Thus it’s not overly difficult to foresee Texas and Oklahoma making a break for it for real next time, triggering the power-conference endgame. If the SEC, Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 all kept their current members and descended upon the Big 12 like carrion, here’s one guess what it could all look like come 2024:
SEC new members: Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. The Sooners are the big prize and the tagalong Cowboys are the lottery winners by virtue of state politics and Boone Pickens.
Big Ten new members: Kansas and Connecticut. It would be a basketball-centric expansion for a conference that already has sufficient football flagships. It also would further the league’s foothold in the New York area, while simultaneously preventing UConn from being the single biggest loser of all realignment.
Pac-12 new members: Texas, BYU and two from a group of Texas Tech, Baylor, TCU and Houston. Or BYU could be the odd team out in favor of an all-Texas foursome.
ACC: Notre Dame and West Virginia. Or the Fighting Irish could continue their current relationship as a football scheduling partner and otherwise full ACC membership. The ACC could make do with 15 in football and 16 in basketball, or it could add Cincinnati to make it 16 and 17.
The difference with the Big 12 is that ESPN and Fox, contractually, have nothing to leverage the conference for the grant of rights extension -- the $25 million-per-school increases are already in the contract.
On this one, ESPN and Fox can only ask and hope.
The good news for them is that several of the Big 12's members might be incentivized to sign such an extension. In the event the Big 12 ever dissolved, it's not entirely clear that everyone in the league would have a Power 5 landing spot.
(emphasis added)Maybe Texas Tech and Oklahoma State and Kansas State would have a Power 5 home elsewhere. Maybe not. Big 12 survival is a safer route.
Because of its lucrative deal with ESPN on the Longhorn Network, which doesn't expire for another 15 years, Texas has 225 million reasons to stand pat in the Big 12.
Oklahoma's only motivation, however, would only be, well, an altruistic stance on greater Big 12 stability.
However, one industry insider, who worked directly with programming before recently leaving for another job in the industry, indicated getting the Big 12 schools to sign a grant of rights without offering anything in return will be a tough sell for the networks, even as they have to shell out up to $800 million to the league. More likely, to get a grant of rights extension, ESPN and Fox would have to put forward an immediate renegotiation of the Big 12's tier 1 and 2 deals, and pay the Big 12 up to the levels of the SEC and Big Ten. The Big Ten is now getting an estimated $250 million per year from Fox for only half of its rights.
If the networks put that on the table, the Big 12's viability for the next two decades would be virtually assured. But only if the Red River flagships signed off. If either balked against a proposal the rest of the conference supported, it could, once again, send a message to the other Big 12 members -- that the Sooners aren't completely committed to the conference.