A Prudent Look At Pac 10 Expansion

Much has been written on the Big Ten’s expansion plans and how it could reshape the college football landscape.  Rumors suggest we could see a one team addition the leaves things pretty much intact or they could add up to five schools and give birth to the superconference era.  The abundance of interest and the maddening lack of concrete details have generated countless essays ranging from thoughtful and informative to things that would probably make conference execs laugh if they read them.  Rather than focus on the Big Ten (because, as previously mentioned there aren’t a lot of concrete details and there are a number of different directions their expansion could take) I’ll instead focus on the Pac-10.  The Pac-10 is also openly flirting with expanding their conference and their pathway forward is much clearer so we can engage in a slightly more informed degree of speculation as to how that league might look in five years time.

Let’s begin by talking about who definitely won’t be joining the Pac 10. If you ever come across anything claiming one of these teams is a potential Pac 10 member, stop reading immediately. To reiterate: expansion today is about television and so a team who does not bring in TV markets beyond what a conference all ready has is a team who won’t be a serious candidate. The new Pac 10 will NOT include:

Fresno State, San Diego State, San Jose State, Hawai’i, Boise State, Nevada, UNLV, or New Mexico. 

The California State schools are already in an area where the Pac 10 has 100 percent market saturation and so they bring nothing to the table. How many people in San Diego will watch a San Diego State game but couldn’t otherwise be bothered with USC or UCLA? That’s how many people SDSU brings to the table and that number is pretty small. 

Boise’s football program has had quite a run recently, and they are all ready a Pac-10 member in wrestling but a football association is a whole different thing. The fact is Boise’s 30 years removed from being a junior college and for a conference that prides itself on its academic standing, there is no chance BSU would be offered football membership. They’re also based in a very small media market where the Pac-10 all ready has a great deal of penetration. Also, again owing to the fact it was a junior college until very recently, most of the local population are actually Idaho Vandals fans. 

Hawaii, Nevada, UNLV, and New Mexico all suffer from similar problems owing to their small local population and the presence the Pac-10 already has in those areas. There are too few TVs they would bring to the table to warrant the current Pac-10 members diluting their 1/10^th share of revenue down to a 1/12^th share.

Now let’s look at who might be in.

I believe the Big XII’s days as a conference are numbered. The revenues from the Big Ten Network show the immense power of television in keeping athletic department coffers full and the Big XII doesn’t control enough of that market to remain competitive. Of the nation’s Top 25 TV markets only four are covered by the Big XII’s “footprint”: Dallas-Fort Worth (5), Houston (10), Denver (16), and St. Louis (21). Compare this to the Big Ten’s seven, the Pac 10’s six. It’s also worth noting that two of the four markets the Big XII does currently control are from schools who are being courted by other conferences.

If Missouri and Colorado both go and take the TVs in St. Louis and Denver with them, then what’s left of the Big XII has nothing outside of Texas (not to mention the North’s marquee program, Nebraska, is also a rumored future Big Ten member), and it’s difficult to see how the conference remains viable.

Adding Utah and BYU as replacements isn’t a good option either; they would bring in a not-large TV market (Salt Lake City ranks as the nation’s 31^st largest), and also create some potential scheduling problems stemming from BYU’s refusal to play on Sundays.

The one thing that really hamstrings Pac-10 expansion is the necessity of unanimous consent from the 10 current members in order to admit new members to the conference. By far the most fertile recruiting ground for all schools is California. The current full round robin means each year both schools in the state of Oregon and the state of Washington will travel to Southern California to play either USC or UCLA and northern California to play Cal or Stanford. That also means USC will come to town every other year so those schools all enjoy a very lucrative home game (which is less of an issue for Oregon but a huge one for Washington State). 

Anything that shakes up that arrangement is going to do a lot of harm to the Pacific Northwest schools, so they’re not likely to support a small addition to the conference that would split them into a “Northern Division” and rob them of their annual trips to California. This makes it almost impossible to add two or even four teams to the conference. For expansion to work for everyone, the Pac 10 almost has to go for six more.

The conventional wisdom is the Big XII North is about to be plundered and those moves will leave the entire conference in shambles. Once it becomes apparent (if it already isn’t) that Missouri, Nebraska, and Colorado are all likely to leave and the Big XII can't survive then Texas, Texas A&M, and Kansas must be approached by the Pac-10 and offered membership. All three are members of the prestigious American Association of Universities who will fit the Pac 10’s academic profile and all bring a lot of glitz and star power in football, basketball, or both. 

To fill out to an even 16 options include the Oklahoma schools, Texas Tech, or possibly Utah. Utah makes geographic sense but might be hard to separate from BYU, and would probably be an option of last resort if the conference had 15 members and needed something to fill the final slot. And while Texas Tech, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State don’t have the academic profile it might be soothing to Stanford’s pride when the Sooners come to Palo Alto and sell enough tickets to buy Jim Harbaugh a couple dozen more bathrooms.

Raiding six teams out of the Big XII would allow the conference to split into two eight-team divisions. One division could be made up of the old Pac 8 teams (Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State, Cal, Stanford, USC, and UCLA), and the other of the eight more recent additions (Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, Kansas, Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State (though the latter two may change depending on a few local political issues)). This type of split allows the northwest schools to keep their yearly access to California, supplements the Arizona schools with yearly trips to Texas to make up for the loss of time in California (though they would still trek to either northern or southern California every other year), it keeps all the teams in the Pacific time zone together and the Central and Mountain time zone teams together, and preserves many traditional rivalries all while fitting nicely into the Pac 10’s current nine-conference game slate. 

Each team would play seven divisional games and two teams from the other division, thus opening up the Pacific coastal teams to Texas once in every player’s college career and opening up California biennially to all the central schools. Throw the conference championship game cherry on top and control of nine of the nation’s 25 largest TV markets with the option to start a television network which will more than rival the Big Ten, and you have a recipe for a lot of success and full athletic department coffers. It’s almost beautiful in its simplicity.

And we’d get USC/Texas every four years!

While the SEC is a distinct possibility for Texas as well, based on their history it doesn’t seem likely. When the Southwestern Conference broke up Texas declined to seriously pursue SEC membership (though Texas A&M was said to be interested), owing to the fact the SEC’s academic profile is not strong. If academics made the SEC unattractive then there is no reason to believe it would be any different today. Unless there’s been a dramatic shift in priorities in Austin or they can guarantee enough wheelbarrows full of cash to make it worthwhile, then the SEC does not look like a likely home for the Longhorns if and when the Big XII comes apart.

This, like everything else being written on the subject right now, is purely speculation. It is based on the factors that are driving the current move toward larger conferences (TV revenue, academic prestige, championship games), and reflects political realities within the conference as they exist right now. For better or worse, this seems to be the Pac 10’s target scenario as the era of the superconferences approaches.