camel at sea

Not alone. With a few friends and for $100M+ more than they'd make in the PAC over the life of the next media rights contract? Maybe. They're not publicly banging the drum about "all options on the table" if they aren't at least entertaining fallback plans.

Yeah. I'll agree with you on that. Maybe they end up with the Fiesta Bowl instead.

Let's assume that USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington all bolt: That leaves: Stanford, Cal, Or St, Wash St, Utah, Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado + 2. There's no way those schools aren't a P5 conference. Low paid? Sure. But still a P5.

It makes sense if the PAC in-fighting is specifically between Southern Cal and Stanford. If SC isn't the one in charge (their AD just implied that they haven't been calling the shots and to their detriment) then the school that's most likely calling the shots is in Palo Alto. If the two CA schools can't come to a solution together, then the CA schools split up.

From the outside looking in, the PAC's issues appear to be a Stanford vs. SC issue. If the Trojans aren't running the show, then the Cardinal are undoubtedly the program with their hand on the wheel. Splitting California in two makes sense in that context. Maybe UCLA would be compelled to stay behind with Cal but I have a hard time seeing the legislature putting up a big fight over that if all four are going to be in a P5 conference when the dust settles. In any case, if you've got Washington, Oregon, Stanford, Cal as the core of your conference, you're still a P5 league.

If the Big 12 only took 4 PAC schools (the two L.A. schools + 2 more), the PAC would still be around. They'd still (probably) have a Rose Bowl tie-in. They could add two as backfill, get back to playing a ten team round robin, and they'd still be a P5 conference. Oregon would be fine. It's dumb to try to add too much of the PAC if you're trying to add value to the Big 12. You'd just be importing their problems.

Border: USC, UCLA, Arizona, Tech, TCU, Baylor, Texas Plains: WVU, Colorado, Kansas, OSU, KSU, ISU, Oklahoma If you get the PAC side of this worked out early enough, then maybe you slide Nebraska into that WVU spot before they re-up with the Big Ten. Tons of good TV inventory. Travel isn't terrible. You don't have a lot of bad west coast inventory late at night.

1. A lot of their fans are already unhappy in the B1G. Watching most of their old adversaries playing games against each other in the recruiting turf they desperately need to pull from? Of course they'd think about leaving. The money would be really good and the donors would love that conference. The academic side isn't going to grip too loudly, either. The elbow rubbing opportunities would be very good after a move, too. 2. If you're a prisoner of the moment, it doesn't stack up well. If you look at it from a 30-50 year perspective, then it does. Texas, Oklahoma, USC, and Nebraska are all blue bloods. There are less than 10 "blue bloods" that everyone usually agrees on and all four of those are there. This hypothetical realignment would probably help all four on the recruiting trail - Nebraska in particular. Scott Frost just landed back to back Top 20 classes. Give him help with Texas and CA and they're probably pushing against the blue chip ratio within a few years. That's a much taller hill to climb in the Big Ten for them. The SEC (for reference) had five teams above the blue chip ratio this past year. So it could get competitive as between the two conferences on the recruiting front, too. Beyond football, men's basketball probably leans toward the Big 12. As do Olympic sports.

Yeah. And really I think status quo has a good chance to happen. The Big 12 will be distributing $45M per member at the end of the current deal. If taking the entire rights package to market merits a $10M per member bump, then Texas comes out of that at $70M+ per year in the new deal (after also factoring in LHN money.) OU is probably $65Mish. That's likely to be in the ballpark enough to keep anyone from moving. That's also why I think adding to the Big 12 from a position of strength is a more likely outcome than anyone leaving.

UT or OU joining the PAC makes no sense. Getting both sides to drop their dead weight will be tough to pull off from an intra-conference politics and state politics standpoint. Raiding the PAC does make sense potentially. The Big 12 + Southern Cal and three friends works very well inasmuch as it addresses academics, recruiting footprint, media footprint, Tier 1 inventory, etc. I think you could do it a lot of different ways but I like this: North: OU, OSU, KU, KSU, ISU, CU, WVU/NU South: UT, TTU, UA, TCU, BU, UCLA, USC That's a conference that stands toe to toe with the B1G and SEC in every way. It's also a conference that doesn't have CTZ schools on the west coast playing super-late games all that often. The new schools have better eastern media exposure, a more interesting national schedule, and relatively friendly geography since they'd join as a group (as friendly as Texas A&M sharing a conference with South Carolina or Nebraska sharing a conference with Rutgers.) Speaking of Corn, Big 12 3.0 could sell NU on a return. Annual games with OU + heavy recruiting exposure in both TX and CA is their dream scenario. If they're ever going to be "back" this is how it happens. And that would give both divisions in that scenario a pair of blue bloods for balance. The ripple effect of NU joining would probably create for WVU a league that needs to add one team.

