Irving, Texas, too, as employees wondered if they would still have jobs. Rob Carolla, who worked as director of communications at the Big 12 from 2004-17, had just had his first child and was in the midst of purchasing a home. He’d peer through the shades of the office’s windows and see television trucks camped out in the parking lot. “Everyone was cordial,” Carolla said. “But you had to remind (reporters), like, ‘Hey, if the commissioner comes out, feel free to talk to him. But leave the receptionist alone if she’s walking to her car.’ That was hard for the office.” USC and Texas had a chance to become conference rivals. (Kirby Lee / USA Today) The creation of the Pac-16 hinged on Texas’ decision. Those who wanted the Longhorns tried to convince them by any means necessary. Beebe sought to take increased revenue off the list of reasons to leave, so he got the rest of the Big 12 to promise that Texas, Oklahoma and Texas A&M could all make at least $20 million in television revenue annually in future years. Beebe pitched the idea to the remaining membership with a simple explanation: Whatever money each school would be forced to give up in this deal would pale in comparison to what they’d involuntarily lose if the league’s cash cows elected to graze elsewhere. He believed the rest of the conference wouldn’t be forced to sacrifice a cent after the next round of television negotiations with partners ESPN and FOX was complete. The Big 12’s annual meetings had come and gone with no firm commitments from any of the most coveted schools. Over the next two weeks, Scott began to make campus visits to further sell his vision. Scott and Weiberg visited College Station, where, unlike his other stops, he found a cool reception and minimal interest in joining the conference. The meetings with the Aggies were far shorter than those on the other five campuses as he made a tour through Oklahoma and Texas. Most crucial of those visits was Scott’s arrival in Austin. He met with Dodds, women’s athletic director Chris Plonsky and president Bill Powers, who died last March. “He laid it out for us,” Dodds said. As Scott made his pitches, the so-called Faithful Four were working on both saving the Big 12 and a swift contingency plan if they were the only ones left. Administrators from all four schools met at a Kansas City steakhouse a week or so after Big 12 meetings. “I have some fond memories of us kind of bonding together in that time,” McCaw said. New Baylor president Ken Starr made a name for himself during the Bill Clinton impeachment scandal in 1998. He leveraged that name recognition to help rally Texas politicians who either held an affinity for Baylor or for the Bears’ plight, believing that a Pac-16 would be bad for the state. “I don’t want to speak for Larry Scott, but in my opinion, the Pac-10 really underestimated the political machine in the state of Texas,” Carolla said. “When those four schools got their political people involved, things started moving.” There was a precedent. In 2003, the ACC explored expansion and initially planned to make Syracuse one of its new members. Odd voting blocs put the University of Virginia in a rare position as the most powerful swing vote. Virginia governor Mark Warner sprung into action, flexing his political muscle and stating both privately and publicly that UVa president John Casteen could only support a plan for expansion that included Virginia Tech. That plan worked. The Faithful Four tried to follow that blueprint, making calls to powerful alums and politicians to apply political pressure for schools in Texas to keep the Big 12 together. “The university president is going to be influenced by the political powers that be,” Carolla said. “Saying, ‘Hey, you’re not going anywhere. It’s going to damage the rest of us.’ They do things like threaten funding for universities.” Beebe also composed a paper called “The Case for the Big 12” and distributed it to members mulling a decision. It laid out his promises and why the Big 12 was best for each school, the conference itself and college sports as a whole. “We would start each day with a call with our regents and senior administration and all those that were kind of lobbying to keep the conference together,” McCaw said. “So we had those calls early in the morning. And then we’d have a recap call late every night. We were working 16 hour days on the phone and doing everything we could to keep the Big 12 together. It was an all-day, all-night effort for weeks.” Outsiders like Mountain West members Utah and TCU watched the proceedings and found themselves with opposite rooting interests. Utah knew a Pac-16 would not include it, but a Pac-12 would be a close call. TCU knew it would be among the first in line to join with the Faithful Four if status quo in the Big 12 crumbled. Information was at a premium, and misinformation was rampant. “Our energy was put into action of hopefully being part of a Pac-12,” said then-Utah