You didn’t fix it. None of the four added by the Big 1G are any good. SC hasn’t been relevant since W’s first administration. Think about it. We have changed post season (BCS to playoff to now 4 team to 12) and SC has never been a factor in any of those changes. The Big 1G is like Patrick Beverley. They do a lot of motion and moves to seem like they hustle but they aren’t moving the needle.
That said, I think adding SDSU and SMU give you two teams that can build in your conference and possibly replace whatever it was SC and UCLA have been doing the past 15 or so years. Adding Utah is probably the strongest addition to any P5 in recent years. Just bullies to these weaker P12 schools the past two years.
Keep fiddling while Rome burns if you want. I’m just now joining this site because of this very topic (and the inane drivel I keep hearing my buddies spewing about it, many of whom are on this site). I live in Big12 country, and have close connections with some of higher ups at a couple of the member schools down here. Virtually every fellow Ute fan or grad I know seems to be living in la la land about the PAC (and thumbing their noses at the Big12 as if it’s beneath us or something). It’s laughable. The Big12 is in a FAR better situation than the PAC, and we are in jeopardy of being left behind (meanwhile BYU has a seat at the table!). We should be jockeying to be included in the Big12 instead of making enemies of it. As it stands, they are poised to take AU and ASU for sure, and it is extremely likely that some combo of CU, UW, and OR join them. Given UCLA and USC’s departure, what the heck do you think we’re left with? The Big12 isn’t our enemy, it is our lifeline. But our fanbase has taken a position of arrogance for some reason. It’s baffling.
We do fall under “hardcore” for Utah. Man those 7pm Pacific starts are brutal for us the next day. Frankly if games started even 2hrs earlier on the West Coast, it’d make our lives more comfortable here on the East Coast. If streaming gets us there, great. If it’s a TV package, great.
If I recall correctly cougarboard is full of this type of hyperbole. Tinydoc is working on stirring the pot. Great for him. Although he does need to learn how to create paragraphs.
Its fairly simple, do I want to partner with UW, Oregon, CAL, Stanford, CU
or TCU, Kansas St, Baylor, UCF, Oklahoma St, BYU?
Thats a no brainer for several reasons.
Sorry. I’m not friends with any high ups (unless you count. I once rented a car to Sammy Hagar and Willam Dafoe (spidermans green goblin) in college : ) )
First, we’re living in a fantasy world if we think those are supposedly the options that WE get to somehow choose. And second, from a football and basketball perspective, do you actually think your first list is superior to your second? Go look at the end of year rankings in both sports for the PAC schools vs the Big12 schools. Basketball isn’t even worth debating. The last TWO national champions are from the Big12 (Baylor and Kansas). And football had TCU making the CFP in 2023 and Baylor finishing top 5 in 2022 after winning the conference and beating Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl.
CAL? They’re likely to not even have a football program in the next 10 years. Stanford brings very little, and could theoretically go independent if needed. Us and Oregon are the only things the conference has left for football, and Oregon absolutely is either going BIG or B12. UW as well. I’m telling you, we don’t want to be left behind here. We should be looking at the B12 as the best thing that could happen to us. More money, and the clear #3 conference moving forward. A 12-18 team Big12 with teams in all 4 timezones is a legit power conference. Instead we’re clinging to a PAC that sucks in basketball and hasn’t been able to get in the playoff in football, who just lost it’s major market teams. Open your eyes.
I used to love the “matinee games” of the Chicago Cubs back in the 1980’s, but that is another thing.
Regarding college football, one of the factors that drove my decision to quit buying season tix was the 8:00pm - 8:30pm start times. These start time typically meant the game wasn’t ending until almost (sometimes after) midnight. After cleaning up the tailgate and loading the truck for the trip home, it was 1:30am to 2:00am before even leaving the U for home. It was not uncommon to be pulling up at home at around 2:30am. Given my age and chronic health issues, it took two days to get back to normal after a game. Last season, staying at home and watching on TV, I got to bed before midnight and could better control my medications; so I was able to recover from the late night faster. I do not believe my story is all that unique. I would want to see games at the stadium again if I knew the latest start might be 5:30pm. Prior to all this, I really enjoyed the 2:00pm kickoff time the best; and again, I don’t think I am unique on this. I get the younger folks like the late start so they can go watch their kids play and go to the game. When I was their age, I didn’t have season tix or go to games because of my kid’s activities and work. I figured you can’t have it all, so why force it.
No time slots are going to make everybody happy. That said, a media rights deal priority should be getting the teams in the conference as much TV exposure as possible. The current deal missed the target in a big, ugly way. That said, we got paid vastly better that our athletics program has ever been paid via media rights. The new package will most assuredly pay out more than the old deal, and if negotiated to add a streaming product, can create a portal for more national exposure.
To the troll’s BIG 12 silliness…
The BIG 12 has some football, KU basketball, and very little else. They are losing more in OU and Texas than we are in UCLA and USC, though both losses are damned hard to both conferences. Given the fact the BIG 12 conference is a big flyover now, I don’t expect their new rights deal to be significantly better than anything the PAC 12 is able to negotiate. As far as “raiding” the BIG 12, that is all going to be dependent on how contractually bound the teams are to the media rights contract. Looking to the ACC as an example, the buyouts to “jump” might be a poison pill no team can afford to pay. I would expect the PAC 12 to have such a poison pill built into their inter organizational agreement, too.
Given the successes we have had and continue to have, I think the troll’s kerfuffle is a tempest in a very small teapot. Much ado about nothing. Given the 12 team football playoff coming in 2024; the general strength of basketball is improving; and the domination of the Olympic sports (even after the exit of UCLA and USC), the PAC 12 will be just fine. The four teams moving on to the SEC and B1G? Probably not so much…but they will get paid.
What are we left with after the departure of USC and UCLA? A lot more than what you are left with when Oklahoma and Texas leaves. A big part of your stability is the fact that no team that is left in the 12 is a threat at all to ever be taken by the BIG or SEC. I would let this play out before celebrating your cougars situation.
Lol. The arrogance among our fanbase is truly unreal. Hope it works out for us, but I can see the Big12 saying “No thanks, we’re good.”
And lol on all the city hubris. Houston is the #7 media market in the nation. Orlando, Cincinatti, DFW, SLC… And if your criteria, oddly, is merely “beautiful in the Fall” you’d be hard pressed to find somewhere prettier than West Virginia. I think you’re just being willfully blind here. But again, I see this throughout our fanbase. [Also think the academic smack talk is funny coming from us when the Big12 has multiple schools ranked higher than we are. Haven’t looked, but I know Baylor, TCU, and BYU are for sure.]
Keep defending the PAC if you want, but I hope we don’t end up without a seat when the music stops because we insisted on acting like we were “too good” somehow and failed to read the tea leaves.
