USC and UCLA Leave for the Big Ten; Why the Big 12 Should Be Aggressive This Time Around
The big college football news this summer wasn’t Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) but more realignment. If Texas and Oklahoma’s exit to the Southeastern Conference wasn’t dramatic enough in 2021 for you then seeing USC and UCLA bolt for the Big Ten should do it.
The PAC 12 without their Los Angeles footprint is a conference left on life support with little to no place to expand. The Big 12 Conference offered a possible merger with the PAC 12 last year and PAC 12 Commissioner George Kliakoff and the school administrators seemed to give it little thought, but they made their bed and now must sleep in it.
The hubris from the so-called “Conference of Champions” blinded them to the reality of the changing landscape of college athletics and holding to the comical notion that this is still amateurism. Seeing Stanford and Cal left out after stopping the like of Texas Tech and Oklahoma State in joining the PAC 12 is delicious irony.
This is all driven by the major networks which broadcast college football. FOX saw what was happening in 2021 and decided to get a piece of the action that ESPN has been orchestrating for decades. What’s damning is watching mouthpieces for the Southeastern Conference bemoan how the Big Ten is being greedy and using the tired trope of worrying about the olympic sport athletes and travel.
The lack of intellectual consistency from the sports media that’s made billions of dollars off of college athletics can’t fathom that the schools want a bigger cut of the pie. The kvetching is more rich than grandma’s key lime pie.
Where does realignment impact Texas Tech and the Big 12? The Big 12 can be the aggressive conference in this go around of realignment and get Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Colorado to get them to 16 members and have a legitimate coast to coast conference in every time zone. If they can’t get the Pacific Northwest schools they should go after the Arizona schools and build one of the most diverse and fascinating conferences in college football.
Texas Tech and the Big 12 woke up on June 30th in the 5th best conference in the country and went to bed that same day in the 4th best conference. Adding the leftovers from the PAC 12 will give the conference all four of the time zones and plenty of inventory for sports networks and streaming services to overpay for live content and draw a partner from a super conference in the SEC.
Culturally, the University of Utah and the University of Colorado make the most sense for the Big 12 with the Denver market and getting the reigning PAC 12 champs in Utah. Having witnessed a few “Holy War” games in person I can’t wait to see BYU/Utah play again every season on Thanksgiving weekend with conference implications in play.
If recent sports history has taught us anything is that we’re not done with realignment and that we’re running to having to four to five super conferences which will be its own entity separate from the NCAA. To quote a space wizard, “We’re in the endgame now.”
Allen Corbin
