With expansion still an unsettled issue for the Big 12 Conference, Commissioner Bowlsby gave his annual state of the league address to open football media days.
Advertisement
“Coming into this program, I was looking for three things”, Grobe said. “As other conferences have grown other advantages have come to them”.
The announcement comes on the heels of news that the Atlantic Coast Conference and ESPN have agreed to a 20-year deal and rights extension that would lead to the creation of the ACC Network – a linear network by 2019 and a digital network beginning this fall.
The easiest way to go through this is probably to pick out the highlights of Bowlsby’s Monday media session and attempt to translate what he’s trying to say or should be saying, not always the easiest things to do. It’s not a proclamation that the identity-challenged league could get back to the number in its name, but it’s much closer than at any time since Missouri and Texas A&M bolted to the SEC five years ago and left the Big 12 scrambling just to get back to 10 schools.
The conference has being batting around the idea of adding more members for more than a year and begins its search with plenty of suitors.
BYU, Memphis, Cincinnati, Colorado State, Central Florida, South Florida and Houston are among the schools that have contacted or are believed to have contacted the Big 12 with strong interest in joining. “We have been contacted by a number of institutions, and my guess is that after this news breaks, we’ll be contacted by them again”.
Grobe did receive a ringing endorsement from one of the longest tenured coaches in the Big 12 Conference during the football media days. That was the much-discussed “13th data point” that College Football Playoff organizers wanted to see.
So, what do you make of today’s news, and who do you think the Big 12 should add, if anyone?
14-team Big 12 is on the table. He said the Board of Directors could vote on conference expansion either at its October meeting or possibly earlier.
Boren said potential candidates should be a good fit athletically and financially in the conference, and it’s ability to further a nation-wide broadcast package with its partners like ESPN, Fox, and a yet-to-be-created Big XII network.
Bowlsby added that the evaluation process will likely come in two stages, initially with some preliminary work, followed by “fact finding” and “perhaps even a negotiation stage”.
Boren said the vote was unanimous on the motion to have Bowlsby get back to the potential candidates. The grant of rights virtually locks conference members together. Not anymore. For the Big 12, expansion is all about survival and protection. He said “we can not just sit on the sidelines and not be proactive ourselves”.
The Minutemen’s best-case scenario would be if the Big 12 added four teams, including at least three from the AAC if UConn wasn’t one of them. No team is guaranteed to deliver both highly competitive teams and a new large market that would increase the value of future TV contracts.
Advertisement
The conference made a second request in late June for “all documents associated with the investigations of the sexual assaults at Baylor”, and also any information that was conveyed orally to school officials or regents including “the unedited written or verbal information from Pepper Hamilton, omitting only the names of any involved students” as well as internal documents relevant to the investigation. AP material published by LongIsland.com, is done so with explicit permission.
