It was supposed to be a relatively calm day for expansion speculation. A couple conference meetings. Some speculation that the Big 12 might make an effort to publicly speak of unity.
But, mainly nothing as the Big 11 wasn’t going to do anything right now so Mizzou and Nebraska would hedge for the time.
Well, no one really believed that the Pac-10 would upset things.
Because it appears the Pac-10, which has its meetings in San Francisco starting this weekend, is prepared to make a bold move and invite Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado to join its league, according to multiple sources close to the situation.
And things went really freaky in Dallas at the Big 12 meetings.
[Iowa State President Gregory] Geoffroy declined to address specific rumors. He deferred comments about the Pac-10 report to University of Texas President William Powers. Colorado Athletics Director Mike Bohn told the Boulder Daily Camera his school and the others could receive Pac-10 invitations this weekend.
“Until something firms up it’s all speculation,” Geoffroy said.
Speculation boiled over when Big 12 Conference Commissioner Dan Beebe first delayed then canceled a scheduled news conference to discuss the league’s future. Beebe declined to comment as he walked past a large media contingent and into an elevator.
Yes, Bohn did.
Bohn said CU has not had any contact with the Pac-10 or its representatives and he was not clear on how he came to believe invitations could be forthcoming. But he said Colorado, Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech could receive invitations possibly as soon as this weekend when Pac-10 officials meet in San Francisco.
“The longer that we were together in Kansas City it appeared that that rumor or speculation did have some validity to it,” Bohn said in an interview with the Camera as he left the Big 12 spring meetings here today.
And then sanity and some sense of what he had said overtook his brain.
Bohn said at this point Colorado remains a committed and proud member of the Big 12 and he believes the conference has a bright future if its members remain together.
“There is great equity in the Big 12 Conference and currently the financial model and the competitive equity we have as a league is currently serving us well,” he said. “The future television partnership opportunities bodes well for long term financial viability.”
Meanwhile Pac-10 Commish Larry Scott, stifled a laugh and had a statement released of non-denial.
“We have not developed any definitive plans,” Scott said. “We have not extended any invitations for expansion and we do not anticipate any such decisions in the near term.”
Yet everyone seems to think something is up. Even if it is merely the Pac-10 examining such scenarios.
Even if the academic fit of Oklahoma, OK St. and Texas Tech doesn’t seem to match well with the Pac-10.
This is all about money (big surprise).
The thought is the Big 16 (or whatever they decide for the name) would start its own television network that could command premium subscriber dollars from cable providers on par with the Big Ten Network and pay out upwards of $20 million to each of the 16 schools in TV revenue.
Such a merger between the six Big 12 schools and the Pac-10 would build a conference with seven of the country’s top 20 TV markets (Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, Houston, Phoenix, Seattle and Sacramento). And such a league would likely command attention from every cable system in the country and command a premium rate from every cable system west of the Mississippi.
Those projected TV revenues would double the current payouts of roughly $9 million to Big 12 and Pac-10 members. If the Big 16 reached its projections, the league would also surpass the SEC’s projected payout of $17 million per school reached in a 15-year TV deal with ABC/ESPN and CBS signed in 2008.
What is amazing is that the politics of Texas may not come into play. It was believed that state politics would force any conference that wanted Texas to also take Texas A&M. Instead Texas A&M seems more interested in going east rather than west.
In Thursday’s editions of the Houston Chronicle, A&M athletic director Bill Byrne was asked if the SEC is an option for the Aggies should the Big 12 break up, and he said, “It might be. You know what? It might be.”
Byrne, the athletic director at Oregon from 1984-92 before going to Nebraska, has been openly critical of having student-athletes travel west, only to return home at odd hours.
Byrne has used the example of when the Aggies had their men’s and women’s basketball teams in Spokane and Seattle for the NCAA Tournament in March and couldn’t get back to College Station until 6:30 a.m. with students having to attend 8 a.m. classes.
It’s no coincidence Byrne’s example included cities in the Pac-10’s dominant time zone.
There is also reason to believe Oklahoma could be enamored with joining the SEC. But that does not appear to be an option Texas officials would be willing to consider. There is a sense among UT officials the academics in the SEC are not on par with Texas.
If A&M and Oklahoma were to splinter off and join the SEC, the Pac-10 would obviously have to revise its invite list.
Yes, they would do back-flips and delete Texas Tech and Oklahoma St. as well from the invites. The Pac-10 would only go to 14 and would still have a huge media presence and impact with the same major markets.
The one thing about all of this that throws me off was how last month it seemed that the Big 12 and Pac-10 were more in the discussions of an alliance for TV deals. Maybe jointly going to form a cable channel. Now the Pac-10 might just pluck them apart.
What astounds me at the moment is how the Big 12 has become the conference most endangered of extinction. Not the Big East.
At least for now.