athletic director Chris Hill said. “But everybody involved was keeping their cards so close to the vest.” On June 10, one week after the Big 12 meetings, Colorado accepted an offer to join the Pac-12, bringing the Buffaloes closer to their alumni base in California and ending their status as the lone Big 12 member in the Mountain Time Zone. The next day, Nebraska officially accepted an invitation to join the Big Ten, saying its new conference had stability “that the Big 12 simply cannot offer.” With Colorado and Nebraska gone, the Big 12 was down to 10 members. Beebe arranged meetings and received assurances from ESPN and FOX that they would promise to honor the current financial figure for the Big 12’s media rights, despite the losses of Nebraska and Colorado, which trimmed inventory. Additionally, Big 12 schools still retained their Tier 3 media rights, giving them one football game, a handful of basketball games and their non-revenue sports to try to command as much as possible from a media partner or monetize the games themselves. Texas had been toying with the idea of launching its own network. That assurance would allow it to pursue one, whereas doing so in a Pac-16 that had plans to launch a conference network would be far more difficult, if not impossible. Texas hosted TCU in a three-game baseball NCAA Super Regional a week after Big 12 meetings wrapped. During the Saturday game, ESPN’s commentators discussed a possible future in the Pac-10 as cameras focused on Dodds huddled in his suite with Plonsky and Mack Brown, then the football coach. The next day, on June 13, Scott visited Austin. “We made (our decision) before he came here, but we heard him out and let him know after that meeting it was something we couldn’t do or wouldn’t do,” Dodds said. “I’m sure it was something he’d have liked to pull off, but it was not in the cards.” The certainty Dodds speaks with now was not the case for everyone on Texas’ campus. The university’s board of regents was set to meet the following Tuesday, June 15, and those “campus pressures” were still pushing Dodds and Powers to make a move. “It was very intense,” Scott said. “There’s ebbs and flows. There’s things moving fast then moving slow. Things working, like they’ve got momentum in one direction, and then moves in another direction.” At around 7 p.m. that Sunday night, conversations with sources led Chip Brown to believe the Pac-16 was imminent. A little after 10 p.m., that had changed. “I came upon one of my best sources, who said, ‘Things are changing.’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ And the response was, ‘This may not happen after all’. And so then I started going down that path,” Brown said. “And sure enough, that was the sentiment I was getting from a couple other places and felt strongly enough that I could report it.” Brown slept only a couple hours and posted a story that morning that reported Texas’ plans to stiff-arm Scott and commit to the Big 12 long-term. However, ESPN’s Joe Schad published a story and went on TV saying there was no chance the Big 12 could be saved, that Beebe’s plan had failed and the Pac-16 was on the way to becoming a reality. “There were many key decision-makers within the Big 12 who told me then and have told me since that they believed the Big 12’s future as a conference was in serious jeopardy at that time,” Schad said in a statement. “For many reasons, including that it’s not in the best interest of college athletes to be members of unwieldy superconferences with exhausting travel schedules, I’m glad it didn’t happen.” Brown panicked. The night before, everything had changed in just a couple hours. Had it happened again? “(Schad) is on the end of the TV partner, and they’re very involved,” Brown said. “I immediately got on the phone and was lucky enough to get the reassurance from my sources that that it was not happening, that the Big 12 would survive. And I just stuck with it.” Texas was, indeed, committing to the territory it already knew, rather than blazing a new trail out west. The Big 12, despite an inaccurate name, would live on as a 10-member conference. McCaw spent the previous evening sick to his stomach when he got the same initial intel that Brown and Schad had received. Then his phone rang. It was Beebe. “He said, ‘We think this thing is going to unravel and we’ll be able to put this together again. How do we take this fragile state and rebuild?’ DeLoss and (Oklahoma AD) Joe (Castiglione) were great leaders in that,” McCaw said. The next morning, Powers and Dodds called Beebe with a simple message from Texas: We’re in. The following Wednesday, Utah accepted the Pac-10’s invitation for membership, joining Colorado to form what is now the Pac-12. “We were always working on parallel paths. We were always developing multiple options at the same time,” Scott said. “That’s why we were able to make the decision pretty quickly when some of the options narrowed.” Larry Scott and the Pac-10 ended up adding two teams — Utah and Colorado — instead of six in 2010. (Getty Images) Even almost a decade later, the saga leaves one giant, lingering, complicated question: Why? Why didn’t Texas want to step into a brave new world and be credited with building a bridge to the West Coast and becoming a founding member of what could have been the first of college sports’ possibly inevitable drift toward four 16-team superconferences? That depends on who you ask. The official word from Dodds is student-athlete welfare. “Bottom line, every time we met as a staff and talked about our kids having half of their competition on the West Coast and being on airplanes all the time, we just felt like that wasn’t the right thing,” Dodds said. “I never got to the point where I thought (the Pac-16) was the right move. We had staff meetings with 10 or 12 people in a room. We started every meeting by asking, how would this affect the kids? And the end result was just not good.” Texas desired to launch the Longhorn Network and did so a year later, in August 2011. The Longhorn Network as it exists today wouldn’t have been possible in a Pac-10 where the league eventually pooled its Tier 3 rights and launched the Pac-12 Networks in August 2012. “Oh, it was definitely a sticking point,” Scott said of Texas’ plans to launch the Longhorn Network. “I don’t believe it was an insurmountable sticking point.” Texas had an eye toward monetizing its Tier 3 rights independently, but even Dodds admits he had no idea his athletic department could command the type of money it did. Texas signed a 20-year contract worth $300 million from ESPN in 2011 to launch the network, which still earns Texas $15 million annually, almost twice what any other school in the Big 12 earns on its Tier 3 rights. Oklahoma is second, and its Tier 3 agreement with Fox brings in a reported $8-10 million annually. Dodds’ thought the first time he saw ESPN’s offer? “I thought we’d better sign it as quickly as we could,” he said, though he downplays its role in Texas’ decision not to join the Pac-10. The Longhorn Network hasn’t grown into the recruiting Death Star some forecasted when the project was in its earliest stages, but it has allowed Texas to earn a $15 million annual paycheck arrived on top of the $38.8 million in television revenue the Big 12 distributed to its 10 members. The Big 12 is the only major conference that allows members to monetize their Tier 3 rights independently. As long as that Longhorn Network contract exists and the money pours onto the Forty Acres, Texas has little incentive to consider finding a new conference home. But ask around, and other reasons that might have contributed to Texas’ decision to stay surface. “I knew that (travel) was something DeLoss and Chris Plonsky took seriously, but candidly, Texas’ institutional ego, which is substantial, got in the way a bit as well,” McCaw said. “Texas had enjoyed the ability to have a dominant position and a great deal of power and control in the Big 12 as they deserved, based on their accomplishments and their resources. But it was very clear that if they joined the Pac-16, they were not going to be able to demonstrate the same level of control in that conference. I think that’s where the institutional ego became a sticking point. “It certainly tested some of the friendships among the ADs and the presidents.” Texas A&M’s exit to the SEC after the 2011 season turned one of college football’s greatest rivalries into a frustrating cold war, but the Aggies’ decision to join the SEC has largely shouldered the blame for the rivalry’s end, despite back-and-forth grandstanding on both sides about continuing the rivalry at some point. “I think at the end of the day, Texas did not want to be seen as the reason that the hundred-year rivalry with Texas A&M was coming to an end,” Brown said. “(Dodds) knew that even if Texas A&M was going to the SEC, Texas would be blamed because they would be making the first move. And at the end of the day, I don’t think DeLoss wanted that. He sacrificed for that rivalry and for history and tradition of college football in college athletics, and then it all ripped apart anyway.” Of course, there’s another theory. “DeLoss Dodds, very close friend, told me he was never interested in going to the Pac-12; it was all inspired by the conference,” said Chuck Neinas, a former Big 8 commissioner who stepped in as Big 12 interim commissioner in 2011. So why take deliberations as far as Texas did and put the Big 12 in as much peril as the conference found itself in that summer of 2010? “He got the Longhorn Network,” Neinas said. Regardless of all the possible reasons, Texas’ decision was bound to alter the course of college sports. The entire saga exposed the lack of trust within the Big 12 and the harm that unequal revenue sharing can have on a conference. The Big 12 finally adopted equal revenue sharing in 2011, and the Pac-12 followed suit