Rumors this entire week have been swirling about what’s going to happen with regards to the Big 10, Big 12, and Pac-10 in the future.
Well in the past 24 hours, two major players made their first move, and now its time to see how the dominoes fall. In a completely unrelated move, another football powerhouse made it huge move.
Here the main things you need to know…
1) Last night, the University of Colorado officially accepted an offer to the join the Pac-10, which I guess will be the Pac-11 right now. Like I mentioned yesterday in a previous post, the Pac-10 had always targeted Colorado because Denver is a significant TV market.
2) Today, the University of Nebraska officially accepted an offer to leave the Big-12 and head to the Big-10 (I’m not sure what they’ll be called. After Penn State joined the conference, they’ve had 11 schools…and were still called the Big-10).
3) Boise State, the nation’s best mid-major conference team (not part of the Pac-10, Big East, ACC, SEC, Big 10 or Big 12), made a move to leave the weak Western Athletic Conference and join the relatively strong Mountain West Conference.
What does this all mean and what’s going to happen moving forward?
1) The Big 12 is officially down to 10 teams, two teams short of what’s required to host a conference championship game. It’s highly unlikely that the Big 12 is going to be able to survive for now, and its more and more likely that Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State will follow Colorado and join the Pac-10 to form the Pac-16.
2) With the Big-12 collapsing, there was talk about what to do with their BCS bid. Since the Pac-16 would be powerful, there was even talk about giving two bids to the conference, one each for each division winner, which I think is a terrible idea.
With Boise State joining the Mountain West Conference, I say the MWC gets an automatic BCS bid. If Boise State was in the MWC last season, the MWCwould have had 4 teams ranked in the top 25: Boise State, TCU, Brigham Young, and Utah.
Year after year, these teams continue to show that they have the ability to compete with the major conferences. It’s about time that we reward them.
3) Basketball and small markets get screwed.
This expansion has always been about money, and unfortunately the basketball schools (Kansas) and the small market schools (Baylor) get screwed.
For a program that has such a rich history like Kansas with regards to basketball, it’s kind of sad to see them without a major conference to play in. However, I believe this “homelessness” will be short-lived as the Big-East (a power conference in basketball already) will come along and invite them.
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