Tag Archives: big 12

TCU to join Big XII

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ESPN Dallas/Fort Worth reports:

TCU trustees are scheduled to meet on Monday and are expected to accept the Big 12’s invitation to join the conference, sources confirmed Sunday.

An announcement could come as early as Monday evening.

The Big 12 extended TCU an invitation on Thursday and said it would begin discussions with the university immediately. TCU chancellor Victor Boschini Jr. issued a statement on Thursday about the situation.

“These discussions with the Big 12 have huge implications for TCU,” the statement said. “It will allow us to return to old rivalries, something our fans and others have been advocating for many years. As always, we must consider what’s best for TCU and our student-athletes in this ever-changing landscape of collegiate athletics. We look forward to continuing these discussions with the Big 12.”

A move to the Big 12 allows TCU to rekindle some of the rivalries it had for so long in the Southwest Conference, which disbanded in 1996.

TCU, the defending Rose Bowl champion, agreed earlier this year to leave the Mountain West Conference for the Big East, which has an automatic BCS berth.

A source told ESPNDallas.com last week that TCU would have to pay a $5 million exit fee to leave the Big East, but would be able to join the Big 12 in time for the 2012-13 athletic year.

What? You thought the Big XII was collapsing? Over and done with? Maybe. But the Big East is going down first, as reported here a month ago. Texas Christian’s decision to get itself into a BCS conference at all costs made sense two years ago, but now, the Big East is done, and TCU’s football team isn’t as good. (That’s a perspective that shows how fast this landscape really is changing, even if it appears incremental on a day-to-day basis.) The Big XII, fearing it’s next to dissolve, had to take TCU to keep something resembling a critical mass and, conveniently, replace one departing Texas team with another. And of course, TCU still thinks it belongs in a BCS conference. Million-dollar musical chairs.

The Pacific Twelve will not expand, cannot explain why, and will regret and later reverse this decision

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As beautifully reported last night, the recently-expanded Pacific Twelve Conference declared it will expand no more. While commodawg recently wrote that I have made some “preposterous suggestions” on this site (a not wholly inaccurate suggestion itself), I am going to register a prediction on this issue. First, though, I have to thank commodawg for discussing and linking to the only sampling of the written word ever to speak of the major Western conference as the “Pacific 12.” That’s on par with “Philip Jackson,” and the only place to go from there is “Pacific Twelve,” so here we are.

Before this year, the Pacific Twelve was the Pac 10. The conference added consistent football juggernauts Colorado and Utah to make a non-baker’s dozen. In reality, the Buffs and Utes are anything but (no matter what Senator Hatch says), which is what makes yesterday’s statement confusing. The flailing Big XII’s national powerhouses, Texas (to my surprise) and Oklahoma, were making comparatively overt, public ovations to the Pacific Twelve, and it was the acts and statements of these schools that triggered the no-expansion announcement. Why they would not want these two programs, though, is beyond me.

I haven’t engaged in the rumor-mongering that’s been flooding the webwaves these past weeks and months, but it’s hard to disagree with the view that we’re going to end up with four sixteen-school superconferences. Once the SEC, Big Ten, and whatever survives out of the ACC and Big East each amass sixteen members, the Pacific Twelve will wish really bad that they’d become the Pacific 14 in 2011 by adding Texas and Oklahoma. In fact, they could have led the way by also taking Texas Tech and Oklahoma State, schools thought to be politically tied to their in-state counterparts, to become the first sixteen-school major conference. Their non-expansionist foreign-conference policy might make Ron Paul happy on some micro level, but in the next round of major conference realignment, the Pacific Twelve will 1) join in the expansion; 2) wish they already had as members these two major programs because there aren’t any better options and those are two excellent options anyway; and 3) solicit their membership if Texas and Oklahoma aren’t already gone to another conference.

Aggies up the ante

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The New York Times reports:

Texas A&M’s departure from the Big 12 Conference drew closer to reality on Monday when the university’s president, R. Bowen Loftin, sent a letter to the Big 12 board chairman, the Missouri chancellor Brady Deaton, notifying the league that the Aggies would formally withdraw — very likely on Tuesday — according to two college officials with direct knowledge of the decision.

This latest step in the Aggies’ effort to join the Southeastern Conference appears to have two stumbling blocks. The first is Texas A&M’s exit fee from the Big 12, which it has not negotiated. That amount is expected to be close to $15 million. The other is the approval of the S.E.C. presidents. Nine of the 12 would have to vote in favor for Texas A&M to become a member of the conference. It is unlikely that Texas A&M would be this far along in the process without adequate S.E.C. presidential support.

