Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
Thirteen years ago, it looked like the Pac-10 would be the league to rip this all apart. Now, it’s the one getting ripped.
To be clear: Conference realignment has always been happening. It’s happened ever since there were first conferences to align. The dramatics from the panic-stirrers in the press are fueled by either disingenuity or an absence of history lessons, and the specific threat that college sports could become just another professional league in America is an empty one, most clearly evidenced by the fact that in professional sports in America, the same 30 to 32 franchises stay in each league in almost perfect perpetuity.
But, as the Pac-12 splinters, unable to produce a national title game appearance in football in nearly a decade, it’s worth a look back and a question of what would have happened had Texas jumped west in 2010.
It’s unclear how close this ever actually was to happening. Texas was never going to be swayed by skittish Colorado, or even by Nebraska, the North Division’s resident power at the time. DeLoss Dodds was almost certainly more persuaded by ESPN offering UT fifteen million dollars a year for the creation of Longhorn Network than he was by his own travel arguments, but those arguments weren’t empty in their merit. As Texas finally does leave the Big 12, it leaves for a conference whose furthest member from Austin is, as the crow flies, less than one thousand miles away. That’s closer than Morgantown, let alone Seattle. Considering Texas’s own value—see: the $15M ESPN gave it for LHN—it’s not absurd to think that Texas could have simply approached the SEC in 2010 if it really did want to give up on the Big 12. But Texas didn’t give up on the Big 12, and instead of it being Missouri, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Baylor, and possibly Texas A&M looking for a new home thirteen years ago, it’s Washington State, Oregon State, and most likely Stanford and Cal looking for a new home today.
What would have happened, though, had Texas said yes?
Texas A&M was among those courted by the Pac-10, and in this alternate universe where Texas had accepted its own invitation, we can assume the money would have been there to persuade the Aggies as well. Let’s say that happened, leaving Utah still in the Mountain West. Would the SEC have still gotten around to including Missouri? Would it have invited Missouri and one extra school? Would that school have been in the Big 12? Already, it gets so unclear. Maybe this arrangement would have led to those remaining Big 12 schools sitting hung out to dry, but the situation was so different back then—it’s hard to believe Lincoln, Nebraska would persuade the Big Ten to extend a full membership offer today—that we don’t really know. There could have been a Big East/Big 12 merger. The Big 12 could have added Utah itself, in addition to TCU and one other (BYU, perhaps), and returned to life as the Big Eight. Perhaps Kansas could have been a prize, thriving as always in basketball and just a few years removed from winning the Orange Bowl.
There’s also the question of how this hypothetical Pac-16 would have performed, both financially and on the field. The Pac-12 Networks would presumably have done much better, buoyed by interest within the state of Texas, but the football teams from this hypothetical league haven’t exactly been world beaters in the twelve relevant years. Combined, this hypothetical Pac-16 has won just one playoff game, its best team arguably Oklahoma State in 2011, the guys who lost to Iowa State in Ames on that Friday night in November. There’s an argument to be made that Texas would have ended up in the SEC in this round of realignment anyway, and that’s without even getting into the premise that Larry Scott would likely have mismanaged the Pac-16 just as badly as he mismanaged the Pac-12.
One way to understand conference realignment is that the biggest programs in college football find themselves their homes, and then the sport’s middle class skitters around like bugs in search of shelter. The nice thing for Texas is that it’s one of the big programs, and that the size of its fanbase and its brand’s relevance in two of the country’s seven biggest media markets make it a magnet even when it only wins ten games once in a thirteen-year span. The scary thing, though, is that others were powerful once themselves. Part of why the Pac-16 was such an attractive idea was that Texas would be in a league with USC. Part of why the Big 12 was enticing enough to end the Southwest Conference was the presence of Nebraska and Oklahoma. USC and Oklahoma and Nebraska retain some value, but they don’t run the sport anymore. The winners do. Texas should probably keep that in mind.
