Expansion Egg On Face- Ranking the Best and Worst of College Football’s Weirdest Offseason (so far…)
With the news that the University of Texas has spurned the Pac 10 and will remain in the Big XII, it looks as though quite a few folks have egg on their face.
Here are some basic points to understand all the chaos that has been going on for the past few weeks:
1. The Big XII is not going anywhere.
With the commitment of four of their major programs, including Texas and Oklahoma, the Big XII will be fine. They have the option to replace the departed Colorado and Nebraska with possibly a TCU or a Houston, or they can stay with their current ten teams for the time being.
2. The Pac 10 has “massive egg on face.”
When Pac 10 commissioner Larry Scott got the OK to pursue expanding his conference, I would be willing to be that the University of Colorado would be “the jewel” of the expansion crown. If you’re going to walk the walk, you gotta talk the talk, and the Pac 10 now will likely have to accept a school like Utah or UNLV to reach the 12 teams required to form two divisions. BYU would be a logical choice, but the word is that their are some egos on California’s Berkely campus that would rather chew broken glass than accept a religious university into their ranks.
3. The Big XII will survive, but they got played.
The Big XII will be around for years to come apparently, but who knows how these other schools will react to the way the University of Texas strong armed the conference into special treatment. The arrogance with which their institution behaved throughout this whole process should be quite insulting to a school like Oklahoma, whose football program has more Big XII championships over the last decade, and who arguably have one of the most successful programs in the history of NCAA football. The folks in Norman have to be quietly fuming at the notion that their football program is apparently a 2nd class citizen in a conference that they have dominated since it’s formation in 1996.
4. The Big Ten and Nebraska come out of this winners, but where will they go from here?
While the Pac 10 looks like a bunch of buffoons and the Big XII celebrates their own survival, the Big Ten has added a traditional powerhouse to their ranks. The question is where will they go from here? It’s no secret that they want to increase their number of schools to 16, but where will they find these schools? The obvious choice would be the University of Notre Dame, but the Irish have so far withstood all pressure to give up their independent status. The University of Pittsburgh would be a nice addition, but other than that, there aren’t really any major programs that would be willing and available. It remains to be seen whether or not the University of Cincinnati will be able to maintain their recent success now that coach Brian Kelly has moved on, and I don’t see much enthusiasm for adding schools like Rutgers or Miami (OH). It would be a letdown after the hype following Nebraska.