This is going to be long so bear with me. I had an opportunity to talk with a Big 12 AD a few days ago. The discussion was primarily about what went on at the Big 12 meetings. He talked about the 3 main issues that were discussed with the presidents and AD's. Those were the Baker Mayfield rule, Baylor, and expansion/championship game. Ask some questions if you have them and if it's something that was discussed and I missed in my initial post I'll touch on it.
Baker Mayfield Rule
So this rule was first voted on by the AD's. After a "heated" discussion about this ruling everyone in the room believed that it would be voted down. Due to this Texas Tech and Texas changed their vote to being for the rule to not come across as aholes knowing that the votes would be leaked out. Well not knowing that each other was going to do it this took the vote from 7-3 against the rule to a 5-5 tie. A tie still comes down as not passed. This is what was reported after the first day. OU is the one that put that information all out to the press. Joe Castiglione, OU's AD, then pushed to have the faculty reps that were having their own meeting be the deciding vote since it was a tie. After they discussed the matter they decided that it should be left up to the athletics side of things. Well in order to break a tie the board of directors would vote on it. OU president David Boren is now the head of the directors. Due to the obvious fact that it would be passed by them. It was revoted on by the AD's and passed. It would have passed the first time if it was setup in the future, but that wouldn't grandfather Mayfield in which was the point of it.
Baylor
Not a lot of talk about this since there aren't a lot of facts out. With Baylor being a private school a lot of facts will never be released. Baylor has/had (likely changing now) a weird setup with their main teams (football, men's and women's basketball) where the coaches had direct access to the board of regents. They were able to bypass both the AD as well as the president. That's why you may have seen one of the staff members fired was Assistant AD for Football. That was his job. The person I talked to didn't believe that what you look at in totality now seemed that clear at the time. What he believes was the fact that so many people had their hands on this from the board of regents, president, AD, Briles, staff members that it was a case of each one of them going just a small bit into the immoral side, but added up put things way over board. That it is impossible to have nearly 30 complaints and never have one of them result in kicking a player off the team. He believes that somebody should have been cognizant enough to realize that was going on. As for their punishment he believes that they will have NCAA violations for lack of institutional control resulting in post season ban. That they won't be able to play in the post season this year. The federal government will also smack them with some huge fines for Title IX violations. Things will get much worse for them before they get better.
Expansion
Going into the meetings, as you have heard from Boren, the presidents were in favor of adding teams. The AD's were not, at least not the teams currently available. The teams that are available now are the same ones that we have all heard, basically the AAC conference. No current power 5 school would leave today for the Big 12. The AD's are looking at it from an athletics stand point and see no reason to make a current have not a have. This just adds more competition for everything from recruiting to hiring coaches. The current TV deal has around 7 years left on it which will begin being negotiated in 4 or 5 years. In the next 4-5 years their goal is to get football no longer looked at as a liability, but as a strength. They believe basketball especially is already great with the double round robin, and other sports are doing fine on a national level. No point to add teams which screws these up. This brings the subject to football and adding a championship game. I'll get more into that in a bit.
The plan going forward is to continue to show the positives of the Big 12. The conference is currently getting around $25-30 mil per school and each school still controls their 3rd tier rights on top it. That might not be as much as the SEC made, but is only a few million off of it which at the end of the day isn't that big of a difference when you are talking $100+ million budgets. The plan is to get more money for TV rights during the next negotiation with Fox and ESPN. If you get it up any more than where we currently sit then it makes us more attractive to current power 5 teams. He said that there have been "rumblings" that a few of the Pac 12 schools aren't happy with what they were sold during the last round of realignment and TV deals versus what they are actually receiving. Currently the Big 12 is only making a few million more per school than the Pac 12, but that doesn't include tier 3 rights. Add that along with an increase of the TV revenue and now you can sell $10+ million per year to those schools in added revenue. Their belief, and now the president's, is that will lure current power 5 teams from either the Pac 12 or ACC.
Championship Game
This is the plan to get the football side of things on a more even playing field to make the playoffs. Nothing has been finalized with splitting into divisions, but that is the plan. It will be two 5 team divisions. Since there is no obvious geographical split that makes sense they have a few different options on the table. The thought is that we need to be unique and forward thinking for this.
