Why Should The Pac-10 Rush To Add Utah When The Big-Tex (12-2) Is Still Unstable (Not Likely Viable)?

I completely agree on everything you said. Even after reading this conspiracy theory that this was Texas’ plan all along…..

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/collegesports/2010/06/15/pac-10-expansion-the-texas-conspiracy-theory/

Even if this was the master plan of Texas, this can’t last for too long, especially if the four “other” schools are being bullied to pay for Colorado and Nebraska’s penalty. It’s definitely gonna create a lot of animosity towards the Big 12 (10) South.

The idea of Texas, Oklahoma, A&M was very interesting to me. Those schools would have made the Pac-10 the best conference in the country. Utah used to be one of those patsy non-conference games that helped the coaches evaluate players and helped the players get some experience in the system. Even though they have won some games in the past, I have no interest in them at all. I’m barely interested in Colorado.

If this is the kind of shenanigans they pull? I wouldn’t want this type of mentality/cancer in the Pac-10, if, of course these rumors are true.

Sorry Guys, I know this isnt the right forum, but did anyone see the hustle play that Jordan Farmar just made. James Worthy all over again.

What a display of hustle by a true Bruin

You mentioned something about Missouri the other day. Why don’t we just tell Texas, were done with their Bureaucratic, scheming Bull S#!t and pick up the Tigers and leave the rest of that conference to fend for itself. I think your absolutely right about Texas potentially being a home wrecker to a PAC whatever it may be in the future anyway.

and does divide revenues among the existing and recently added Pac 10 members, the mega conference is the future. Utah, with an adequate basketball history and recent above average football program, can’t be allowed to be picked off by an eastern conference.

From Texas and northward, all of the conferences are east of that geographic line. To gain a proportionate amount of bowl representation, I feel it is imperative that the Pac 10 first defend its geography. Utah adds little, I concede, but a mega conference that contains the greatest physical territory, maintains a huge percentage of the national population, cannot be ignored during bowl selection as it currently exists and tournament time. To build a conference empire, the Pac 10 should build in order that it cannot be ignored by networks.

When the entire western half of the country is comprised of a singular conference, then adding hold-outs UT, TTU, A&M, OU, and OSU is no longer a reach. Who wouldn’t want to be represented in a conference that represents an entire half of the country?

Realizing this is a dissenting opinion, I welcome the responses. : )

Initially, this post was aimed at sam_in_hb, FreewayBruin03 and Patroclus,but since a lot of posts have been made on this, I just wanted to share my take. Note that this doesn’t directly address Utah, but its mostly about the entire re-alignment thing and where we stand:

The whole thing is like a giant game of Risk, only billions of $$’s are at stake. History majors take note… this episode will be a great book to read about one day.

I agree though that in the long run, the super-conference (centered around football) is inevitable unless major changes happen such as the NCAA and BCS agreeing to a football playoff… which needless to say, isn’t likely to happen without some major movement from the outside.

I didn’t pay much attention to college sports back then, but these last few weeks have taught a lot about where college athletics are going.

From 1990-1994, we saw an era of expansion among nearly every conference:
-The SWC dissolved and the Big 12 was formed from the SWC+Big 8
-The SEC went from 10 to 12
-The Big-10 forgot how to count and added Penn State, and unsuccessfully tried to get Notre Dame
-The Big East went from 9 teams to 14, adding Miami, Temple, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, and Rutgers. And they started playing college football. Of course, Temple eventually left and then Miami, Boston College and VTech went to the ACC in 2005
-The ACC added Florida State to go to 9, then took Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College in the mid 2000’s (it is important to note too that those 3 teams are big football schools)

Notably absent amongst the big 6? The Pac-10 of course. Sure, Texas asked to come in after the SWC, but we had the famous Ann Richards & Baylor issue which eventually forced those 4 Texas schools to go together to the Big 12.

Also of note is that the conferences have in the past 20 years shifted their focus to college football. The Big East started playing college football, and the ACC shifted gears in the 2000’s to add prominent football programs.

If there were any doubts about which sport is dominant, this week should have made it crystal clear: football. When you consider that Kansas, with their great basketball history and tradition, was on the verge of being sent to the MWC – and was basically begging to be included as team #16 if A&M went to the SEC – that should tell you how little people care about basketball on the business side of collegiate athletics.

