Lubbock & Waco are probably outliers. lol. Lubbock reflects the rural regions pretty well and Waco is a Baptist school that was run by Ken Star. It’s the you-know-who of Texas.
Weirdly, I think a major portion of swing states are the big 12. At least Ohio and Arizona are that.
I would say B1G. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania
Are we still calling Michigan a swing state? I really haven’t looked at projections. Florida used to be one and may be one again which would go for the Big XII. Basically, football season in 2024 is going to be annoying as hell if you go on road game trips.
Politicians just blanketing your tailgates.
Trump won it in 2016 and Biden won it in 2020. So…yeah…
Couldn’t care less about whether our new conference rivals lean toward one political side or another.
Just about what sort of competition they provide on the field/court.
I’ll see some of you at the Florida tailgate and game, but this is likely the end of my time as a college football fan. The whole thing is just disgusting on so many levels, but sadly not surprising. I have zero desire to visit most places in the new conference for reasons but mostly I have no desire to support this monetarily.
No, it’s not an airport, I’ll still be around, but only because of the friends I’ve made through Utah football. That, I will always have and appreciate.
Look for the ASU president video posted here (and elsewhere). UO and UW ghosted that meeting early Fri and he knew they were dead and no longer had a viable conference. Things moved quickly after that. I saw an article that basically said saving the PAC9 was hours away. But with 2 universities playing, it came down to UO choice and B1G offer (which I felt was only going to be there IF UA, ASU, UU left to Big12, but ended up reversed). UW came out and said it was about stability, but they were the one fighting Thu night to convince UA to stay and keep the order (for the sake of $10M travel costs and student impact). So lots of fast moving prisoner dilemna and once someone pulled the trigger (tired of the back and forth), which was UO to B1G, then it all cascaded.
Networks manipulated all of this (FOX is fine paying added teams in the Big12 $35M full share but wouldn’t even bid for PAC (even at $25Mish)?). Schools had to make decisions with the information they had and even with a coalition of school CEOs, they are still looking out for their ‘best’ interest.
I can empathize. I’m already a season-ticket holder for both volleyball and WBB, and will attend more softball games. Definitely will be supporting more of our non-rev sports.
I would like to see the data for PAC12 → Big12 for the 4 corner teams. Other than UCF, WVU, Cinci, I’m not sure the mileage is much different for some schools. The west is vast. I mean, maybe a little more travel, but trips to UW and LA aren’t that much shorter than to Kansas or Texas for the U. CU (even though who cares?) may have lower travel (except to those Big12 outlier outposts).
Now, the west coast schools going to B1G? That’s ridiculous from this standpoint. I’ve long hoped that football would break off (6 road games, usually on Sat is totally manageable) and non-rev would be in more regional conferences/grouping.
Whoa:
He’s not wrong:
Just got this. I’d share the link but my work e-mail system has blocked it (no livestream video allowed). So I can’t even see it myself.
If you’re as disgusted as I am with what has happened, you’ll agree with this too.
They Finally Broke College Football. What Chaos Happens Next?
The weekend collapse of the Pac-12 was fast–and hardly a shock
We need a horn.
A large, noisy, custom-made horn. Something along the lines of a tuba–or better yet, a marching band Sousaphone. Just a glorious horn that must be honked, with gusto, every time a college president, athletic director or head coach in America dares to suggest that big-time college football is anything other than another money-driven golden goose chase-a-palooza.
COLLEGE PRESIDENT: What’s important here is the mission of education, and a tradition of…
HOOOOOOOOOOONNK!!!
COLLEGE PRESIDENT: As I was trying to say, this is really about the student-athletes…
HOOOOOOOOONNNNK!!!
Please send one of these horns as quickly as possible to the University of Washington and the University of Oregon, Pac-12 schools that over the weekend eloped with the wintry Big Ten, eager for the joy of walleye cakes and 13-7 nailbiters. Please also send horns to Arizona, Arizona State and Utah–Pac-12 members which joined Colorado in bailing to that other famous conference of buttes and palm trees…the Big 12.
As soon as 2024, the Big Ten conference will have 18 members, including those beach bums from USC and UCLA who already announced their Pac-12 exodus. The Big 12 will swell to 16, matching the Southeastern Conference, which is splurging to add Texas and Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, the Pac-12, the “Conference of Champions,” will have…wait for it…four teams left.
Let’s hear it for sad math!
HOOOOOOOOONNNNK!!!
Conference defections like these get explained as survival tactics, and it’s true–though it’s sort of like an art thief avoiding capture by hiding behind a potted plant. It’s a hasty escape from a self-inflicted disaster, one that the Pac-12 conference, members and administrators all had a hand in, amid a brewing crisis even the sleepiest fan saw coming for years.
