NCAA Expansion: Why the Failure of the Pac-10 Raid Was Actually a Good Thing

Pac-10 fans are understandably upset and embarrassed at the public rejection of their courtship of Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State. The sting is made even worse because the Pac-10 is now stuck with Colorado and their one conference title since Bill McCartney left. As well as the ego sting of being rejected by what the Pac-10 perceives as a group of academically and culturally inferior universities that would have benefited greatly by the Pac-10's association with them.

However, the truth is that it would have never worked. The idea that the Pac-16 could operate as two separate eight team football conferences that would each get an automatic BCS bid was crazy. The Pac-16 would have been ONE conference. Not two. Plus it would have required the TV networks, the other conferences (both BCS and non-BCS), and possibly even the NCAA and Congress (meaning the anti-trust types who are already investigating the BCS) to sign off it. This would have never happened.

Ultimately, this would have been a minor issue, as this league would have been practically guaranteed an at-large BCS bid anyway. The fact that this was even floated by Larry Scott's office as a possibility (when it had no chance whatsoever of happening), was evidence that the effort was being led by someone brought in from outside the world of college athletics and was a wild pitch from the beginning. The Pac-16 was something that looked good on paper, but would have been an absolute nightmare to operate.

This Pac-16 would have been made up of two separate groups of schools that are literally half a continent apart physically and even further apart culturally.

Even though the Pac-16 tried to minimize these issues by dumping the Arizona schools in with the six schools from the Big 12, the geographic problems would have been crazy. Remember, Colorado's being in the Big 12 was (barely) viable because they were in the Big 12 NORTH.

The Pac-East (or whatever it would have been called), would have skipped from Arizona north to Colorado and back southeast to Texas-Oklahoma with nothing in between. (Well, nothing except for the Mountain West Conference I guess!) That would have been difficult even if you desperately wanted to make it work, as Colorado, Texas Tech, and Texas did (or I should say, as the president of the University of Texas did).

But to the people that this would have been imposed upon, which definitely included Texas A&M and to a degree everybody else (including, let's not forget, the Arizona schools), would have caused nothing but hurt feelings and frayed nerves.

And those hurt feelings and frayed nerves would have spilled over into the conference political battles. Look, these Big 12 schools don't like each other or get along despite having so much in common (geography, culture, rivalries, tradition) and need to coexist because of a shared destiny. What on earth makes anyone think that they would have gotten along with schools halfway across the country? 

If you think that Texas was going to stop being UT-Austin just because it joined the Pac-10, that is simply unrealistic. If you believed that the Texas-Oklahoma five were going to just have USC, UCLA, Cal, Washington and the other Pac-10 powerhouses dictate things to them because "you guys joined our conference, and you are lucky for the privileges gained by affiliating with us ," then you are mistaken.

And if the Texas-Oklahoma five were expecting to come in with the attitude "hey, we are giving you guys out west—other than USC of course—a real football conference for a change!" ... well, that wouldn't have gone over well either.

And disappointment would have been inevitable. How much would Washington State, Oregon State, Colorado, and Arizona State athletics really benefit? About as much as Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, and Texas A&M academics would have.

That's the problem with these 16 team "super-conferences": they're too big. The universities and athletics programs who were at the middle of the pecking order before have to deal with superior ones being added to the top, and they have to compete with more teams added to the middle and bottom. Oregon State fans might protest "we were one victory away from the Rose Bowl two years in a row!"

I know Beavers, and that's why I picked you. Had Oklahoma and Texas been in your conference in 2008 and 2009, you wouldn't have been anywhere near the Rose Bowl, and those huge back—to—back Civil War showdowns between you and Oregon would have been meaningless outside your state.

Conferences work best when, in theory, nearly everyone has a shot. In a 16 team conference with three superpowers, (one of whom rules California and the other Texas) eight to ten of the teams are going to be irrelevant. Pac-10 fans have always prided themselves on the top-to-bottom competitiveness of the conference. There was no surer way to kill that off in favor of a conference with a few powerhouse programs and a lot of also-rans than this expansion deal.

Now sure, this sounds like it is coming from an SEC fan who didn't want the Pac-10 to surpass his own conference. Well, the Pac-10 is already far better than the SEC where it counts: academically. Second, being number two to a 16 team colossus that spans half the Continental US and includes mega-states California and Texas isn't a bad position to be in, no? Third, the SEC hasn't always been number one (it certainly wasn't in the 70s, 80s or most of the 90s) and won't always be.

