Let’s get this straight. The Big Ten has 12 teams, the Big 12 has 10 teams and the Pacific-10 has 11 and counting. Yeah, those numbers make perfect sense.
Welcome to college football expansion, a megadollar game of musical chairs with the band starting to slow down and seats becoming scarce.
The Big Ten has added one team. It’s just not the one team. Longing for Notre Dame for years, the Big Ten settled on Nebraska, which is leaving the Big 12.
Colorado also is departing from the Big 12 to go west for the Pac-10, which likely is not finished adding sheep to its flock.
Confused yet? Well, hang on because all of that is what we know. What we don’t know yet is which shoes will be the next to drop.
Reports surfaced Friday that Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are headed for the Pac-10, too, and an official announcement could come as early as Tuesday. That would leave the league with 15 members, an awkward number no matter how you divide it. Baylor would love to join its Lone Star State brethren in the move west, and Texas A&M apparently is deciding between going to the Pac-10 or seeing if the Southeastern Conference is a possibility.
The shuffling leaves the Big 12 on the brink of folding. Half of its schools are either gone or allegedly gone, and the rest are scrambling to find homes.
The SEC has been strangely quiet in the mad dash to become the next superconference. In truth, the SEC, regardless of numbers, already is the first superconference. It has the best television deals. It has the best programs in football, which is the sport that drives the machine that is college sports. If you think the Big Ten is looking to add Nebraska because of the Cornhuskers’ recent baseball success, well, you have my permission to stop reading.
Why does the SEC need to expand, especially if Texas is off the table? Unless the league can move to 16 and get another automatic BCS berth, the only thing expansion adds is more mouths to feed. After dividing up the profits from 2009-10, the league recently handed out an average of $17.3 million to its 12 schools. With the television contract secured well into the 2020s, that number will be roughly the same for the foreseeable future — unless, of course, there are 16 slices of the same pie.
It’s easy to understand the aggressive motives of the Big Ten and the Pac-10. The Big Ten, which controls its own network, needs a championship game. A 12th team gives it that option. If the Big Ten-plus two continues to add, it’s just adding more programming and markets. That’s a smart move.
I understand the Pac-10’s push into Texas and Oklahoma and toward becoming the Pac-16, especially if it can deal the ultimate death blow to the Big 12 and successfully argue that the new Pac-16 deserves two BCS bids. By comparison, the Pac-10 does not have a big-dollar television deal, and more teams and more markets could mean more bargaining power.
The reasons are less clear for the SEC, though.
If the SEC opens its doors, there surely will be no shortage of teams willing to jump into college sports’ most lucrative franchise. Be it a swirling collection of in-state rivals of current SEC members, say a Georgia Tech or a Clemson, or even an ambitious push toward a big fish — maybe a late push for the Texas schools or Florida State and Miami — an SEC invitation would be difficult to ignore.
In fact, I can think of, oh, 17.3 million reasons to join.