Colorado Joins the Big XII
Well, the moment that Big 12 fans have hoped for and Pac-12 fans have dismissed but secretly feared is finally upon us. After over a year of waiting for the media deal that the Pac-12 constantly claimed was "coming soon", the first Pac-12 member school has finally run out of patience. On Thursday, July 27 at 3pm MST, the University of Colorado Board of Regents officially voted 9-0 to rejoin the Big 12 conference for the 2024 season. And some very reliable media sources are now indicating that the Buffaloes aren't alone. We might be days or even mere hours away from a full-out stampede of Pac-12 teams abandoning ship while they still can. In this post, I'm going to give my thoughts on what Colorado brings to the Big 12, what their departure means for the remaining Pac-12 teams, what other Big 12 news may be in the pipeline, and what the Pac-12 got wrong (and the Big 12 got historically right) about realignment.
Colorado: The Prodigal Son has returned
Colorado was one of the founding members of the Big 12 in 1996 and had previously been a member of its predecessor conference, the Big Eight, since 1948. But when the Pac-10 decided to expand for the 2011 season, they convinced Colorado to join them and added Utah from the Mountain West as a regional pairing. Colorado was never really at home in the Pac-12—they've been to just two bowl games in 12 seasons (and lost them both) and their Pac-12-created regional "rivalry" with Utah has been a one-sided snooze fest in favor of the Utes. So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that as the Pac-12's TV contract woes have compounded in the aftermath of the Big 10's poaching of USC and UCLA, Colorado would be the first in line to board the lifeboats with a return to their former conference.
Despite its lack of on-field football success, Colorado still brings significant value to the Big 12 off the field. The Buffs have consistently ranked better in attendance compared to the rest of the Pac-12 than they've had any right to, coming in at 7th in the league last year despite a 1-11 season. They have a loyal, passionate fanbase that has stayed surprisingly consistent despite the team's struggles. But the most interesting asset Colorado has is undoubtedly head football coach Deion Sanders. One of the hottest head coach candidates in the nation last year, Sanders has begun an ultra-aggressive re-tooling of the program, pushing nearly the entire scholarship roster into the transfer portal and bringing in a host of new talent. Sanders is, of course, an NFL legend, and he's also ultra-charismatic and fantastic in front of cameras. He's got a knack for holding the sports media's attention, which makes him a great guy to have in your conference, even if he's coaching one of your worst programs. Colorado's contribution to the Big 12's media value will probably be outsized just because of Coach Prime.
How did this happen to the Pac-12?
It's hilariously ironic that two years ago, the Big 12's lack of stability gave the Pac-12 the chance to definitively cement itself as the third-best conference in football. A bungled, abortive realignment experiment in 2016 and a series of missteps by commissioner Bob Bowlsby had all led up to the fateful announcement in the summer of 2021 that the Big 12's two flagship programs, Texas and Oklahoma, would be departing for the SEC in 2024. The Big 12 had been struggling for a long time (heck, it hadn't even had twelve teams in years as a result of the SEC poaching Missouri and Texas A&M in 2012) and was now at its weakest point ever. The Pac-12 had a golden opportunity to swoop in and offer select Big 12 teams an opening to jump ship to a much more stable league. TCU, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, or perhaps a Kansas school or two could have been viable expansion options. The Pac-12 was primed to further stabilize itself and deal a likely fatal blow to the Big 12, its major competitor west of the Mississippi.
Of course, the Pac-12 did no such thing. Over the course of their existence but especially for the last two decades, the Pac-12 and its predecessor leagues have tried very hard to market themselves as the cultural and academic equivalent of the Ivy League on the west coast. They have set an enormous amount of stock in the fact that every member school is an AAU Tier 1 research institution and have regularly thumbed their noses at perceived "lesser" academic schools. This insufferable snobbery found expression in the Pac-12 members' openly-asserted belief that they were culturally and academically superior to any possible expansion candidate from the Big 12. At the time, this attitude made the Pac-12 look like a collection of self-righteous pricks. Now, they look more like self-defeating imbeciles. Like Thor, the Pac-12 really should have gone for the head when it had the chance. Its decision not to poach any Big 12 teams allowed the Big 12 to remain unified long enough to add the four best available non-P5 programs—BYU, UCF, Cincinnati, and Houston—and sign an impressively lucrative TV deal in the process. As will be discussed in a moment, that was an opportunity the Pac-12 never should have given the Big 12.
20/20 hindsight tells us that the Pac-12 made a catastrophic mistake in not expanding back in 2021. This didn't become obvious, though, until the summer of 2022, when USC and UCLA rocked the college athletics world by announcing a move to the Big 10 for the 2024 season. This unprecedented course of action totally blindsided the rest of the Pac-12. Up to that point, the Pac-12 basically consisted of five primary revenue-driving football programs—USC, Utah, Oregon, UCLA, and Washington—with USC by far the biggest brand in the league. The other seven Pac-12 teams were basically hangers-on who rarely made waves on a national level. With USC and UCLA suddenly jumping ship, the Pac-12 lost its biggest single brand and another valuable contributor.
At that point, while it had already missed its best opportunity for expansion, the Pac-12 still could have potentially saved itself. All it had to do was add a couple of prominent G5 programs (perhaps from the Mountain West), lock in the best TV deal possible, and bet its future on the continued success of the three remaining flagship football programs (along with basketball powerhouse Arizona). In other words, the Pac-12 could and should have done exactly what the Big 12 did after Texas and Oklahoma announced their impending departures. Instead, that good ol' Pac-12 self-importance reared its ugly head again.
