Big 12 and Pac 12 should still team up to be most attractive and self-sufficient, even if that’s not fun for journalists.
I don't know why you keep posting this here. We are where we are now because the Pac 12 had several chances to do this and they wouldn't. They can't even figure out what or who the Pac 12 is. What's the Big 12 supposed to do if they don't even know who they are going to partner with?
It looks like Washington State and Oregon State are going to get stuck, at least temporarily, with Mt West schools. Hopefully ESPN pulls them in to an ACC westward expansion with some of those MWC schools.
A partnership would be explored by way of the two commissioners getting together and agreeing to stop being weird, at least in that get-together, and brainstorm the win-win options and then with each commissioner going back to their schools that are locked in for now and going through those options and building a consensus. If I was the pac 12 guy, I'd not start with uw and oregon. The big 12 guy would of course exclude ou and ut and include the 4 that are coming in.
I post it here because it still seems like the obvious common-sense solution and there's absolutely nobody in my irl or even twitter I'd ever talk about this crap with at all, let alone while expecting people to not have a damn near redneck sec-sec-sec attitude about something as silly as college sports conferences.
These talks have happened multiple times with Scott & Bowlsby, Kliakoff & Bowlsby, and Kliakoff & Yormark. Both times with Bowlsby the Pac 12 we're pretty public with expressing their non willingness to work with the Big 12. That's not the commissioners fault though, the schools clearly didn't want to, what they thought was to sully the brand.
I don't know how the talks went between Kliakoff and Yormark went but it's pretty clear that when this happened in the early spring that Stanford, Cal, Colorado, and likely UW, & UO didn't want to associate with the Big 12 brands.
The people in Big 12 country bring sore because their inferiority complexes notwithstanding, the schools in the two conferences are generally poor cultural fits, and we've known that for generations. It's why everyone shrugged when Colorado left. Anyway, what the fans or even potentially the schools want doesn't matter a single bit. The customer of college football is no longer the fan, but it's the media partners paying for the media rights. It could certainly change but the big two networks don't seem to have any appetite for these conferences to merge. Until Fox says they want the Pac and Big to join up, they aren't joining up.
