Weighing in on Big Ten expansion, Part 3

In other football news…welcome to the Big Ten, Nebraska.

From the DMR:

University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents endorsed and approved a resolution Friday afternoon to pursue membership in the Big Ten.

Later in the day, the Big Ten voted unanimously to approve the membership. The Cornhuskers will officially join the conference on July 1, 2011 and begin competition against the other 11 members in the 2011-12 academic year.

Finally! After all the talk and conjecture, Big Ten expansion has becomes reality.

Frankly, it feels a little bittersweet. Sure it’s cool to welcome a new member into the Big Ten family, but it comes at a cost. Not only is the conference shedding its 11-membmer exoskeleton — the comfy identity worn as along as I’ve followed Big Ten sports — but the addition of Nebraska represents another step toward the Big 12’s demise.

Call me naïve — or slow — but I didn’t truly comprehend the impact Big Ten expansion would have on the FBS college sports scene until this week. It was an amazing, and unusual, lapse in foresight. A year ago, conference expansion was just playful and harmless discussion, but today it is a serious issue determining the future of the college sports landscape.

Ever since 1999, my hope had been for Notre Dame to become the Big Ten’s 12th member. The Irish’s newfound association would have only hurt the traditional out-of-conference football rivalries the school needed to abandon. I couldn’t care less about the Big East and what would happen if Rutgers or Pitt left, but Nebraska leaving the Big 12? Holy shit. I never though it was possible until the last few weeks, when the talk in Lincoln became more than rumor.

The conference shuffle has begun and it didn’t start with Big Red’s move today — though rumors of a Cornhusker desertion may have fast tracked what happened in Boulder. Yesterday, Colorado announced it accepted an invitation to join the Pac-10 in 2012.

Who would have thought Colorado, the lowly Buffs — whose football program has fallen into mediocrity since the days of Bill McCartney and Kordell Steward, and whose basketball programs are, essentially, non-existent — would make the first move to initiate a prospective conference realignment upheaval? (Realistically, the Denver TV market dictated that move. I’m not sure the Pac-10 got anything more than that.)

The Big 12 South (minus Baylor, and maybe Texas A&M) has all but merged with the Pac-10, too, effectively orphaning Kansas, Kansas State, Mizzou, and Iowa State. This was the nightmare scenario Tom and I discussed, and it is poised to become a dizzying and unfortunate reality for the Jayhawks, Wildcats, Tigers, and Cyclones.

Officials at Mizzou have stated they are not “looking at any other conference,” and the Big Ten is, despite earlier rumors, not interested in Missouri. (Since adding the Huskers, why would it be?) The Tigers announced its curators will hold an emergency meeting on Sunday, to discuss…? For the time being, Mizzou is committed to the Big 12.

Newsflash: what Big 12? The only Big 12 in the country is now the Big Ten. (Please tell me it won’t change its name to the Big Twelve, continuing the tradition of spelling the number. Though it would put a lot of distance between the new version and old, hickish, trailer trash Big 12.)

The Texas university regents, on the other hand, will be discussing the Longhorn’s future in the Big 12, which there likely won’t be.

Bill Self, Kansas’ men’s basketball coach, is unsure why football matters so much, and I feel for him. In the wake of Big 12 South abandonment, Kansas’ rich basketball tradition has been left waving in the wind. Iowa State athletic director Jamie Pollard is P-I-S-S-E-D. Here are some of his more colorful quotes from a DMR article titled “Questions, concerns for Iowa State, Big 12 grow more ominous”:

“The Big Ten Network completely changed the television industry,” said Pollard, who contended that the notion Iowa receives no subsidies is “hogwash.” “Anybody who’s got cable or DirecTV, you’re paying the Big Ten. Whether you’re an Iowa State fan, a UNI fan or a Drake fan, you’re paying Iowa a big chunk of money.”

“Within the Big Ten footprint, there are 22 or 23 million homes,” Pollard said. “And the formula for cable is, every month, you guys are giving the Big Ten about 75 cents of your cable bill.

“When you multiply that by all the households, it adds up pretty quick.”

I feel for the guy. He and the remaining Big 12 North schools have been pushed into a corner. But, as Tom wrote on Churchill’s Cigar, it’s partially the Big 12’s fault that its members are even contemplating re-association. Figuratively, the conference let itself get bent over by expansion talk and plans from the Big Ten and, more recently, Pac-10. Any effort the Big 12 made to remain together and viable was too little too late. It sat back, let two competitors plan its demise, and made empty promises. The Big 12 has nurtured regional and division biases (no other conference in the country is half as unbalanced as the Big 12), let itself to be picked apart, and has potentially left five of its members in athletic limbo.

As is, the Big 12 needs to die. It is, essentially, dead, and I will bemoan its loss. In hindsight, it should have strove to be more balanced and equitable. Regardless, it’s likely dissolution leaves a major hole in the middle portion — in the Great Plains region — of the country. The major universities will affiliate themselves with those on the far west coast — a major mountain range away — to form a bloated and unbalanced super conference. (You know damn well the Northwest schools will feel very slighted by the Lone Star contingent eventually.)

The talk of expansion has morphed into realignment speculation. I hope it all serves the Big 12 North orphans well. But we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ll be trying to score tickets to Nebraska’s first football and basketball visits to IC. The first game I remember seeing at Carver was Penn State’s first men’s basketball visit to IC in February 1993 (Iowa won), and I also attended the PSU-Iowa game on October 21, 1995, the Nittnay Lion’s first game at Kinnick as a member of the Big Ten (Iowa lost). (The football game was infamous for someone in the Iowa student section throwing a real pig’s head on the field, prompting calls to cover the student section with a dome. Craziness.)