Of course, a lot of this is geographic… cities and schools are a lot closer to one another on the east coast, and so conference re-alignment isn’t nearly as big an issue. Population also favors the east coast. On the west coast, all the big time colleges are already in the Pac-10 so simply put, there isn’t much left. Travel isn’t any easier in America now (arguably, it’s worse).

And that’s a big reason why the Big 12 was looking to be the conference to be carved up. Texas, while the #2 populous state in the nation, doesn’t exactly have large neighbors. The Big 12 has Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. The Pac 10 has Los Angeles and the Bay Area. But no one is going to confuse Seattle, Phoenix, etc. for Norman or Manhattan… KS that is.

Fact was, beyond even the population & market issue, the Big 12 doesn’t have much room to expand either. East? The SEC is there to stay. North? The Big-10. The West Coast? The Pac-10 has all the key markets already locked down, and the Pac-10 hasn’t changed since 1978, so it has been extremely stable.

Poaching schools from the MWC or WAC were the only other options if the Big 12 wanted to exist, but those schools simply don’t bring much to the table. Hence the entire Texas & Co. to Pac-10 talks had been going on for a few months already…

Nebraska and Mizzou saw the writing on the wall – and being close to the Big 10 geographically, they all wanted that coveted last spot.

As we all saw, the lesser schools in the Big 12 all knew they were scewed. KSU, KU, MU (once it became obvious the Big 10 didn’t want them), ISU, and Baylor all hoped that the Big 12 would be saved. Texas had all the cards too – Oklahoma was going to follow them since it gave them access to Texas recruiting. OSU was going to follow its in-state big brother. TTU was tied to Texas by the Texas legislature, and Aggy’s won’t admit it, but they weren’t likely to get a full invite to the SEC without bringing Texas or Oklahoma along.

Now I don’t need to recap what happened in the last few days/hours, but it gives a look at the future.

Going into this whole mess, I was on the traditionalists side – I wanted the Pac-10 to stay at 10, maintain its round-robin, etc. Admittedly, adding Texas & Oklahoma & Kansas/A&M would have been nice that I wouldn’t have minded adding OSU, TTU, etc. but I was wary of all the politics and drama that would come with it in a few years – turns out I was wrong, all that came before the conference could even form.

All that being said, why do I still think an eventual poaching of the Big-12 and/or joint network/conference is going to happen? Because in the interest of the Pac-10, that might be what’s required to keep ourselves alive.

The landscape of college sports has changed a lot since early 1990’s reshuffling of leagues. College football money has absolutely exploded – that’s well documented.

But also, every conference has gotten larger, and since colleges are a finite resource – and very good colleges with good athletic programs are even more finite/rare – we don’t have that same room anymore. Case in point… the West coast is so dominated by the Pac-10 colleges, that no matter how good a SDSU or Boise State or Utah or TCU or whatever gets, they and their conference will never get close to the recognition the Pac-10 gets, which is why any of those schools would jump at the first opportunity the Pac-10 gives them. Even now, a lot of us still don’t want anything to do with those schools in the WAC/MWC.

Unlike the early 90’s, the independents are all but dried up too (to say nothing of the fact there isn’t a big-time independent on the west coast anyways). Only Notre Dame remains a hold-out. I suppose you could count Army, Navy, and Air Force, but the service academies aren’t about to join or be invited to the Pac-10. (I said this last year though, that I’d love to see us play one of them sometime instead of SDSU or whatever all over again). Also, all the major conferences now have 11 or 12 teams, except the Big 12-2 of course.

So simply put, the number of possible schools to poach, that are even geographically feasible (and the Big-12 schools were already pushing it) are drying up. And since college athletics programs don’t bloom overnight, we might not see any new powers on the west coast for quite some time (and it will also certainly require our nation’s population to grow a bit as well).

My other half of why I think this might be inevitable is that the status quo need only be upset a little bit, and the scramble for superconferences will begin all again. Say the Big East (considered the next weakest after the Big 12-2) decides it can no longer compete and needs to fold… well the Big 10, ACC and SEC all come knocking. All 3 already have 12 teams, but there’s no doubt picking up new markets would be very lucrative. So it becomes a scramble all again, but alignment is easy since they’re all on the east coast and close to one another. Pitt to Penn State would be easy logistics for example. Same scenario is true of the ACC folds… there’s no doubt a Big 10 or SEC or Big East would absolutely scramble to get UNC and Duke under their labels.

