Big 12 Break-Up: Mass Expansions Give Lame-Duck Football Seasons to All

Here is an interesting side-effect of the mass conference expansion:

The next two years are going to be lame-duck football seasons.

Everyone is very aware by now that Nebraska dropped the Big 12 like a sour relationship as soon as they had a new place to stay, and they were preempted by Colorado in what figures to be a mass-Big 12 exodus.

Rivalries that are more than a century old are going to get torn apart.

While the biggest expansion right now is happening in the Pac-(insert today's number) every conference in college football figures to be affected by this ordeal. The SEC is now looking to expand, the ACC will be forced to as well, and the Big East won't escape it.

Boise State managed to make a pretty quiet move earlier in the day from the WAC to the MWC, so both of those conferences are definitely involved. Plus, everyone leftover from the Big 12 implosion will have to go somewhere.

Funny thing is that the schedules for this coming college football season are already set.

Nebraska, for example, has a season finale this year against Colorado; they won't play a single team from the Big Ten, but they do currently have the distinct possibility of playing in what will certainly be a riveting and meaningful Big 12 championship game (that game has to be canceled).

They start with their new conference earlier than most: That would be in the tail end of 2011.

Obviously, they'll set a different schedule for that season than is currently planned, but most teams won't have that luxury.

For example, the Pac-10's leading gain of at least five, and likely six Big 12 teams won't go into effect for two seasons.

The Big 12 won't be able to maintain scheduling during that time because it likely won't exist, so a bunch of teams are going to be floating around trying to schedule games with whoever is willing to play them.

Who is going to sort out that mess?

And as expansion continues toward the ultimate goal of four, 16-team super-conferences, the scheduling problem is going to spread across the country.

That should lead to a meaningful national title hunt.

College football is a very unique animal in that it has the most meaningful regular season in all of sports. If the structure of that regular season is disturbed nationwide for a couple of years, the seasons themselves become unquantifiable. The results will basically be meaningless.

And most teams are going to be thinking about bigger and better things anyway, so if measuring effort input was possible, it almost certainly would go way down.

While the result is going to make a phenomenal case study, the next two seasons until all team transfers have been made to their new conferences will be mediocre at best. In economics, this scenario would be bunched in with the concept of transition cost.

If it was isolated to the Big 12 (former?) conference, things might be slightly different. But all signs are pointing to the Big 12/Pac-10 merger being the first act in a series of major changes. For football fans, hopefully the changes occur quickly, or more lame-duck seasons could come out of it.

In all, over the course of these changes, with the Pac-10 adding six teams, the Big Ten likely adding a total of five, the SEC needing to add four, the ACC needing to add four (or perhaps more if it gets raided), and the smaller conferences transferring teams around to consolidate/do their own thing, more than 25 teams could move conferences (and that is probably a conservative estimate, the Big 12 alone is half of that).

More than one-fifth of college football, at least, will be locked in transfer.

How this situation is going to get temporarily sorted out is beyond most folks, and who is going to do the sorting remains to be seen.

Hopefully, this is a one-time deal, because for the fans a lot of quality football is going to be missed until the swaps are all official.

And people are not going to want to go through all of this again if it is later decided this was a bad experiment.