Last week I recanted a conversation with an old boss about why Notre Dame should join the Big Ten. You may have read that article and presumed that I do indeed look forward to a day where the Big Ten has 14 or 16 teams and one of them being Notre Dame. You would be wrong. I wrote it more as a Plan B point, if 16 be the number and the number being neither 15 nor 17, I'd demand that Notre Dame be included to give the 16 team "super conference" some legitimacy.
Plan A is that we do not expand and really neither does anyone else. Yesterday, Mike Slive commissioner of the SEC said: "We remain optimistic that Texas A&M will be a member of the SEC and have started to look at schedules for 2012-13 involving 13 teams'. " He then went on to say that the SEC has no immediate plans to go beyond 13 teams, but that it's "impossible" to never say never. Also, this just in, Mike Slive is a liar. They might stop at 14, but I'm pretty sure that Slive's limit on Schnitzengruben is higher than 13.
I think within the next week, we'll see this decided one way or the other. Currently, Oklahoma is in the catbird's seat for a couple reasons. 1.) Baylor has offered to rescind their lawsuit against A&M should Oklahoma agree to stay in the Big 12 er, 10, er 9. This would ensure A&M's exit. 2.) Oklahoma could leave for the Pac 10, er, 12, er 14 with Oklahoma State and then the Big 12 disintegrates overnight. Oklahoma will want to get this settled because in a week, somehow they may end up out of the catbird's seat, so better to decide on their terms than wait and have to decide on someone else's.
I find it interesting that the conference that cannot hold itself together is going to be the group that decides College Football's potentially dystopian future. I've joked with my college roommate for years that the Big 12 was a farce, there's Tejas, Oklahoma and previously Nebraska then 9 nobodies. It's only become apparent in the last couple years how that was truth posing as farce.
There's really no question that there are some corollaries to pre World War I Europe here. Everyone's in bed with everyone else and everyone is so twitchy that there's going to be a problem that there is a problem because everyone is so twitchy. Could these mega conferences be avoided? Sure. Will they be? Probably not. There's too much money on the table for some of the schools involved.
Is Jim Delaney, the Big Ten commissioner responsible for starting all this mess by creating the Velveeta and Rotel network, padding everyone's pockets by 10-20 mill a year and encouraging other conferences to do the same? Well. That's a question for another day.
For now, we play Notre Dame Saturday. The rest of the week will be more of a rivalry week focus. We hate the Dame, do we not?
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