Texas Big 12: Did Longhorns Kill Mega Expansion, Save Notre Dame's Independence?

It wasn’t supposed to end this way, or at least no one thought it would.

Conference expansion and realignment picked up a strong and robust head of steam over the past month and it looked as if collegiate athletics and football would be drastically changed sometime in the near future.

Now it looks as though things may settle down and the changes will be kept to a relative minimum.

After a few small tremors, there was no major earthquake to disrupt Notre Dame and many other schools who could have been on the outside looking in when the dust settled.

Maybe we shouldn’t speak in the past tense just yet, but did this realignment make a lot sense?

The impetus to expand has always centered on money and generating more revenue, but just as much, it seemed like an exercise in seeing who could stick their chest out the furthest.

I think many college football fans questioned the validity or workability of 16-team super conferences and were hesitant to really embrace the grand scheme of the proposed 21^st Century realignment.

Even for those who won’t admit it, the questions and worries were there right from the start.

But those questions didn’t matter to a lot of people because the prospects of the power implicit in a super conference were just to alluring.

Look no further than the Big Ten for evidence.

A month ago, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany was being lauded as a crafty genius and astute businessman who had brought numerous treasure to his conference and was about to bring untold more riches through expansion.

We were told the Big Ten was going to become the first super conference.

We were told the Big Ten was going to add powerful programs and become the best football conference in the nation.

We were lectured on how much money the Big Ten was making and how adding new markets were going to increase the conferences’ already large bounty.

They told us Missouri was going to bring the St. Louis/Kansas City market, Rutgers was going to bring the ever attractive New York market and it was all going to be finished off with the Big Ten finally adding (or forcing) the national brand of Notre Dame into the fold.

Conquest complete!

With all these possibilities a few weeks ago, you probably could have convinced some Big Ten fans that Jim Delany should have been in the running for Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Sure they’ll scoff at that notion now, but I guarantee it crossed some people’s minds.

Needless to say, things haven’t exactly played out the way many thought they would.

As of now, the Big Ten has added Nebraska to its ranks, bringing the conference to 12 teams and giving them the ability to play a conference championship game.

Years down the road this may be viewed as a great decision by the Big Ten, but because of all the hype generated by the super conference and market expanding scenarios, it looks like somewhat of a failure.

I wouldn’t say it is a failure simply because I didn’t believe in all the excitement surrounding a Big Ten super conference and I knew what this realignment was really going to boil down to.

It was about power and popularity.

The Big Ten desperately wanted to become more popular and felt the success of the Big Ten Network gave them the power to increase their popularity from the Atlantic to the Rockies and beyond.

It all started with the inferiority complex brought upon by a lack of a conference championship game and the notion that the conference as a whole didn’t get the respect it deserved across the country, in the polls and in the BCS rankings.

Some of those complaints are certainly valid, and I would argue that the Big Ten has definitely been underrated for years.

Still, the problem for me wasn’t that the Big Ten was trying to solve some of these problems and put its teams in a better position to succeed (you know like just coming out and saying they would add one team and move on with life), but how much hubris was displayed in the belief that the conference was going to become the best and most profitable in the history of football.

It was as if some believed the lucrative television revenue from the Big Ten Network demanded that the conference be considered the best, even before expansion.

“Screw settling things on the field, we make more money as a conference than the SEC,” they exclaimed. “We’re going to become more popular than everyone soon enough!”

Nowhere was this more apparent than in many Big Ten fan’s unwavering belief in Rutgers ability to grab the New York City market and send streams of cash into the conference coffers for decades on end.

Well, in the quest for increasing popularity and money, we learned that there’s an awful lot of power to be wielded by the other conferences and individual programs as well.

And the irony of it all is that the Big 12 conference ends up becoming smaller and yet able to negotiate a new television deal that will pay each school significantly more than in the past and on par to the amount being earned by Big Ten members.

Because it wasn’t really ever about the Big Ten being better or more popular in that sense, but rather it was that they were the early birds to the lucrative television deal opportunities. Within the next few years we may see the rest of the major conferences close in on just as much revenue.

So what’s the big deal?

Isn’t it kind of obvious that conferences didn’t have to realign to start making more money? It has been fairly clear in recent years that television revenues have been sky rocketing for just about every conference and there didn’t seem to be any end in sight.

For a while, the Big Ten was basking in the spotlight, holding all the cards, waving around the currency from its own network and threatening to expand and increase its power and money.

But those threats have not come to pass and other players upped the ante in the face of all the danger. The Big Ten was able to free Nebraska from the Big 12, but that allowed Texas and its allies the opportunity to maximize their own profits and sign a deal as lucrative as the Big Ten Network.

So while adding Nebraska was certainly a smart move on the Big Ten’s behalf, we have already learned that the their revenue advantage has been decreased with the Big 12 signing a deal with Fox Sports.

This is all good news for Notre Dame who looked to be standing on the precipice of independence and almost assuredly joining the Big Ten.

With the Big 12 staying in tact and mega conference expansion a lot less likely, there is hope that the Fighting Irish will be able to keep one of their sacred traditions and move forward with their new coach in a new era.

Someone give Bevo a hug for me.