COLLEGE CONFERENCE DOSEY-DOE UPDATE: Just to catch up: Texas, Texas A&M et al are staying in the Big (Ten Teams in the Plains States) Conference, with Texas retaining its own media rights. But why stop there with the money? Kansas, Kansas State, Baylor, Iowa State and Missouri also agreed to cede their shares in the buyout penalties to be paid by Nebraska and Colorado for leaving the league (about $9M penalty each, from what I can tell) over to Texas, Texas A&M and Oklahoma.
The Pacific-And-Inland Teams Conference now has eleven teams, and folks are expecting it to raid the University of Utah from the Mountain West Conference for a twelfth. And then, we may be done -- with Notre Dame apparently staying put, the Big Midwest Land Grant University Conference With Twelve Teams isn't likely to grab more teams right now, though Maryland, Rutgers and Boston College are being considered. The era of four rival sixteen-team superconferences is not yet upon us.
I like how the five who would have been left out basically agreed to pay Texas, Oklahoma and Texas A&M to be their friends. "Please stay -- we don't want to have to end up in a conference with mouth breathers. We'll pay you to hang out with us. We just want to be near you. Don't ever leave us."
ReplyDeleteSo does this mean the Big Ten and the Big Twelve swap names?
ReplyDeleteThis has all been highly entertaining. Pity that it largely seems to be over....
ReplyDeleteI believe the preferred term is protection money.
ReplyDelete"Nice BCS program you have here, Iowa State. Be a shame if something was to happen to it."
Doesn't the fact that both ABC/ESPN and Fox stepped in to prevent the creation of superconferences raise some antitrust issues? Acting independently should be fine; acting in concert to divide up the territory (or, to look at it another way, to prevent further concentration among sellers) would pose problems.
ReplyDeleteThe real question is whether the Big XII decides to go after 2 additional members. They can't do the (very lucrative) conference championship game unless they've got 12 members, and there is some pretty substantial political pressure in Texas for them to add in TCU and Houston, likely leading to OU and OSU moving to the North Division.
ReplyDeleteBob Stoops and (more importantly) Mack Brown both hate the conference championship game so it seems like the current plan (and this is what they promised the TV networks) is to not have a championship game, instead, they will implement the 9-game round robin football schedule and 18-game round robin basketball schedule, both currently used by the Pac 10.
ReplyDeleteConference championship games are definitely a cash cow for the conferences/networks but, if we've learned anything this past week, Texas (and Mack Brown) has the only vote that counts.
I've always liked the sound of "Danegeld." Can we get a picture of Jamie Pollard waving a treaty and proclaiming "peace in our time?"
ReplyDeleteWhile we're at it, how about the agreement of the NCAA jointly agreeing to compete not for player's salaries.
ReplyDeleteA poster on FootballOutsiders noted the interesting conflict of ESPN's business end wanting to keep the Big XII together (for broadcast rights reasons) while its news side reported that the conference's demise was a sure thing, boosting Texas' leverage.
ReplyDelete