Colorado trustees voted today to leave the PAC12 and join the Big12. This may be the death nail for the PAC12, with last years departure of USC and UCLA to B1G.
George Kliavkoff, PAC12 commisioner since 2021, hasn’t helped, especially with the lack of sustainable media rights contract for the conference. With UCLA, USC, and CU leaving after this year, the conference members will drop to 9 schools.
There continue to be rumors of other defections from the PAC12.
The Big12 will now move to net 13 members in the 2024 season after UT and OU leave for the SEC and CU joins.
I’m just spitballing here, but I’m guessing that the Big 12 will look to expand to 14 or maybe 16 members in the next year or two. After Colorado joins and UT and OU leave, adding 3 more schools would make it 16. And I think they’ll look to further plunder the Pac-12
Maybe Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah. Or Oregon, Oregon State, and Washington.
The Big 12 will probably never match the overall football prowess of the SEC and Big 10, but 16 teams would solidify their position as the #3 football conference.
There are already reports that their goal is to become the Big 16.
The person familiar with the Big 12’s discussions said the conference would ideally like to expand to 16 schools with Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado all coming over from the Pac-12 to create a Western wing of the league.
The article doesn’t say anything like that – only that the ACC has “run models on adding a number of potential targets, including West Virginia, SMU, Oregon and Washington” but “the ACC hasn’t determined yet if any specific schools could help boost the conference’s value.” It’s all just wild speculation.
I don’t like these coast to coast conferences. I never thought Rutgers and Maryland really belonged in the Big Ten and like the addition of two LA schools even less. But as long as athletic directors kneel at the altar of the dollar, we’re in for more of it.
Having said that, the ACC seems like it could be a disaster for the Ducks and Huskies. The conference’s media deal runs through 2036 and is worth right around $36 million per school. It’s not terrible, but it’s also far from great.
Plus, do the Ducks and Huskies really want to be flying across the country for half their sporting events? That’s an absurd amount of travel.
Oregon and Washington should keep all options on the table, but joining the ACC seems foolish.
It puts a lot of doubt into the idea that either school would actually go to that conference.
What, no mention yet of the Crazy Rumor of the Day That Seems to Be Picking Up Traction:
By the end of this week (Saturday 8/5), supposedly Oregon, Washington, Clemson, and Florida State will all be announcing that they will be joining the Big 10.
If true, Clemson and FSU’s buyout will dwarf what UT and Oklahoma paid to get out of the Big 12. They still have 13 years remaining on their grant of rights to the ACC.
Pac12 commissioner shared media rights deal terms with the 9 remaining members presidents this morning. Nothing confirmed but rumored to be significantly less than the Big12 current payouts, and almost all streaming with AppleTV, with future upside as AppleTV subscribers increase.
My guess is this will not be acceptable to the Arizona schools or Washington or Oregon.
Big10 doesn’t have provisions in their current contracts with Fox to allow for increases in the payouts if schools are added. So if they add Oregon and or Washington, then it dilutes the amount received by every school.
The Big 12’s contract with ESPN does allow for increases if current Power 5 schools are added, so it’s not dilutive the existing schools.
The NCAA lost most of its power relative to college football years ago. The 2021 SCOTUS case: NCAA vs. Alston pretty much stripped away power and they relinquished it.
In terms of FBS Football? None. The fact that the NCAA gets little, if any, money from the CFP shows that the “balance of power” in terms of football has belonged to the schools for decades. (I think the only money the NCAA gets from the playoff is the licensing fees for the six CFP bowl games.) The only power the NCAA has in FBS football is things like how many games each team can play, which ones get postseason bans and recruiting restrictions for violations, and so on - and keep in mind that most of those are determined by the schools themselves.
As far as the NCAA is concerned, conferences only really matter in terms of who can get an automatic invitation to an NCAA championship tournament. This is not a problem with FBS football, as the playoff is not run by the NCAA,
Conference realignment talk always feels like ancient history to me because I grew up watching the Big East and that conference was blown up over 20 years ago (at least in football).
The major shift in conference realignment started happening over 12 years ago but I understand that it’s easy to overlook if your team was largely unaffected.
Now I’m just wondering how long it will take for us to end up with 4 super conferences.