Expansion, imperfect as it may be in the Big 12’s case, is pretty much the only way to solve all those issues. We’ll use this category to offer an overall ranking of which schools would most likely be the best fit for the Big 12.
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Grobe’s time at the podium during Big 12 football media days was hotly anticipated on Tuesday.
The Bearcats have openly advocated for Big 12 membership. Only TCU and West Virginia earned Big 12 invitations, as the league chose to add just two schools, despite losing four (Colorado, Nebraska, Texas A&M and Missouri) over a two-year period.
“A number of universities have contacted the Big 12 to express interest in our conference”, said Boren, Oklahoma president and chairman of the conference board of directors after a meeting in Dallas. The feeling here is that the four new teams would be quickly and similarly assimilated.
The 10 member schools voted unanimously in support of pursuing expansion.
“The ACC was establishing a conference network, had secured grant-of-rights from its members through 2034 and had dibs on Notre Dame, should the Fighting Irish ever decide to leave football independence”.
The reconstituted Big 12 in 2014 hailed its round-robin football schedule as the way to produce “One True Champion”, but the slogan looked silly when it ended up with co-champions that season. The announcement came Tuesday from OU president David Boren and commissioner Bob Bowlsby.
There will be hurdles that need to be cleared regardless of whoever the conference chooses, but it’s clear the Big 12 do everything in its power to remain relevant in the new playoff era of college football. That’s when the conference announced it would bring back a championship game in 2017, most likely with two five-team divisions, and would not pursue a conference cable network. “Unbelievably, I’ve had people tell me they don’t think they dealt with it strongly enough, but going forward, do we want to learn from our past mistakes?” Alabama and Tennessee fly the Big 12 flag in rowing. He also added the league would consider several factors, including strength of athletic program, fan base, media market, reputation and academic standing.
“I think that this continues to be exploratory, but it’s clearly another step forward and one that our board felt very good about”, Bowlsby said.
One would think Houston is an obvious choice due to the emergence of the football program, but who knows how Texas, Baylor, TCU and Texas Tech would feel about another Power Five school in the state competing for the same recruits. Boren did not single out any prospective schools in his comments. A clause in the existing TV contracts with ESPN and Fox includes a provision to increase the payout for the overall conference to at least maintain the same payout per team if expansion were to occur to 12 or even 14 teams. Its schools are bringing in about the same money as the Big 12’s are, despite a conference TV network. Six weeks ago, Boren had admitted defeat on a conference network, because the television partners said they weren’t interested. It’s a nice position to be in. Ultimately the Big 12 Board of Directors, the expansion committee, and Big 12 athletic directors will have the final say in who gets invited if it gets to that point.
UMass made a decision to leave the Mid-American Conference rather than becoming a full member of a bad basketball conference.
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But this time, after pledging their interest at an afternoon meeting of the conference’s board of directors, the Big 12 said it was finally, truly, quite possibly going ahead with the process of accepting applicants to expand the league.
