I would laugh my a$$ off if the PAC went in and took Baylor, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma St. Colorad9 would be standing there with their dick in their hand. It won’t happen, but it would be funny as hell.
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Some interesting theories on here. It could be driven by coach prime and donors, but the Pete Thamel article seems to say that Oregon and Washington want something different than the rest of the conference.
There’s such an obvious reason there would be tension between those schools and the rest - and the devil is always in the details. Forget linear vs streaming. Everyone after the fact has said the pac 12 should have “taken better care” of usc and ucla. That really can only mean having given disproportionate money. Why wouldn’t oregon and Washington now want that? If they don’t see a path for that though, it seems reasonable the length of the deal and exit options would be important to uo and uw (so they can get that big ten money later) basically Thamel says uo and uw want to get to the big ten, and don’t want to expand now in order to maximum their share of cash today (before they presumably hope to leave the conference. )
Of course much of the pac will want expansion and to essentially become b12 west, were uw and uo to leave- a range of bubble schools (meaning on the blended academic/brand/market/football scale with for example Michigan being an “ideal”) that hopefully grow into decent brands. Once “culture” and “academics” stop being touted it shouldn’t be difficult to do and I expect prefilling is preferable to back filling for the other 7 teams.
(Stanford is an interesting outlier team of the 7 since they presumably could pretty much do whatever they wished to, they don’t really need conference affiliation for the sake of research or sports and are probably just sitting back) - but 6 existing plus 6 new would be totally fine and pretty similar to the big 12
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The only thing the PAC and the U have done throughout the past year is erode my trust in anything they say. IMO, CU left because they lost trust in what they were being told by GK about media rights $$ and for a guarantee of $$. The PAC has been weak and without aggression from the start. In football terms, they have been playing a prevent defense. Unfortunately, they were either too arrogant or blind to understand that they were losing.
CU looked out for itself. I believe they wanted the PAC to survive, but that didn’t prevent them from creating and maintaining another path. I doubt the U did that or if they tried, they were not successful.
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Agreed. Plus, What does CU have to lose in the short-term? Not much, if anything. It’s already an AAU institution with good a academic reputation. It doesn’t have to pay P12 anything to leave.
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LOL. Y’all keep forgetting playoff expansion is on the table after 2025. Do you think the SEC and Big 1G are giving up Conference champ auto bids to Big XII, Pac 12, and ACC? All this realignment is helping the two real Power conferences throw their weight around when it comes time for negotiations.
The school realignment will end up causing the total split of this level of the sport. Regional conferences were a reason to have multiple champ auto bids. Not anymore.
Not forgetting it at all. IMO, west coast football will always be a second fiddle to the East and Midwest. It doesn’t have the concentration, emphasis, or support.
As I’ve expressed before, as much as I support our Utes, I couldn’t care less if CFB blows up and disappear. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about college football. It’s just not a priority to me at all.
Always has been second fiddle and it’s really not fair. That said, it’s wild because I think the ACC, Big XII are also in the same boat as the Big XII. I feel you on only caring about Utah. I probably should change my name because “Fan” is not a good description. I follow Alabama but I’ve really become less of a rabid fan. I don’t like the fanbase and I really have lost love for the sport the bigger this has gotten. I’m nostalgic for the old school regular season games. I don’t think NIL killed this. I think playoffs and trying to crown a champ killed the sport.
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Well, it was not aimed at every west coast team or every year. My comment was more of a collective one.
This may be the dominant explanation - I certainly can’t refute it, and all things being equal, Yormark ran circles around Kliavkoff, badly. (There’s an argument that all things weren’t equal, with a shifting media landscape. Eg, ESPN’s big cuts.)
However, it makes sense to me that CU also was open to listening to the Big-12 offer, in significant part because the PAC for them has been a nightmare.
Sanders offers a large pivot, charisma, a sold out spring game! This coincides with them going back to a very different Big-12. No more OU, Texas, Nebraska (a nemesis), Missouri, etc. They’ll be able to find & sustain success much easier in the new Big-12.
Even if the money would have been close, this is a completely new direction: New coach, new conference, enthusiastic fans - they gladly took the reset.
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Blasphemer !!
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I’m more of a college basketball fan. Please forgive my sin. haha
I was sent a tweet authored by some guy named Criddle. He said CU’s departure makes it clear that the PAC-12 is no longer a P5 conference. We’ll be hearing that a lot from a certain fan base.
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I think it is clear that there is a P2 (SEC, B10, a second tier (ACC, Big XII), and G5. Where the remaining PAC schools sit is TBD.
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Amazon and Apple are sitting on piles of cash and need more content to beef up their streaming platforms. The networks are facing a gap in production due to the strikes and are desperate to fill the gap as the longer the strikes last the further down the road they are to getting programming they can broadcast. Having access to live sports and a catalog of past programming can really help with those needs. I think these things are all part of the negotiations.
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That’s dumb. The Pac 12 has lost 10% of it’s Conference Champion school over a 10 year span. Meanwhile the Big XII lost 70%.
Big XII has lost Missouri, Texas A&M, Texas and Oklahoma. I would say that is much more significant than SC, UCLA and CU.
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I think I know who @LAUte is talking about: Criddle. IIRC he used to lurk and post on the old UF.N. He was a Zoob in the worst connotation of the description, iirc.
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I don’t want Utah to join the Big 12. I like where they’re at, but I understand that it’s a precarious situation and all options are on the table. The university has to do what’s best for itself rather than the conference. However, I do believe that the one winner sport of Big 12 admission would be Utah basketball.
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At least Czechia has a decent industrial base, and some resources to use them.
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