Tom Holmoe was delayed on his flight to Chattanooga on Monday.
“I love the South,” he said over the phone from the Memphis International Airport. “Just give me a little barbecue and I’m fine.”
In today’s college sports landscape, delays seem somewhat commonplace for Holmoe, the athletic director at Brigham Young University. The last month has been dominated by talks of expanding conferences, and Holmoe and the vast majority of ADs around the land are forced to hurry up and wait.
“I think just about everyone — well, a lot of schools anyway — are uneasy right now because we don’t know what the environment will be,” Holmoe said. “For Brigham Young in particular, we have to wait and see what is going to happen. There’s so much rumor out there.”
Holmoe said he is frequently asked about the topic of expansion and understands the curiosity. He expects to field more questions about the subject here today when he’s the guest star of the Chattanooga area’s BYU Alumni Association’s 11th annual golf tournament and fundraiser at Valleybrook.
“So much of what I read I know is not true,” Holmoe said of expansion, “but you have to react to everything because you have fans, student-athletes and administrators wanting to know how’s it going to go down.”
The how is unknown. It started with the Big Ten, which has 11 schools, and its rumored interest in adding at least one and maybe as many as five schools. The obvious and long-coveted target for the Big Ten’s expansion scenario is Notre Dame, and from there the dominoes could fall anywhere.
And everywhere.
“It depends on the different scenarios,” Holmoe said. “What it really predicates on is the Big Ten. If they add only Notre Dame, then I don’t think much more is going to happen. If they go to 15 or 16 teams, then a lot of things will happen. Then the tumblers start to fall.”
Holmoe’s program would draw some interest if the six Bowl Championship Series conferences begin scrambling to add teams. Like most programs and most conferences, BYU and the rest of the Mountain West is in a holding pattern, much like a layover in an airport.
If it becomes a conference free-for-all, BYU could be a target for the Pac-10, but Holmoe said no one from that league has approached him in any way. And he doesn’t expect to hear anything any time soon.
“The Pac-10 is not looking for expansion just for expansion’s sake,” Holmoe said. “Certainly they would not be talking about changing membership without revenue. It’s amusing to me, really. There’s not much anyone can say; if it were to happen, either you get invited to the dance or you don’t.
“A lot of things would have to happen from a series of schools. Who knows if or when it would get to us, and in all likelihood nothing will happen.”
There are smokescreens, but that doesn’t always mean fire. The future may be murky and the how unclear, but the why is crystal — money.
“All I hear is just rumors now, and it’s hard to act on rumors,” Oklahoma State athletic director Mike Holder said. “Our focus — the conversations that I’ve had — is to do what we can to keep the Big 12 intact. Our No. 1 concern is to narrow the gap in revenue that exists with the Big Ten and the SEC television contracts. We’ve got to come out with some strategy that will help narrow the gap.”
Holmoe has a similar view.
“It’s about revenue stream, plain and simple,” Holmoe said. “I’d rather have the SEC’s television deal (with ESPN and CBS) than the Big Ten Network because it’s a guaranteed thing and puts the SEC in a great position across all sports.
“That said, I’d rather have either one of those than what we have.”
He would know. In the early 1990s Holmoe was finishing his master’s degree and one of his final term papers was on the possibilities of superconferences in college sports.
“I got an A-plus, brother,” he said excitedly. “That was the hot topic then, and there were probably people writing papers on it all over the country.
“It was just speculation.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.