To say the obvious: The horse left the barn long ago in college football. It left the barn and built a newer, bigger barn, with heated floors, a home theater, wine cellar, a pool with a lazy river, a LeRoy Neiman of Secretariat and a five-horse garage. Colleges grew spellbound by the windfall potential, even if they weren’t any good at football, even if the revenue usually gets sunk right back into football, and the impact upon enrollment and alumni loyalty isn’t as potent as claimed.
One after the other, schools have fallen into a silky bed of billion-dollar network arrangements, eight-figure head coaches, millionaire assistants and conditioning gurus earning high six figures to say That is not a proper squat. (Yes, I know they do more.) In return, schools rearranged their scholastic priorities, athletic departments and the entire U.S. map to please the true leaders of college sports: television programmers.
Don’t blame TV, though! Television is just doing what television does: paying for the eyeballs, wherever they are. They want the numbers, subscribers, customers and ad dollars, nothing more. If they could get instead by paying for indoor shark pickleball, they would pay for indoor shark pickleball.
It’s the schools, conferences and the mothership NCAA that have taken us here, compromising what makes college sports great to achieve the highest financial bid, no matter the impact for fans, rivalries, or heaven forbid, the thousands of thrown-into-turmoil athletes who have the misfortune to play something other than big-time football or basketball.
Imagine being a prospect committed to play Pac-12 softball, dreaming of rivalry games with fellow West Coast powerhouses. Get ready to grab a mitt and hop on the plane to Madison, Piscataway, and College Park. The coming chaos is going to be intense. What happens to proven Olympic athlete factories like Stanford and Cal, left behind in the cobwebs of the Zombie Pac 4?
College football’s musical chairs derby might be defensible in the abstract (we’re just serving up better games) if it wasn’t creating such collateral damage. It’s another handful of hypocrisy for a sport that already held the copyright on the term. (While we are at it, let’s not forget the epic free ride currently enjoyed by the NFL, which gets a nationwide development league with no stake in the game.)
Please know: There are college sports officials making a ruckus to Congress about the alleged perils of the transfer portal (which allows players to freely change schools, like coaches do) and Name, Image, Likeness reform (which allows players to make money on their image). They are picking this battle at a time entire institutions are on the run, wiping out a 100-plus year old conference almost overnight. It’s like getting a lecture on vegetarianism from a ribeye steak.
They don’t get it. Actually, it’s worse: They do get it, but they still have power, so they’re trying one last time to grab the wheel away from athletes. History says it’s futile. The Supreme Court unanimously laughed the NCAA out of court when it tried to enforce its antitrust exemptions to limit educational benefits for athletes. You can bet that labor organizing and collective bargaining is next. They’ve tried before, and they’ll eventually succeed.
If you grew up at a time when college football felt smaller, when Bear Bryant put it in his contract that he had to make a dollar less than the University of Alabama president, this all may sound unthinkable. But the sport has been professionalized in broad daylight, over many years, from the luxury locker rooms and facilities to the expanded playoff tournament, nonsense bowls, random weeknight games, and the partnerships with online gambling companies already causing worry. They don’t even try to hide the private jets to ferry around incoming coaches. It’s all part of the deal.
Where does college football go from here? It’s going to the haves, perhaps in the form of two super conferences: the Big Who Knows What and the mighty SEC. Maybe the ACC and Big 12 reinforce themselves, to create some version of a Power 4 (down from a Power 5). Notre Dame will stand in a corner, fists up, until it likely relents.
The expanded 12-team playoff, meanwhile, will create new revenue, but who knows what it does to the regular season? Will these fab new conferences matter as much if a September loss isn’t a problem anymore? The Big Ten is getting rid of its divisions, which means Michigan and Ohio State have a chance to play each other three times (regular season, Big Ten championship, expanded playoff). I may have to move to the moon or beyond.
There’s a weird hubris that this party (and the growth) is going to keep on rocking. I’m not so sure. If you follow anything about the TV business in 2023, you know that it’s a volatile place, as the profitable cable bundle (customers even paying for stuff they don’t watch) declines in favor of streaming (customers paying only for what they want), and the latter hasn’t proven to be anywhere near as lucrative as the former.
Current TV deals run into the 2030s. Then what? What happens when a network looks at the product and says: Wait, why are we paying for ________? Nobody watches them and they never win a thing. There’s a faith that tech companies will keep the bidding high, but the Pac-12 wound up the Pac-4 partly because Apple reportedly looked at the conference’s lack of leverage and made a practical, not obscene, offer.
