This move may have been the motivation behind the Big 12 deciding to move forward with expansion.
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In a probably-overdue effort to avoid being left in the dust by the other Power Five football conferences, the Big 12 announced Tuesday that the league will formally explore the possibility of adding new schools to its lineup.
If you’ve been on the Big 12 expansion roller coaster since day one I commend your never-say-die attitude and, frankly, loose grip on sanity.
University of Oklahoma President and Big 12 Chairman David Boren told reporters this week the conference will generally gauge each candidate by five criteria – strength of athletic program, fan base, media market, academic standards and reputation.
UCF president John Hitt told the Orlando Sentinel that the Knights belong.
“We have reports from our two groups of consultants that have been working with us in terms of evaluating the interest of other schools and also those that have been giving us advice as to our media relationships and the media contracts going forward”, Boren said.
There is a lot of leadership in the Texas Legislature pushing for the Big 12 to add Houston. The problem is if the Big 12 wants to let in a Texas program that could leapfrog current Longhorn state members in status and in recruiting circles.
“Very, very impressive”, Gee wrote back to Rudd. Football-only or otherwise, that’s where the university would like to be to secure its athletic future moving into the coming decade, even if it means severing long-running ties with the Atlantic 10.
Colorado State: Would bring back Colorado, and Denver, back into the Big 12 fold.
Houston President Renu Khator’s email to Gee had the subject line “TV ratings” and had a color-coded chart attached showing the 20 highest-rated regular season games last season in Houston area.
And so the Big 12 suddenly saw itself as vulnerable and poor. The rest were Southeastern Conference games. A conference championship is expected to bring about $27 million to the league, which now means about $2.7 million per team.
The hindrances to expansions have always been that are no schools who are not now members of either the ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12 or SEC, that could bring in more revenue than they take from the pot. The Baylor representatives met with the Big 12 board for over two hours. “I’m an old West Virginia hillbilly, and we got that feeling if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. If that is not provided, a university must pay the conference $5 million or double the school’s final year’s conference revenue, which ever amount is greatest.
An industry source familiar with the discussions told Carlton that expansion was nearly assured with the key decision now being two or four schools. 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. The league now stands at 10.
Eight schools, including UCF and USF, are said to be pushing for a Big 12 invite.
Stay on topic – This helps keep the thread focused on the discussion at hand.
The scoop: “You look at this part of the country and think it’s not really college football territory, and it really isn’t”.
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