USC, UCLA move to Big Ten could mean early Big 12 exit for Oklahoma and Texas | Opinion
Football field-length meeting rooms. Sleep chambers. IMAX screens on which to watch game video.
University athletic departments are in an arms race.
Oklahoma and Texas to the Southeastern Conference. UCLA and Southern Cal to the Big Ten. Half of Conference USA jumping to the American Conference.
College football leagues are in a land run. Collect as much plush territory as you can.
But land runs were a race, too, and now the SEC and Big Ten are in a different kind of sprint.
Which super-conference launches first?
USC and UCLA will play Big Ten football in 2024. That’s settled and clean and contractual. The Pac-12's television deals end in summer 2024, and the Trojans and Bruins are free birds after that.
Oklahoma’s and Texas’ obligations to the Big 12 end in summer 2025, and that’s when the Sooners and Longhorns are scheduled to make the jump to the SEC.
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But Oklahoma and Texas would like to join the SEC sooner. Production wanes after giving notice. Lame-duck status rarely is productive.
New adventures and great riches await in the SEC. Bitterness and awkwardness fester in the Big 12. Heck, money is the only reason the Big 12 clings to the Sooners and ‘Horns. Milk what you can out of the bell cows while they’re still in the barn. And money is keeping OU in the Big 12.
The Sooners’ buyout to leave early is about $76 million. Bevo’s got that kind of cash hidden in his horns, but the Schooner has no such bounty in its wagon wheels.
Oklahoma and Texas will go into their new league receiving full shares of the SEC’s new contract with ESPN, which kicks off in 2024 and is expected to boost conference appropriations to each school past $100 million. The Big 12 has been paying about $38 million per year to members, a respectable number until the world went crazy.
The Big Ten’s Los Angeles marriage is launching in 2024 with a new television deal, probably with Fox. Would ESPN be content to wait a year before its big splash?
When did ESPN ever play the waiting game? Seems likely that ESPN might get involved and try to expedite the move of the Sooners and Longhorns. Of course, plenty of Big 12 people will tell you that ESPN was involved all along in an attempted dissolution of the conference, so that Oklahoma and Texas could immediately follow the gold brick road to the SEC.
Some people on the Oklahoma campus say the Sooners are desperately trying to work a deal to leave the Big 12 before summer 2025. But leadership says the plan remains to stay financially prudent and committed to the Big 12 through three more football seasons.
You never know what could happen.
The Big 12 was boosted by the USC and UCLA defections from the Pac-12. Now it’s the Pac that is the most-distressed league. Now it’s the Pac with a most-precarious future.
The Big 12 – after adding Brigham Young, Cincinnati, Houston and Central Florida next season – no doubt is considering further expansion, with worried Pac-12 members. The Pac-12 announced it would respond with expansion itself, and the Big 12 is where that attempt starts.
But unlike last summer, the Big 12 now is in the stronger position.
The Big 12 somehow lost its two marquee schools and still didn’t fall much below the Pac-12, if at all, even before the USC/UCLA news, in conference supremacy.
If the Big 12 could entice some combination of Pac-12 expatriates – Oregon and Washington at the top of the wish list; Utah, Arizona State, Colorado and Arizona next in line – it could form a 16-team league ready to launch in summer 2024.
Oklahoma and Texas want no part of some kind of Big 12 transition, and in truth, the Big 12 wants no part of Oklahoma and Texas, other than the monetary value they bring. The last thing the Big 12 wants is an Oklahoma-Texas football championship game in Decembers 2022, 2023 or 2024.
So the Big 12 might be more agreeable to some kind of Oklahoma/Texas buyout if the conference future is on the upswing. The conference is not going to let the Sooners and Longhorns walk free, or even at a drastically reduced rate, but every little bit helps.
A last resort could be an OU/Texas legal challenge.
The grant of rights – in which conference members hand over their television rights to the league, regardless of whether they stay in the conference – is keeping Oklahoma and Texas in the Big 12. If OU and Texas jump early to the SEC, the Big 12 would get the Sooners’ and Longhorns’ SEC television money until summer 2025.
Grant of rights is what keeps USC and UCLA in the Pac-12 until 2024 and what keeps the Atlantic Coast Conference bound together through 2036.
Grant of rights never has been challenged in court. It could be shaky in the courtroom. But that’s a risk. A long, contentious legal battle that could end in defeat for Oklahoma, which would cripple an athletic department’s finances. That’s no way to run a business.
Of course, part of Oklahoma’s patience has been the coaching change. Lincoln Riley’s defection to USC, and Brent Venables’ hiring, meant a major culture shift in Sooner football.
Culture shifts take time, especially from one successful program to (in theory) another. Giving Venables some runway before reaching the SEC rigors didn’t seem like such a bad tactic.
But things rarely stay the same in college football these days, and the Big Ten’s addition of USC and UCLA was a meteor no less impactful than OU-Texas to the SEC.
This is a game of Can You Top This? It’s a land run. The Big Ten staked a claim of 2024 for its shiny new toys. Hard to imagine the SEC not doing the same.