No need for Big 12 to rush to action on David Boren's expansion talk
When University of Oklahoma president David Boren suggested last week that the Big 12 "should strive for" expansion, he set off a predictable wave. In the college landscape, the topic of conference realignment is dry tinder. Given the weight of an influential leader and coupled with a slow news period, the usual combination of furor and fun quickly spun up.
What-ifs unfolded. Fantasies floated. Which schools should be the candidates? Cincinnati? Central Florida? Memphis? Houston? BYU? Insert your favorite Group of Five school here?
But Boren's comments were essentially meaningless, except in fueling conversation. It's almost as if he recognized the vacuum — these few weeks, at least up until the middle of July when conference media days crank up, can be the slowest of the calendar year — and threw sports talk radio a bone.
That wasn't the intent, of course. But neither was Boren signaling the Big 12 was about to get bigger.
Boren has said similar things over the past few years. It's no secret he would like the Big 12 to return to 12 teams. So would others in the league. But the moves have to make sense. In the same set of comments, Boren noted just that.
"I think it's something we should strive for while we have the time, stability, all of that to look and be choosy," Boren told reporters, according to The Oklahoman. "(We) can be very selective about who we want to add. It would have to add value to the conference. I think we should."
In other words, nothing has changed at all. Would the Big 12 like to be numerically correct again? Sure. It is making do with 10, touting the benefits of a nine-game, round-robin schedule for football, explaining how not having a conference championship game isn't really a big deal, and so on. But 12 would be better in an ideal world.
The problem is that last part. Boren referred several times to finding "the right partners." But if the right partners were currently available, the Big 12 would move. Actually, it already would have moved. It's interesting that Boren revealed (and Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby subsequently confirmed) that the league's main TV deal includes a clause that would proportionally increase revenue if the league expanded, meaning members wouldn't get less money by adding two schools.
That doesn't take into account other revenue, like from the College Football Playoff. And it doesn't change the basic value proposition.
Whether it's football prowess or TV markets or location or fan base or yeah, even academic profile — to a certain extent, that actually matters — there aren't candidates that bring enough value to the league to make expanding viable. At least, not until the Big 12 gets desperate.
That hasn't happened yet. But if there was any added urgency in Boren's remarks, it might be the context, coming after the Big 12 was left out of the first College Football Playoff.
We always knew the four-team bracket would leave out at least one Power Five conference champion. In some ways, because controversy sells, that's actually considered a system feature rather than a bug. But if everyone understood it was coming, well, the Big 12 has now experienced it, which is why there has been hand-wringing in the past few months over whether the league needed a conference championship game.
Although the Big 12 backs a proposal to deregulate the NCAA rule that prevents leagues with less than 12 teams from having a championship game, league members wisely decided last spring not to go any further. Looking back to last season, the Big 12 was a few plays away from having not one but two teams in the Playoff, and looking like geniuses for not having a conference championship game.
Bowlsby, Boren and others think the league is at a disadvantage in the eyes of the selection committee. Maybe they're right, though the bigger development last season wasn't that Ohio State played a 13th game and Baylor and TCU didn't, it was what the Buckeyes did with it, routing Wisconsin 59-0 with a third-team quarterback.
After that performance, it's likely they would have been chosen over the winner of a Big 12 conference championship game, too, but who really knows?
Only time will tell, which is why the Big 12 rightly didn't overreact. This time next year, another league might be reevaluating everything after getting left out.
But by calling the Big 12 "psychologically disadvantaged" at 10 members and without a conference championship game, Boren meant that the league is diminished in the eyes of others — most importantly, the Playoff selection committee — when compared to the other Power Five conferences.
That's debatable. The Big 12 had two teams on the cusp of the Playoff, and any diminished perception might have more to do with the recent struggles of Texas and Boren's Sooners, the Big 12's traditional heavyweights. But it was a revealing glimpse into the thinking of some inside the league. Does the league, or do some of its members, suffer from an inferiority complex?
Even if expansion eventually occurs, there are those within the Big 12 who believe the league is inherently unstable and destined to eventually fall apart, that big fish like Texas and Oklahoma will be reeled in by other leagues, and the rest of the members will scatter. After the departures of Colorado, Nebraska Texas A&M and Missouri and the addition of TCU and West Virginia — and a fat new TV contract, as well as a grant of media rights that would presumably keep schools from bolting for other leagues — things have settled down. But TV contracts and rights agreements expire. (In that vein, Boren also took a shot at Texas' Longhorn Network, which continues to be an irritant for many in the conference.)
From the Big 12's beginning, it was never one big happy family, and it isn't now. That doesn't mean the league will someday dissolve, or that it won't one day expand.
And Boren might not have had other motives in mind last week. It's worth noting that before assuming the OU presidency, Boren was Oklahoma's governor and then a U.S. senator. He's a skilled politician who knows how to send multi-layered messages. Talking about psychological disadvantages might actually be a psychological operation, designed for the selection committee members to hear, intended to immunize the league from being hurt by the lack of a championship game.
Or maybe he was just spouting off. Politicians have been known to do that. Whatever Boren was trying to signal, though, expansion is not imminent. But if nothing else, he accomplished one thing:
In some parts of the country, during the dog days for sports talk, the phone lines are full.
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