Baker Mayfield Rule
So this rule was first voted on by the AD's. After a "heated" discussion about this ruling everyone in the room believed that it would be voted down. Due to this Texas Tech and Texas changed their vote to being for the rule to not come across as aholes knowing that the votes would be leaked out. Well not knowing that each other was going to do it this took the vote from 7-3 against the rule to a 5-5 tie. A tie still comes down as not passed. This is what was reported after the first day. OU is the one that put that information all out to the press. Joe Castiglione, OU's AD, then pushed to have the faculty reps that were having their own meeting be the deciding vote since it was a tie. After they discussed the matter they decided that it should be left up to the athletics side of things. Well in order to break a tie the board of directors would vote on it. OU president David Boren is now the head of the directors. Due to the obvious fact that it would be passed by them. It was revoted on by the AD's and passed. It would have passed the first time if it was setup in the future, but that wouldn't grandfather Mayfield in which was the point of it.
Baylor
Not a lot of talk about this since there aren't a lot of facts out. With Baylor being a private school a lot of facts will never be released. Baylor has/had (likely changing now) a weird setup with their main teams (football, men's and women's basketball) where the coaches had direct access to the board of regents. They were able to bypass both the AD as well as the president. That's why you may have seen one of the staff members fired was Assistant AD for Football. That was his job. The person I talked to didn't believe that what you look at in totality now seemed that clear at the time. What he believes was the fact that so many people had their hands on this from the board of regents, president, AD, Briles, staff members that it was a case of each one of them going just a small bit into the immoral side, but added up put things way over board. That it is impossible to have nearly 30 complaints and never have one of them result in kicking a player off the team. He believes that somebody should have been cognizant enough to realize that was going on. As for their punishment he believes that they will have NCAA violations for lack of institutional control resulting in post season ban. That they won't be able to play in the post season this year. The federal government will also smack them with some huge fines for Title IX violations. Things will get much worse for them before they get better.
Expansion
Going into the meetings, as you have heard from Boren, the presidents were in favor of adding teams. The AD's were not, at least not the teams currently available. The teams that are available now are the same ones that we have all heard, basically the AAC conference. No current power 5 school would leave today for the Big 12. The AD's are looking at it from an athletics stand point and see no reason to make a current have not a have. This just adds more competition for everything from recruiting to hiring coaches. The current TV deal has around 7 years left on it which will begin being negotiated in 4 or 5 years. In the next 4-5 years their goal is to get football no longer looked at as a liability, but as a strength. They believe basketball especially is already great with the double round robin, and other sports are doing fine on a national level. No point to add teams which screws these up. This brings the subject to football and adding a championship game. I'll get more into that in a bit.
The plan going forward is to continue to show the positives of the Big 12. The conference is currently getting around $25-30 mil per school and each school still controls their 3rd tier rights on top it. That might not be as much as the SEC made, but is only a few million off of it which at the end of the day isn't that big of a difference when you are talking $100+ million budgets. The plan is to get more money for TV rights during the next negotiation with Fox and ESPN. If you get it up any more than where we currently sit then it makes us more attractive to current power 5 teams. He said that there have been "rumblings" that a few of the Pac 12 schools aren't happy with what they were sold during the last round of realignment and TV deals versus what they are actually receiving. Currently the Big 12 is only making a few million more per school than the Pac 12, but that doesn't include tier 3 rights. Add that along with an increase of the TV revenue and now you can sell $10+ million per year to those schools in added revenue. Their belief, and now the president's, is that will lure current power 5 teams from either the Pac 12 or ACC.
Championship Game
This is the plan to get the football side of things on a more even playing field to make the playoffs. Nothing has been finalized with splitting into divisions, but that is the plan. It will be two 5 team divisions. Since there is no obvious geographical split that makes sense they have a few different options on the table. The thought is that we need to be unique and forward thinking for this.
- This is the most likely method. Use this year's (2016) final standings to determine the split for 2 years. The two divisions will be split in finishing order of 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 versus 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. This will allow rivalry games such as OU/Texas, OU/OSU, and a maximum number of games in Texas (as requested by OSU, KU, and ISU). The reason it will be done for 2 years to easily maintain a home vs away split. You will play the 5 opposite division teams during the first 5 weeks of conference play, and your 4 division teams during the final 5 weeks giving you a bye week. This would result in not having a rematch for the championship game for at least 5 weeks after the teams played.
- Similar to some European soccer league the 1st and 2nd place teams get to pick the divisions. Let's use last year for example. OU would pick a team to be in OSU's division and OSU would then pick a team of OU's division until all teams are selected. Their thought is that this is unique and would be a good way to get more exposure nationally for the league as this would hopefully be done during prime time on ESPN similar to the NBA draft lottery.
- They discussed doing a lottery system, but that it could make either very strong or weak divisions that would take away the balance that they want for that championship game. Not likely to happen for that reason alone.