in 2012 as it launched the Pac-12 Network. The Big 12 schools also agreed to a 13-year grant of rights as part of the television deal it signed in 2012. That agreement prevents any member from earning any money on media rights outside the Big 12 through 2025 and effectively prevents any defections. Before Texas A&M officially accepted an SEC invite in September 2011, Scott again made overtures to Texas and Oklahoma. “I don’t think OU is going to be a wallflower when all is said and done,” then-Oklahoma president David Boren said the day before the 2011 football season began. The quote angered Missouri, which had stayed in the Big 12 that year after an invitation to the Big Ten or SEC never materialized. To Mizzou, it sounded like a threat and kept the Tigers from feeling secure in a still-shaky Big 12 that had no contractual guarantees that it would remain an alliance beyond just the few remaining years on the current television contract. That November, Missouri accepted an invitation to follow Texas A&M to the SEC. The Big 12 returned to its current 10-member configuration by inviting West Virginia and TCU to join the conference in October. By then, Oklahoma had pushed out Beebe as commissioner, turning to Neinas to guide the league into its new era. Representatives from Oklahoma declined to be interviewed for this story. “Boren acted like Oklahoma could go to the Pac-10 without Texas. They couldn’t do that, but he felt like he wanted to show Oklahoma had enough power to have the commissioner removed and then they’d stay,” Beebe said. “And that was how it ended for me there.” But the superconference era of college sports never arrived. “Whoever said there were going to be four 16-institutions conferences was wrong. A lot of people, a lot of pundits suggested that,” Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said. “But it’s also true to say that consolidation was happening, and it was probably related to competitiveness, media and recruitment.” There might not be 16, but the SEC, Big Ten and ACC all have 14 members. Texas A&M and Missouri aren’t in the SEC if Scott doesn’t push to make the Pac-16 a reality and expose the distrust that marked much of the Big 12’s existence. Nebraska likely doesn’t leave its flawed-but-comfortable home and historic Big 8 rivalries for the Big Ten if the Pac-10 didn’t threaten the Big 12’s very existence. TCU is likely stuck living on the outskirts of the sport alongside UCF and Boise State if the Big 12 didn’t stumble into life as an eight-member league and pursue expansion. West Virginia’s fate could have gone any number of directions. Conferences have grown and consolidated, from six major conferences to five as the Big East ceased to exist in football and remaining programs formed the American Athletic Conference. The Pac-10’s pursuits in the summer of 2010 were only the latest chapter in the never-ending story of realignment in college sports. And though it was the most disruptive chapter of the modern era, it likely won’t be the last one. “Sometimes, you may come up with a blueprint or a model for the future that’s just not possible at that time,” Scott said. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth exploring and going for it. And you know, at a different time in the future, it may come back around in a different way.” Contributing: Nicole Auerbach, Stewart Mandel
Wonder what would have happened had this gone through..... I guess A&M still goes to the SEC Maybe the Big Ten takes Kansas and Missouri? West Virginia to the SEC to balance A&M? Fuck if I know Idk, glad it's been quiet for a while.
Easy to see why these "journalists" pump out half truths and sunshine if it's true they went from 9k to 11k subscribers over a few weeks.
Well that’s what happens when you cheat on her with an intern at orange bloods. Who swings her newfound stick into a job at orange bloods. The drama of the old days.
They would've been decent fits given they are each AAU members and not in danger of losing that accreditation
https://thespun.com/aac/connecticut/uconn-football-independent-big-east-aac $17m is a lot to leave the football program in no man's land. I guess football home and homes annually with New Mexico State, Liberty, and UMass are worth it for hoops.
They have great facilities for D3, but they're going to have to do some work to get to D1 level in terms of capacity and whatnot. Kind of curious how long it takes them to build that up, considering how difficult expanding that stuff can be. They've also already lost two football games this season and there's a very good chance they miss the playoffs for the 2nd straight year.
Tarleton State is also going to D1, joining the WAC https://www.dallasnews.com/sports/2...sion-i-will-join-western-athletic-conference/
the WAC is super desperate I guess their student body voted to increase their athletics fee last week https://www.brownwoodtx.com/sports/...l-ready-after-athletic-referendum-vote-passes