The Pac-12's leadership—commissioner George Kliavkoff and the various university presidents—seemed to be operating under the assumption that they, with their lofty academic credentials and "Conference of Champions" moniker—would be valued higher than the Big 12 even without USC or UCLA. From the outside, this was a transparently delusional attitude, but that didn't stop the Pac-12 from pursuing TV contract negotiations that were, from the start, unrealistic. One particularly staggering report from Dennis Dodd of CBS indicated that AFTER the announcement that USC and UCLA would be leaving the conference, Kliavkoff and company tried to demand a TV deal which would pay $50 million per year to the remaining ten Pac-12 teams. Fifty Million Dollars per team per year? For a conference whose best programs, Oregon and Utah, have done absolutely nothing on the national stage in years? That's Big 10 money!
That proposal, which obviously never went anywhere, is indicative of the overall inflated self-image to which the Pac-12's leaders have clung. Their message for over a year has been, without any evidence to support it, "We have a TV deal coming soon, and it will be better than the Big 12's deal." Through their loyal media personnel—Tony Altimore, John Canzano, Stewart Mandel, Jon Wilner, and others—they have repeated that line like some kind of saving mantra.
But simply saying something over and over doesn't make it true, and as the new year came and went, as spring turned to summer, and as the all-important football media day arrived on July 21, 2023, it became painfully obvious that a satisfactory deal was not forthcoming. Colorado had been in closed-door talks with the Big 12 for months by that point, and media day seems to have been the last straw. Despite repeated promises from Pac-12-aligned media figures that there would be some indication of what the TV deal might be, all the league had to offer was another laundry list of excuses, equivocations, and empty promises. Enough was enough, and Colorado bolted less than a week later. That was a great decision—by jumping ship when they did, the Buffaloes (the worst program in the Pac-12 by a decent margin) have virtually guaranteed themselves a better TV deal than any that the rest of the Pac-12 is likely to receive.
Where does this leave the Pac-12?
Not in a great place. The league's lack of a TV deal is a serious problem because in the absence of a TV deal, there is no exit fee for any school that wants to leave the Pac-12. This means that if a Pac-12 team gets an attractive offer from another conference, there's virtually nothing the Pac-12 could do to prevent their departure. And this brings up another problem for the Pac-12—most of its expansion candidates, those that could backfill the three (and counting) vacancies in the league, are in the Mountain West Conference, which DOES have a TV deal and therefore a back-breakingly expensive buyout in place for any team looking to jump ship. San Diego State, Boise State, Fresno State, UNLV, Air Force, and Hawaii are all potential Pac-12 expansion candidates, but each would have to pay enormous amounts of money to make the jump—money which they don't have and which the Pac-12 likely can't afford to supply. In other words, the Pac-12's major avenue for short-term backfilling isn't really available.
The Pac-12 could still pursue teams like SMU, Tulsa, or heck, even Tulane. But that might only be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point for one simple reason—Brett Yormark and the Big 12 probably aren't done shopping yet.
What will the Big 12 do next?
The news of Colorado's impending departure rocked the Pac-12 to its very foundation. That's not necessarily because Colorado is some flagship athletic program—it isn't—but more because yet another defection laid bare just how tenuous the conference's much-vaunted "unity" really is. There really isn't any incentive for a program to remain in the Pac-12 at this point if another P5 opportunity presents itself, and that may already be happening. The Big 12 doesn't want to be a 13-team league in 2024—odd numbers are just awkward, I guess—which means it will probably make an effort to grab 1-3 additional teams for that season.
If I had to guess at this point, I'd say that number is probably more likely to be 1 than 3. The Big 12's TV deal includes a pro rata clause which allows up to four new members who join from pre-existing P5 leagues to receive the full payout promised to every Big 12 team in the deal. Colorado takes up one of those pro rata slots, leaving three more for the league to pursue additional expansion. Assuming that Brett Yormark doesn't want to use up all four of those slots immediately (especially given the ever-present risk of poaching by the SEC and Big 10), it would make sense to only add one team for now. So who might that be?
Well, at this point, the most likely answer seems to be Arizona. The Wildcats have been linked with the Big 12 practically since USC and UCLA announced their departures, and the word on the street is that they are in very serious talks with Brett Yormark et al. Arizona has one of the worst P5 football programs in the country, but they make up for it with one of the best basketball programs year after year. And football success isn't TOO far in the past for them, either—they made the Fiesta Bowl as recently as 2014. More importantly, if online rumblings are to be believed, they've been communicating with the Big 12 for some time and are therefore most likely further along in potential expansion negotiations than other Pac-12 teams.
But Arizona is not the only team that's been linked with Big 12 expansion rumors since the Colorado news broke. Prominent CFB recruiting insider Mike Farrell has already reported that both Oregon and Washington—two of the Pac-12's remaining flagship football programs—are in talks with the Big 12 as well. I find it somewhat less likely that the Big 12 adds Oregon and Washington—both schools seem to be angling for eventual berths the Big 10 as regional counterparts to USC and UCLA, so the Big 12 might not be interested in risking their defections down the road. Still, the mere fact that those conversations seem to be happening is an indicator of just how bad the situation really is for the Pac-12. If it can't negotiate an acceptable TV deal within the next month or so, it might fall apart altogether.
Meanwhile, the future of the Big 12 looks positively rosy. Realignment has been kind to it, allowing it to capture the most viable non-P5 expansion candidates and begin chipping away at the Pac-12. The SEC and Big 10 are, of course, still the great powers of college sports. But as long as the Big 12 can firmly cement itself right behind them, which it seems well on its way to doing, it should be able to maintain a lucrative and nationally prominent position. The future looks good for BYU and the Big 12.