BIG XII RESEARCHING POSSIBLE CANDIDATES FOR EXPANSION EVEN BEFORE PLAYOFF SNUB
Don’t expect the Big 12 Conference to panic simply because its co-champions, TCU and Baylor, were excluded from the four-team field of the College Football Playoff despite each matching the one-loss seasons of three teams included.
With its lucrative television contracts in place, worth more than $20 million annually to the member schools, the Big 12 would be foolish to make any move simply in reaction to that disappointment.
However, the conference already had been planning its future well in advance of Sunday’s CFP selections.
Big 12 officials recently met with administrators from the University of Cincinnati, a source close to the university told Sporting News. That is not an indication membership will be offered to the Bearcats in the immediate future — only that they would be a candidate were such an expansion to be undertaken.
It is not known how many other universities, if any, have had similar meetings. Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby was in New York and unavailable to speak Monday with Sporting News.
Expansion is a complicated matter for the Big 12 because its television contracts, signed with ESPN and Fox in 2012, are scheduled to run through the 2024-25 season. Such deals have been renegotiated in the past with other conferences; in some cases, it was believed the opportunity to reopen television contracts was a motivation for leagues to pursue expansion.
However, aside from Notre Dame – which already declined an opportunity to join the Big 12 and instead chose the ACC – there is no potential member outside of the current “Power 5” conferences whose appeal would lead either network to add substantially to the current Big 12 contracts.
BYU is independent and has a considerable following and already has an ESPN deal through 2018 believed to pay the school in the neighborhood of $1 million for every televised home football game. If the Cougars desired more defined access to the football playoff, it is possible ESPN would make some minor adjustments to its contracts with the Big 12.
Bob Bowlsby (Getty)
There is, however, the latent threat of expansion by other conferences to include Big 12 members – specifically Texas, which always has been an attractive target for the Big Ten Conference but never has come into play in its expansion discussions.
The Big 12 members signed a grant-of-rights pledging future media earnings to the league, which essentially binds them to the league, but Maryland was only the latest athletic program to negotiate down its penalty for changing leagues (from the $52 million excepted down to about $31 million).
An attorney writing for Fox Sports suggested a school possibly could escape a grant-of-rights deal with no penalty whatsoever; however, Texas’ value to the Big 12 might test the lawyer’s hypothesis that no league ever will have a TV contract reduced because of a change in membership.
The Big 12 does not stage a football championship game because it includes 10 members. NCAA rules mandate a league have at least 12 members to be approved for a title game. The Big 12 has asked for a waiver of that rule, but the status of that request is uncertain.
The results of the CFP deliberations, at the very least, figure to lead to the league pushing harder to get that waiver approved. The conference wound up with co-champions in Baylor and TCU because they had identical win-loss records. There is a common belief the absence of a title game hurt the league.
“It’s clear that we were penalized for not having a postseason championship game,” Bowlsby said in an interview with ESPN. “It would have been nice to have been told that ahead of time.”
However, there have been multiple occasions in which a Big 12 team on track to be invited to the BCS title game was eliminated because of a conference title-game loss.
If any of the current playoff entrants had lost on Saturday – even previously undefeated Florida State – that team likely would have been replaced by either Baylor or TCU. If two had lost, the Bears and Horned Frogs both might have made it.
Big 12 officials met Monday in New York in a scheduled gathering that coincided with the annual gathering of athletic administrators for the National Football Foundation dinner.
No doubt the agenda for that meeting was reprioritized at some point on Sunday.
