Pac-10 Expansion: Within Five Years, Texas, OU, Texas Tech and OSU Will Join

All that was accomplished by Big-whatever commissioner Dan Beebe is a brief delay of the inevitable.

Now the Pac-11 will presumably add one more, likely Utah, to jump up to Pac-12 status. But when the next offseason comes around, expect the exact same story to come up again.

Larry Scott and the Pac-10 are going to have to go back to the drawing board in order to reconsider financial plans to bait the Longhorns, but they'll be back with even more temptation next time. Texas eventually won't be able to say no.

Sure, a bunch of powerful people who think they know what is best for the involved athletes and universities made some last-minute calls to stop conference realignment on the Pac-10's end. But the Big Ten (Twelve?) will keep going. Jim Delany will never be satisfied until he ultimately has Notre Dame.

That could mean they have to expand up to 14 teams. It could also mean they have to expand up to 16 teams. But do not expect them to stop expanding until they hit the Notre Dame jackpot, and it only takes one oversized conference to upset the balance of power.

The truth is, the Big 12 minus two is a weak conference. Sure, people are arguing that for basketball Nebraska and Colorado mean nothing, but college basketball has reached its maximum revenue capacity. The money-grabbing university heads are looking for football money.

Are fans supposed to believe that a league consisting of only Texas and Oklahoma, and then a bunch of underlings, is going to attract viewership?

I'm sure that everyone outside of the sparsely populated plains states is really going to care a lot about that ferocious Iowa State-Baylor game. Or how about the wonderful Kansas State-Texas matchup coming up next year?

That will thrill a lot more than, say, Ohio State-Nebraska.

The Big 12, when discussing football, was a three-trick pony—and historically the centerpiece has been Oklahoma, not Texas.

Oklahoma's northern rival is gone. The league is going to be boring to watch now, and fans are going to get uneasy with it.

In the hearts and minds of those looking on, the damage is already done, whether they realize it now or not.

A league that was the Big 12 South just lost the only two teams with viable markets to other conferences and is going to be viewed by everyone else in the country as weak. What was previously viewed as the second strongest football conference in the country for the past couple of years is now undeniably the fourth, and more likely even down to the fifth.

Aside from Texas-Oklahoma, this conference doesn't even exist.

It may take a couple of years for Texas to realize they made a huge mistake, or it may happen later this summer. But the Big 12 is still on life support.

If you are Dan Beebe, how do you convince a team to leave its conference to join yours? Sure, you're a bigger conference than C-USA, but 48 hours ago everyone thought you were about to cease to exist. No one is going to leave that security for a conference that could have mass defections at any moment.

The die on this has been cast. What the Big 12 accomplished by staying together was complete irrelevance in the national title hunt for both itself and the Pac-10. The Big Ten and the SEC are preparing to drop the gauntlet, and for the next few years, the champions of those conferences will be in a race to accumulate BCS titles.

The Big 12, on the other hand, will be sending Iowa State and Baylor out of conference to get slaughtered to weaken their strength of schedule. They'll have one game a year that might draw a measurable audience from outside of their time zone in the Red River Rivalry.

So when the Pac-10 comes calling again, and Texas A&M still wants to go to the SEC, will Texas have the foresight to finally jump off a sinking ship?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The time to jump out of the Big 12 was today, and Texas missed the ball.