I'm thinking about how I can't imagine how Boston College deserves a seat in one of these 4 conferences over Baylor. Doug Flutie ain't walking through that door!!!
I mean Baylor played Gonzaga for the national championship and NO ONE thought they weren't the 2 best teams in the country. Wild.
The Baylor Gonzaga game was the most watched non football sporting event in the last 2 years (17 m viewers).
You can't say that yall didn't peak at the exact right time for all of this to happen. Even still, it probably won't be enough. Hell, yall have had remarkable timing in terms of peak program performance preceeding the last two conference earthquakes. 2020 football season notwithstanding of course. But that was a weird one for all of us.
College basketball is an afterthought in terms of these discussions. It's all about the money generated by football.
nah you're right. I don't have any illusions about any of it. I hope for the best, but we'll see. Also UH has done insanely well to position itself given where they were. I went to law school at UH...my son goes there now...my younger son will likely go there...and I did undergrad at Baylor. So I'm rooting for UH and Baylor in this mess, and eff everyone else
that's true. and my hope in that is they just leave hoops alone and let smaller teams compete with the giants. My alma mater can clearly handle that.
ESPN? why have the private sector pay when the texas legislature will take it from the taxpayers and give to the aggies?
Partisan politics is largely irrelevant to media networks and academic administrators maximizing advertsing and licensing dollars on individual sports broadcasting contracts.
https://sports.yahoo.com/se-cs-cour...big-12-pac-12-big-ten-and-ncaa-190134687.html What's next for the Big 12? The league is beginning to discuss contingencies Thursday, as it’s obvious that this would be a devastating blow. Expect the Big 12 to be aggressive in adding schools. It'll knock on doors at Arizona and Arizona State. Perhaps it'll try and lure Colorado back and pry Utah. The Pac-12 is weak now, but the core of USC, Oregon, UCLA and Washington are all more attractive to be aligned with than any of the Big 12 schools. From there, the Big 12 will decide how big it wants to get. It has to decide whether to add two, four or six schools. Four seems like the most reasonable number, with Cincinnati, UCF, USF, BYU and Boise State the most likely candidates from outside the state of Texas. The potential addition of Houston and SMU becomes complicated, as Baylor, TCU and Texas Tech wouldn’t have much interest in more in-state competition. Remember, it’s streaming subscriptions, not cable boxes, that matter most. BYU would appear to have the best option for that, with its national following. But BYU is always complicated, which prevented the Big 12 from adding it in 2016 when the Cougars' complicated LGBTQ history became a factor. UCF and USF have great markets, but would the Big 12 want two Florida footholds? Cincinnati is a preseason Top 10 team that has been working hard behind the scenes to build for this moment. It also brings a big market and fertile recruiting area. This is all sub-optimal for the American Athletic Conference, as it'll be a familiar trickle-down. In a similar food chain fallout that followed the ACC cannibalizing the Big East a decade ago, the Big 12 will go after the most attractive AAC candidates. The AAC will do its best to hold on to its top programs but a reconstructed Big 12 without Texas and Oklahoma should offer a more attractive financial landing spot than the current AAC. Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby is one of the most respected leaders in the space. But it’d be a surprise if Bowlsby, 69, is around for more than a few years. One thing that could help the Big 12 recalibrate is that the Pac-12, ACC and Big Ten wouldn’t have much interest in any of the remaining schools. Oklahoma State isn’t a cultural fit anywhere, Kansas football is an abomination thanks to Les Miles and Jeff Long, and TCU is in an attractive market but lacks national cache. Baylor is hurt by its market.
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...iscuss-possible-departures-oklahoma-texas-sec This has all the trappings of the Big East saga from 10 years ago. The Big 12 will invite some combination of UCF, Houston, Cinci, USF, and Memphis (I don't think BYU would accept at this point). But the hits will keep coming until the point where the conference is made up of more new members than legacy members. WVU to the ACC seems all but certain at this point. The question is what do the B1G and PAC end up doing.
If any of the P5 come calling, you’d have to immediately accept right? Not knocking on any of those schools, but don’t think the conference survives very long regardless of what they do.
I think the Big 12 will survive as long as the PAC doesn't do anything. The Big 12 can sustain losing a member or two to the B1G or ACC, but if the PAC swoops in (like they should) and grabs 3-4 schools, it's over. You can put together a respectable and competitive conference out of the Big 12 leftovers and the best of the AAC. Most of the last decade the top 2-3 teams in the American have been really, really good. Some bordering on elite. The problem has always been the dead weight at the bottom of the conference. ECU, Tulane, USF, Tulsa, SMU. These programs have just absolutely killed us. I don't know what a "best of the rest" conference will get in terms of revenue and inclusion into the playoff club, but I'm hopeful. We'll always be way, way below the SEC/B1G, but I think the end result could wind up with something far closer to the PAC/ACC in terms of revenue and competition than say, the current AAC or MWC.
Consistently good? Obviously one of the bigger problems is coaching turnover which would probably be alleviated somewhat with a move to a P5 but I can't see the conference surviving. And believe that says more about the current members than whoever they'd be able to bring in.
I think it's more likely the new big 8 go to the AAC than vice versa. At least then the surviving conference gets more valuable instead of significantly less. It's hard to trust the Big 8 that are left are all in it for good. I'm sure TCU would take an invite from the ACC in a heartbeat.
Like I said, they survive only at the behest of the rest of the top tier conferences. If the PAC/B1G/ACC want to kill the Big 12, they can do that at any moment. Coaching turnover is usually related to two problems. Money and access (and the downstream implications of that lack of access). The money problem will never go away because of the insurmountable revenue gap between the top tier and the non-top-tier. Any SEC or B1G program that wants to grab a coach from the hypothetical B12/AAC conference could do so at will if money is a factor. Access is TBD. If you're in a conference that has no access to the top tier of the post-season, then you will end up losing eyeballs and recruits because of it, and that's frustrating for a coach I'm sure. So we'll have to see how that shakes out. The tipping point for that is unknown and going to be very interesting when/if it is revealed. IIRC most conferences have a membership threshold whereas once the league dips below X number of legacy members it is basically dissolved automatically. I think that if they go below 6 it will be very hard for them to justify keeping the Big 12 as an organization/business together. For Houston's sake, I hope they do, because my main desire is to escape proximity to the deadweight programs I outlined earlier. Inviting 4-5 Big 12 programs to the AAC would be better than nothing, but it doesn't solve our core problem as a conference.