Maybe they’re right, and tech keeps the party going. Maybe I have this all wrong, and fans love seeing Ducks vs. Hoosiers. Or maybe the party stops with a television/streaming market correction. Maybe there’s a further reduction, to a conference of elite football programs, a “super league” that can be salaried and even partnered to the NFL.
Before then, there’s probably (hopefully?) going to be a few presidents saying enough is enough, and dropping football altogether, or at least living a more sensible life in Division III. I’m sure there are plenty of college presidents who would like to take this door now.
At least we all see big-time college football for what it’s become. Until recently, it had some of us fooled, that it was still about Saturdays, tribal rivalries, giant tailgates, silly chants and singing the alma mater with bare-chested freshmen who somehow misspelled DFENESE. That version of college football can still be found, and it’s fantastic, but what matters most to the people in charge is how much money it’s going to bring in. They’ve made it clear where they stand. Reality can be a bummer. Bring me the horn.
I’m not sure there has been much complaining about the added travel time for Utah, ASU, and AZ in the Big 12. You’re right, @DataUte, the West is already pretty spread out, but the Western schools going to B1G locations who will suffer.
Another note: Averages don’t tell the story. The individual trips for Utah et al. to Baylor, Cincinnati, Kansas State, UCF and West Virginia will be hard on the players. Wazzu was the only comparable PAC-12 trip.
The Rose Bowl game vs. Ohio State that my wife and I attended was supposed to be my last UU football game. Well, I fudged one last time when the next season I flew from California to SLC and, and per his request, met my oldest son from Ohio to watch Utah-USC at Rice-Eccles. I did so primarily because the U football team lost all five games he attended previously over the span of 20 years. He got his win. It was a beautiful conclusion, per Kyle Whittingham, “one of the most exciting games in Rice-Eccles Stadium history”.
About 8-10 years ago I posted a message on this site that since D-I college football (and to a lesser extent D-I mens hoops) has gotten so big, I called it the D-I college football industrial complex, it seems that in not to many years there is going to be some sort of giant collapse. I figured it might be something like the discovery of various powerhouse schools clandestine distribution of millions to athletes, and/or wholesale grade fixing, etc. Wrong. Million dollar compensation was made legal, in order to keep the leviathan properly sustained.
There is much wrapped up in the word UTAH for me, far to much to describe here, and I’m sure many of you. It’s hard for me to resist an athletic team with it emblazoned on their uniform.
After they have had time to digest the recent turn of events over the last couple days, I’m hoping Stanford and Cal will take the position, this card game has gotten to absurd, we fold, for the sake of ALL our athletics programs, we’ll take the MWC, or independence. A friend of mine suggested some sort of Ivy League solution might fit them.
I hope the Utah ski program can weather this storm. The four peat NCAA champions regularly have among the highest academic achievement of U athletics.
No interlocking U’s.
Agree. There are a few individual trips that hopefully aren’t as often based on pod or division pairings. A few are fly into a city and bus for 1-2 hours which (like Wazzu) are not as good. Seems like flying into KC is the way for KU, but Wichita for KSU. WVU is probably the worst (PIT then bus) while UCF is the longest flight. Equipment driver is going to get some miles for football. Do any other teams have to have an equipment truck, or can they fit everything onto a plane?
Take out Wazzu in the PAC and take out the Cinci, WVU, UCF in the Big12, and it’s nearly the same (like you said, Baylor actually is like Wazzu/WVU in a longer bus ride after flying).
And absolutely agree that USC, UCLA, UW, UO are complete idiots when it comes to this, esp. the non-football sports. I hope their recruiting crashes and they really evaluate if the money is worth being terrible at everything … They might drive a breakaway from NCAA to try to form a new western division of semi-pro that this will all become.
This would be the best case scenario for this whole bloated corpse. Form a semi-pro football league that’s somewhat affiliated with universities. Pay the players, find sponsorships, get huge tv contracts and let money lead the way. Then put all the other sports back into the regional conferences that make sense.
Pitino makes a lot of sense:
Rick Pitino
](https://twitter.com/RealPitino)
Doesn’t it make more sense for football to break away to separate leagues and allow the rest of the sports to compete regionally? Rivalries remain n minor sports don’t spend half their day looking for bad food at airport resta
it would be interesting to see how they keep a true semi pro league non-profit. sports that don’t generate net income would have a difficult time making their budgets if the split off were to be too legally severe. segregated athletic dining, coaches salaries, fancy facilities, travel comforts and even equipment costs would all have to be cut. so i don’t think it will get that extreme.
and while having a single college football conference as separate from other sports makes a lot of sense, the SEC and the B1G would have no interest in ceding power. maybe TV has more say than those schools, but i don’t think you could drag them along. I think it’s more a matter of “to the victors go the spoils.”