They won the North in their last two years in the Big 12, and nearly won the CCG each year against Top 10 teams. The roster they recruited in the Big 12 won a division title in their 2nd Big Ten year, too. It's probably too soon to give up on Scott Frost, especially because his staff is recruiting well, but if the wheels come off down the stretch of this season 2020 is going to be a make or break year for him.

Eh. Arizona and ASU are middle of the pack football schools that occasionally play above that level. Maryland football might fit that description but Rutgers doesn't. I don't know if you get excited about those two Arizona schools but they aren't as bad as the Big 10's recent adds. From a purely athletics standpoint, maybe that would be like someone else adding Oklahoma State and Texas Tech.

I doubt the flow of out of state students from CA into the state of Arizona slows down if the two schools are playing in the Big 12.

The two Arizona schools are so far back in the CA recruiting pecking order that moving wouldn't impact them at all. If anything, having the ability to sell "better more visible conference" to CA recruits might improve their situation.

1. Oklahoma 2. Baylor 3. Iowa State 4. Texas 5. Texas Tech 6. OK State 7. K-State 8. TCU 9. WVU 10. Kansas KU has an OOC P5 win. WVU has an OOC P5 win. TCU has an OOC P5 win. K-State has an OOC P5 win. OSU has an OOC P5 win. None of those are great OOC wins but they're solid. Top to bottom the conference is pretty good this year. If ISU hadn't lost that Iowa game in such crushing fashion, I think the national guys would be noticing how good the league is this year.

Scott Frost needs more than two recruiting cycles to get a fair eval. But I do wonder if he can recruit the kind of talent he wants. Generally speaking you build a college program to maximize the type of talent produced in a given region. SEC teams look the way they do because "Southern" HS football looks the way it does. The Big 12 is largely the same thing with our programs mirroring Texas HS football. Frost is trying to build a team that looks schematically Big 12ish (based on his time at Oregon/UCF) in a region that produces the type of HS talent to build Iowas and Wisconsins. If playing in the Big 12 again gave them a small boost in Texas (which produces the type of players he wants), it wouldn't hurt their efforts in Florida or California. So they'd be better off just on that alone. But add in getting a rivalry game back on the schedule that moves the needle nationally and maybe it helps everywhere. It's easier to sell kids on the rebuild if you remind them of what you used to be occasionally. The worst part of being in the B1G, for them, is that nobody is ever reminded of their glory days when they play anyone on their schedule.

At worst, they should have been able to recruit Texas as well as Mizzou did. Pinkel had a bunch of good TX HS players on his roster when they left for the SEC. The weird thing is that Nebraska didn't really even attempt going all-in on Texas recruiting until Pelini took over. They should have made that a priority on Day 1. Even so, Pelini was doing reasonably well (on paper) with TX HS recruiting before they switched conferences. Imagine if they'd hired a likable coach with TX HS ties? If they rejoined the Big 12, their ceiling immediately gets higher. Winning, the hope of winning big, and all the merch sales and ticket price hikes that go with it, would offset the media rights money to a big degree, I'd think.

Yeah. They're going into about year 8 and I have never heard any bad stories about trips to Morgantown from any Big 12 fanbase. Maybe the fanbases from the Great Plains just mix better with Appalachia based folk than Big East fanbases did. They started throwing the Horns Down a lot in the last calendar year because Sills got flagged for it in last year's game. But pretty much everyone in the country started throwing Horns down after that game. ESPN had a big write-up about the history of it, too. https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/27160980/the-petty-wonderful-delightfully-weird-rise-horns-down There's a segment of UT fans who react to the Horns down gesture the way that aggy reacts to someone walking on their grass. That's a big part of why people do it. If Florida fans got all up in their feelings about a mock Gator chomp you'd see that go national, too.