Texas A&M hopes to play in the S.E.C. during the 2012 football season, which would appear to leave the conference with a mathematically clunky 13 teams for one year.

With this move, Texas A&M’s membership in the SEC is far from secured, and a smooth transition into the SEC is not guaranteed. There has been no public statement from the SEC on conference expansion since mid-August, when the conference “reaffirmed [its] satisfaction with the present 12 institutional alignment.”

Rather than negotiate the particulars– including its Big XII exit fees and whether the SEC would operate with an odd-numbered membership (currently it has east and west divisions of six schools each)– behind closed doors, A&M has stepped out into the open, formally making its intentions known to all.

The move does not place any more pressure on the SEC to act, however. A&M is a school that needs a conference– it can’t and won’t operate as an independent– but the SEC is not in danger of losing it to another conference; this pairing is the only logical option, and the SEC should want a foothold in Texas if it is to expand at all.

Even though this decision doesn’t raise the stakes for anyone but A&M, it may make easier a deal that brings it to the SEC. If the conference was nervous about making the invitation before it was sure A&M would accept it, this formal notification of departure from the Big XII would appear to erase any first-mover qualms the SEC might harbor. The ball may be back in the SEC’s court, but Texas A&M has served up a slow floater, and the SEC can and likely will sit and watch this one for a bit before taking action.

Eagerly Anticipating the LSU/A&M Rivalry

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Huzzah for inaugural posts. Given the frequency of AD’s posting thus far, I’m a bit intimidated by the prospect of making any sort of regular contribution to ALDLAND. I sat out the first week so that I might get a feel for the Bard of Battle Rapid’s voice and the character of the blog. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen so far, it would seem that my forte – sweeping, overwrought pieces that capture the zeitgeist and bring readers to a greater knowledge of self and a higher plane of being – will be completely out of place among fake interviews of hockey players.  Further, my commentary on sports usually doesn’t progress beyond cursing from the sidelines or the occasional essay on why Lane Kiffin is an idiot. If you really want my opinion on sports – and by sports, I mean college football – just go read Spencer Hall at Everyday Should Be Saturday. If I could write, or knew anything about sports, I suspect that’s what I would say. At any rate, for now, any contributions I make to ALDLAND will likely be focused on music.

That said, this Texas A & M rumor means I’ll be commenting on sports sooner than I expected. I’ll admit I was a little surprised to read that A & M  was looking at the SEC again. Not that the idea is inconceivable, but the timing caught me off guard. We went through all this last year, with Texas flirting with the PAC10+ (What would they have called that, by the way? Is Texas Pacific Group up for grabs now that the PE shop is officially TPG?) It seemed clear at the time that A & M was pretty content to stick around so long as the Longhorns continued to anchor the conference.

It also suggests that A & M got a look at the details of the Longhorn Network deal about the same time we did. That’s been covered extensively, and I won’t try to add my own thoughts (because, frankly, I haven’t read the thing. I haven’t even read the coverage at Midnight Yell that AD linked). But my understanding is that it certainly doesn’t provide any long term security for the Aggies.

As an SEC man, I’m all for A & M joining the conference. Their strategy, though, suggests that there isn’t strong leadership inside the administration in College Station. I don’t know how strong their bargaining position with Slive and Co. was last year, but it certainly had to be better than right now. If they are in talks this time around, it means they are desperate for an exit, so I’d expect to see the SEC get them on good terms (whatever that means).

As for Big 12 Commissioner Dan Beebe’s comment that moving away from your geographic base and tradition rivals can “create a lot of problems”, I understand he has to say that kind of stuff, but get real man. You can see why A & M doesn’t want to stuck in the University of Texas with a dash of Oklahoma conference. If UT decides to go their own way someday (And don’t say they won’t. As literally every Texan will tell you, it’s the only state that can secede from the union), the whole house of cards falls. Granted, a move by A & M might help accelerate the collapse.

The last question is a matter of balance in the SEC. If Slive puts the Aggies in the West, who do we steal for the East? My pick during this whole debate last year was Va. Tech, and I still think it’s the best move in terms of increasing market share (as well as getting another high quality program). That said, with all that’s happened in the past few months, I bet we could get Ohio State for ten cents on the dollar right now. It’s not a cultural fit by any means, but having a crippled OSU in the East for the Gators to beat up on would make me a happy man. One can dream.