Also, many SEC fans have been bemused by the idea that the Pac-10 was going to surpass the SEC by adding a bunch of teams that have a losing record to the SEC in bowl games, including going 0-3 in BCS title games and 0-2 in recent Cotton Bowls. Instead, I honestly believe that this Pac-16 was going to be a bigger mess than was the Big 12 and is now the ACC (whose expansion to 12 teams has been a giant fiasco that no one will admit to or talk about).

There are other reasons why I am glad that this thing fell apart. Namely, it would have been a horribly unfair deal for the Big 12 teams left behind, especially the ones who have been pouring money into their programs and facilities the last few years in an effort to get better like Kansas, Kansas State and Baylor. Now had this been a merger involving the strongest 12 or 16 teams from both conferences, then fine.

Instead, it would have been the Pac-10 grabbing some of the better programs from the Big 12, plus Colorado (not for merit, mind you, but simply because it liked it better). The result would have been some very good Big 12 programs being left out in the cold while all the Pac-10 programs would have had a home and benefited from this $20 million a year no matter how mediocre they were.

So, Missouri and Kansas with their good basketball programs and improving football programs would have had to join the Mountain West, while all the Pac-10 schools would have sat back and raked in the dough just because they were already in the conference that was killing off the other. It was unfair and wrong when the ACC tried—and incidentally totally failed—to do the same to the Big East, and it would have been the same had the Pac-16 succeeded in their scheme.

Granted, there would have been academic benefits to associating with the seven AAU institutions that are in the Pac-10. But come on! The state of Texas can achieve that for Texas Tech by simply investing more in it, and it can raise the profile of that institution without doing it at Baylor's expense. Because of their small population, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are more limited, and they are the ones who are probably grousing behind the scenes the most about not getting to be in a conference where 10 of the 16 members would have been AAU institutions.

However, the very fact that they were counting on using their football program as their primary vehicle for academic improvement speaks volumes. The simple truth is that if Nebraska is an AAU institution despite being in a state with a population of 1.7 million, then why isn't Oklahoma or Oklahoma state? Oklahoma governors? Board of Regents? T. Boone Pickens? Anyone? Being in a state whose political and business leaders don't value or invest enough in education isn't a problem that jumping into the Pac-10 is going to solve.

Instead, Bob Stoops, Mike Gundy, and T. Boone Pickens need to start working the leadership of that state to get them to build OU and OSU into universities that their football teams can be proud of.

As to improving the Pac-10 on the football field, the solution to that is simple: hiring more guys like Don James, John McKay and Pete Carroll. The reason that the Pac-10 wanted Texas and Oklahoma is that they win, and the reasons that they win are Mack Brown and Bob Stoops.

Look at Oklahoma football the ten years before they hired Stoops, or Texas the 20 years before they hired Brown. So instead of adding Texas and Oklahoma to get Stoops and Brown in your conference, why not just hire guys like Stoops and Brown at the institutions that you already have? Or guys like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer. Again, look at what Alabama was before they hired Saban (or for that matter look at what LSU was before they hired Saban) and look at Florida football before Meyer and Spurrier.

And none of this "we can't afford to hire coaches like that." Let's not forget that it was Barbara Hedges at the University of Washington who started the coaching salary war by paying Rick Neuheisel $1 million a year. Hedges hired Neuheisel in 1998.

Well, Mack Brown was making $350,000 a year at North Carolina in 1997. Also, it's only the guys that have already won national titles like Saban and Meyer that are getting those huge salaries. Everyone else is making about the $1.8 million Jeff Tedford is making to deliver zero conference titles or major bowl game berths and one top 10 finish in eight seasons. And Tedford is probably the most accomplished coach in the Pac-10 right now.

Suffice to say that a 16 team mega-conference, revenue of $20 million per year, and a TV network doesn't fix problems like that. Instead, having AD's and presidents who will put in the work to identify and hire the best candidates instead of double and triple retreads (Neuheisel at UCLA, Dennis Erickson at Oregon State a few years ago and Arizona State now, John Mackovic at Arizona a few years ago) and whoever was passing game coordinator at some other Pac-10 program (it seems like nearly every Pac-10 school has at some point hired someone who worked under either Terry Donahue at UCLA or John Robinson at USC).

Bottom line, as disappointing as this deal falling through seems now, it wasn't going to work, and all parties involved are better off. Now the challenge for these institutions going forward is to find something that will work. As shaky as things look for these two conferences now, the truth is that both are in far better shape than the SEC was not so long ago. But then the SEC added a conference championship game, brought in Steve Spurrier as a coach, and recruited Peyton Manning as a player, and the rest is history.