USA TODAY International Edition
College shuffle?
The Big 12, at risk of falling behind its football rivals, says it will consider expansion,
In the span of one afternoon, the Big 12 all but decided to change the very nature of its conference and shake up the entire college sports universe for the foreseeable future.
The conference of One True Champion is about to undergo One True Expansion.
After a meeting of Big 12 presidents here Tuesday, Oklahoma President David Boren announced that Commissioner Bob Bowlsby had been authorized to engage schools interested in joining the Big 12 and said the league could grow by as many as four teams.
While it technically means the Big 12 could backtrack and stay at 10 members, it is clear the presidents have every intention of getting bigger — and perhaps as soon as the 2017 football season.
“It’s a statement we want to move forward,” Boren said.
Though the Big 12 has had an internal battle over whether to expand since Dec. 7, 2014 — the day the league was left out of the inaugural College Football Playoff — the one overriding factor was the quality of programs available to expand.
While many in the league were open to or simply ambivalent about expansion in theory, the Big 12 did not have the strength to lure other schools in peer leagues.
For more than a year, the question of whether the Big 12 could add members from outside the Power Five without diluting the league’s overall product and brand essentially had stalled any serious momentum on getting bigger. And when the NCAA approved a rule change this year allowing the Big 12 to hold a football championship game with fewer than 12 teams, there did not appear to be any financial or competitive reason for the league to get bigger.
The momentum changed Monday, when ESPN reported the Atlantic Coast Conference would soon announce a partnership on a new cable network and had agreed to a “grant of rights,” locking in its members for the next 20 years.
That means more money for the ACC, more stability and more of a threat to the Big 12 should another league — say, the Big Ten — consider expansion again in the next decade. The Big 12 could do nothing, certainly, but it decided Tuesday that the risk of falling behind without expansion is greater than the short- term issues new members might create.
While there are no ready- made members that will boost the Big 12 now — otherwise they’d already be in — the league is going to swallow hard and use its brand to build up a program from outside the power structure.
In the meantime, this movement toward expansion is going to ripple throughout the rest of the college sports world. One well- connected person in the industry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said athletics directors and presidents wouldn’t sleep until the decision was over because jobs will literally be on the line.
This represents potentially the last major realignment for quite some time, and the chance for schools outside the Power Five to jump the fence — particularly as the financial gap has widened — is going to create tremendous pressure on administrators.
It is also going to shake up several conferences. It’s possible the American Athletic Conference, which has been the top league outside the Power Five, could lose multiple teams. The dominoes could fall all the way down to a school such as Massachusetts, which does not have a home for football and is playing an independent schedule.
And, according to Bowlsby, the process could move quickly enough that a September vote on how many and which schools to add isn’t out of the question.
“I don’t know that I’m prepared to put a time frame on it right now,” he said. “We intend to be active very soon.”