Duo could cash in on SEC move, at a cost
To best understand what happened Wednesday, with the revelation that Texas and Oklahoma are again thinking about leaving the Big 12 behind, it’s important to think about the larger context of the last year in college sports.
The short version is that nobody’s happy. For all the money being made already in this enterprise and the billions more arriving on the horizon, the prevailing mood in college sports is discontent and disillusionment with the
NCAA, with the increasing financial pressures placed on athletic departments, with the genie being released from the bottle on college athletes making money and with a future dictated by Congress and the courts that they know will look very different from the past.
When you talk to administrators candidly, many of them no longer enjoy their jobs or what college athletics has become. Between the COVID-19 pandemic and name, image and likeness, the vast majority of their time over the past 1 1⁄2 years has been spent on stuff that has nothing to do with why they got into this business in the first place.
And now, at a time where they’re being forced to navigate massive changes, we’re going to see who’s so beaten down that they’ll just go ahead and blow the rest of it up.
Make no mistake, if Texas and Oklahoma end up leaving the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference – a possibility that became all too real Wednesday with a leak to the Houston Chronicle about their wandering eyes and a series of non-denials from all parties involved – it’s difficult to see who this will turn out good for besides the people counting the money.
Moving conferences won’t solve Texas’ habit of stepping on its own foot. It won’t be a competitive plus for Oklahoma, which has dominated the Big 12 for most of its existence. It could be disastrous for the mid- and low-level SEC schools such as Tennessee, Ole Miss and Arkansas, which struggle enough as it is to be relevant in football and could suddenly get knocked down a couple of more rungs on the ladder.
And we know it doesn’t appeal at all to Texas A&M, whose athletic director Ross Bjork just happened to be at SEC Media Days (wink, wink) as this story broke via a Texas A&M beat reporter (wink, wink again) right before it was Jimbo Fisher’s turn in front of the podium (wink, wink a third time). It took Bjork roughly two nanoseconds to find reporters to talk to, allowing him to get it on the record that Texas A&M doesn’t want the Longhorns encroaching on the Aggies’ SEC turf.
Texas A&M-connected people leaking the story at SEC Media Days in a blatant attempt to sabotage whatever behind-the-scenes conversations have been taking place between the SEC, Texas and Oklahoma makes for the juiciest realignment drama since those same schools along with Oklahoma State and Texas Tech nearly bolted for the Pac-12 back in 2010.
But the reality of this blindside power play by the Big 12’s two most prominent programs is that it could be the most destabilizing event to hit college sports in our lifetime, leaving lots of losers in its wake.
Everyone understands that the events of 2010 left the Big 12 weaker and more vulnerable, held together only by the notion that Texas and Oklahoma were better off as the heavies in a less powerful league than trying to fight for real estate with other programs of equal stature.
But now that Texas and Oklahoma have signaled that they’ll be free agents when the Big 12’s TV deal expires in 2025, everyone’s hand is forced and decisions could be both sped up to the point of irrationality.
There will be ripple effects from that, too. Without Texas and Oklahoma, the Big 12 would barely be viable as a power conference going forward. Attempting to backfill with the top programs from the American Athletic Conference would do nothing to stop the likes of Oklahoma State, Baylor, Kansas and the rest to start desperately looking for other options. Meanwhile, would the Big Ten try to do something in response? Would the Atlantic Coast look to add? Would the die be cast for an eventual college football super league, with the SEC becoming the de facto NCAA? It’s all on the table now.
It would be a massive understatement to say the Big 12 was blindsided by Wednesday’s news. Just last week, Commissioner Bob Bowlsby was at his league’s media days, suggesting to reporters that he believed realignment was mostly a quiet topic, particularly with College Football Playoff expansion talks pretty far down the road. Within the league, it would be hard to find anyone who saw this coming right now. The way they see it, Texas and Oklahoma have had it pretty good in the Big 12.
But again, dissatisfaction with the present and anxiety over the future hangs over everything in college sports right now. The Big 12 makes a lot of money – the distributions have been between $35 million and $38 million per school, keeping them competitive with their power conference peers – but the next round of TV rights negotiations is likely to leave a sizable gap between the SEC and Big Ten and everyone else even in the best-case scenario.
From ESPN’s perspective, it makes all the sense in the world, particularly since it now owns all the SEC’s TV rights. Rather than paying top dollar for the SEC and having to bid on the Big 12 in the next round of negotiations, you can see the allure of adding Oklahoma’s and Texas’ value to the existing SEC contract and in turn no longer needing to pay the rest of the Big 12 like a premium product. It also would deal a blow to rival Fox, which has anchored a lot of its college football programming to Texas and Oklahoma the past several years.
But is a further erosion of regionalism, tradition and rivalry in the service of TV deals really what college football needs? Is the sport better with so much power concentrated with one conference? Is there even anything fun about SEC supremacy when you’ve stacked the deck to such a degree?
If Texas, of all schools, has been so defeated by its football irrelevance of the last decade that it’s ready to become just another McDonald’s franchise selling the same Big Macs as schools it used to sneer at, it’s an admission that college sports has reached an all-time low. It’s a money grab born of weakness and desperation, not strength. It’s the Longhorns taking the aura they cultivated for decades and marching it down Interstate 20 straight to Birmingham on a white flag. It’s a signal that college sports, as we knew them, are over.
Maybe after everything that’s happened over the past year, we’re already there and just haven’t realized it yet. Maybe this fuse has been sitting there for a while waiting to be lit. Either way, Texas and Oklahoma are yet again peering over the edge of a cliff. The Big 12 has pulled them back before, and it could certainly happen again.
One day, though, they’re going to jump. And even when they land safely on whatever big pile of money is out there, they’ll eventually look up and wonder if it was worth it.