So what would a Pac-10 do in that case? If it wants to compete, not just money wise, it would have to expand, and all the lucrative schools are in the Big 12, but they border the other conferences. I bet that Larry Scott and others running the Pac-10 now have certainly thought of that: a nightmare scenario where Nebraska and Mizzou run off to the Big 10 and Notre Dame finally joins, the SEC poaches Texas and OU, and the Pac-10 is left out with nothing and becomes relegated to the 2nd tier.

Nightmare all-time worse scenario? Sure. Unlikely? Sure. But is it a risk you’re willing to run while you still have cards in your hand, namely a contract due to be renegotiated (and keeping in mind that contracts last for 10+ years, it would be in the interest to start strong) and a stable conference with large markets? It all seems far-fetched, but I have no doubt such scenarios have to have been considered by these guys, even if its thrown in the “outlandish” pile.

So where does everything go from here? Hard to say. Obviously, if Vegas did odds on the Big12-2 imploding with an over/under of 5 1/2 years, I’d seriously have to think about the under. Though this last scenario has left a bad taste in my mouth with regards to dealing with Texas and the Texas state legislature, I think they’re still the best option if it came to needing to expand beyond 11/12 teams.

Ideally, the status quo is maintained and no more conferences implode. That is, the Big East stops its own in-fighting, the Big 10 and SEC and ACC are content with 12 teams, and we go on our merry ways. Then again, ideally, we have a college football playoff….

So the next step is mostly… hurry up and wait. The only thing we can control now, is where we stand for our TV contract re-negotiations. I’d like to believe that Scott and company have done the calculations out, and have an idea where we would stand with different scenarios. These guys seem too smart not to (and, I hope they don’t pick the same consultants for marketing that Beebe and the Big12-2 did…) have thought this out and know whether a 12th team or not will help the conference as a whole, especially since they’ve been talking about this for months.

Sadly this entire scenario reminds me of how greed can destroy what made college sports great. Hearing about how the Big 12 was willing to break up the Nebraska-OU, Texas vs. A&M, etc. rivalries was scary, because they were oh so willing to do it for the money overnight, destroying decades of tradition etc. However, this last week has also proven that there are powers beyond even our conference who want things to go certain ways, and billions are at stake, but in the end the real losers ended up being the fans.

For those of you saying that Utah is primarily a BYU state, from what I understand that has no bearing on TV revenue. I’m going from memory so take the figures with a grain of salt, but the Big 10 network gets something like $1.50 per cable subscriber in markets where a Big 10 team is located. For markets outside of a Big 10 team they get $.70 per cable subscriber. Assuming a Pac 10 network gets a simular deal, it doesn’t matter whether or not a person is a Utah or BYU fan, just that they are a cable subscriber who has a package that include the Pac 10 network. We get paid even if they never tune into the channel.
I’m not trying to argue that adding Utah makes financial sense, just that the fan base numbers have little to no bearing on TV revenue especially if we start our own network. Now if things change in the future and ala carte cable is mandated, then the fanbase numbers will matter as subscribers will be able to choose whether or not they get the channel, but for now it will be forced on them should they choose any sort of non basic channel package.

Even when news was trickling out Monday that the Big 12 would stay intact w/10 teams, I just couldn’t help but have these uneasy doubts about the long-term viability of this “new” association. Just being from Iowa and a U of Iowa grad, I’ve already been getting a pretty good feel about the growing animosity between Iowa and Iowa State (not that they weren’t already big rivals anyway) should ISU get left out in the cold with a break-up of the Big 12 and how the U of Iowa Athletic Department is a money-making machine.

Again, to build on a post I made yesterday, I just don’t think Larry Scott has the luxury of waiting to see what all goes down unlike his counterpart from the Big 10, Jim Delaney, who has an assortment of schools that could make good additions. Sure, I think it’d be neat to have Texas, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech. Maybe even OU as well. And, while I think that the Big 12 will one day break up for good, I don’t think Larry Scott is in a position to just sit back and bank on it. He may be forced to make a move like going after Utah – whether we like it or not.

Perhaps they just meant the Big 12. Colin Cowherd yesterday was spouting that now Texas had the driver’s seat to the BCS championsip game now since they don’t have a true road game test, because they play OU at a neutral site.

They never schedule a difficult OOC schedule. They should be penalized for that in the BCS polls, IMHO. At least SUC and the Buckeyes played each other in a home-and-home.