If you're just putting up a fantasy scenario, then you could get something like: NU joins the Big 12 at the end of the Big Ten's current GOR a couple years from now. Then the Big 12 adds (probably) Houston to get to 12. But it wouldn't really matter who #12 except that they need to fit well. Big 8: OU, OSU, KU, KSU, ISU, NU SWC: UT, TTU, BU, TCU, UH, WVU Then you just push Disney/SEC/Arky on the idea of the Pigs trading places with WVU. WVU works well enough that you could be patient with this. OU being in the North, cross-division rivalry games, and a 9 game conference slate would protect against the North from being forgotten/ignored by the Texas TV viewers/media (which hurt the North during Big 12 1.0.) At that point, you have a great conference and can stop there at 12 forever. If the Buffs want back into the Big 8 division at some point after that, and if the money works to take them at #13, then the SWC division might have some options that make sense. Maybe Tulane if they've turned the corner. Or Mizzou (cross-division game against KU, division game against new "rival" Arky, Wal-Mart unity, etc.)

I've suspected that for a while. But I'd guess the point is making the Big 12 look bad moreso than WVU specifically.

https://www.colorado.edu/coloradan/2018/08/25/top-10-home-states-cu-students It might be interesting to know how big a lead California has on Illinois, Texas, etc. And it might be interesting to know how big a lead Colorado has over California. My point is that I've wondered if the "west coast alums" argument for why CU would never leave the PAC is maybe a little bit overblown. But I haven't seen data indicating either way. And I do know - excluding the Buffs - that there is a significantly larger Big 12 alum/fan presence on the Front Range than the is a PAC presence there. You and I have agreed on Arkansas to the Big 12 for a long time. It's a perfect fit. They could compete better with respect to financial resources (3rd in the Big 12 as opposed to maybe 8th or 9th in the SEC.) Travel is better. They'd get their #1 historic rival back. They'd get secondary rivals (OK State, SWC exes, OU) that care more about them than the SEC does. They'd get better in-roads for recruiting in East Texas again. They would even add a lot to the Big 12 basketball tournament, with a really strong hoops fanbase not all that far from KC.

One and the same. I can't speak to whether she is a real life idiot, or just pretending to be one. I lean more toward the latter.

Yes. The board owner over there punted a paid poster months ago. He said with quite a bit of certainty that it was a paid poster so that's not coming from me as an opinion. She/he was operating primarily under the handle "SoonerPride" and pretending to be an OU fan, but she/he had set up multiple fake accounts on that board, for use in that thread, pretending to be from multiple different fanbases, all of which were made to echo an OU to B1G pov. One of the guys who still posts on that thread multiple times daily tried to pass off the paid poster as an OU fan multiple times. I found the twitter account of the guy who still posts there daily and "coincidentally" one of his only followers on twitter is that same OU-to-B1G paid poster. There are a few other regular posters in that thread who operate pretty much the same way. I have some theories about how the whole thing works but you start sounding like Joe McCarthy at some point expounding on it. The funny thing to me is that people have such a hard time believing that a university/conference/TV Network wouldn't devote a few thousand dollars per month to steer the conversation on twitter and in online forums around the country. Nobody has a hard time believing that this happens in politics. Or with products and services. When you're talking about multi-billion dollar TV contracts, where fan opinion matters, it just makes sense that entities with deep pockets would do that.

Yeah. Arkansas more than anyone else would benefit from being in the Big 12. They don't actually benefit from being in the SEC on the recruiting trail. So they're unique in that respect. And the money difference isn't exactly wide. The Big 12 just distributed $38.8M per school before Tier 3. The SEC's distribution isn't a lot higher than that if it's higher at all (who knows how Arky would do with their own Tier 3 deal.) Winning consistently would more than make up for that TV revenue difference either way. Nebraska wasn't ever Texas dependent and didn't put a ton of effort there until Bo was HC. He went hard in Texas and Louisiana but had to redo his recruiting strategy a couple of years into his tenure after the move to the B1G. So I'm not sure what the Huskers could do if they actually tried to recruit TX over a long period of time. But I'd guess recruiting Texas, while playing games there, is probably easier than recruiting Texas with no presence there. And Frost is trying to build pipelines in FL, GA, TX, and CA... with games in and around the Great Lakes. IMO, Missouri is proof that Nebraska could have recruited Texas well if they'd had a post-Osborne coach as smart as Pinkel. The money difference is a bigger deal at NU. But relevance, a rivalry game that moves the needle, and a place with deep recruiting turf are hard to quantify. And NU coming back would close the money gap with the B1G, too, so there's that.

There's an "OU to B1G" political action committee (or a group that operates like one) overrunning that thread.