This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The Big 12 Conference is creating a football championship game and sharing a pile of money.
That's not the kind of news anyone associated with BYU hoped would emerge from the league meetings. Nobody's saying expansion beyond 10 schools has been dismissed, which just makes it worse in a way. BYU and other would-be Big 12 members remain stuck in an awkward state, waiting for the conference to become compelled to add a couple of them.
The Cougars' degree of attractiveness to a Power 5 conference is high, but that's almost irrelevant until a league chooses to expand. And that's why, for BYU followers, this past week became another exercise in overreacting to every sound bite or piece of analysis from the Big 12 meetings.
My advice? Look ahead to 2023, when various conference television contracts are ending and another major shift of the college football landscape could occur. Between now and then, BYU's home schedules gradually will become more attractive, for the benefit of the actual ticket-buyers, and the Cougars can keep trying to position themselves for an invitation to an elite level.
BYU's bold move has not become a failure, but independence is imperfect. Scheduling always will be complicated, with athletic director Tom Holmoe trying to reach just the right degree of difficulty every season and avoid having a schedule become ridiculously front-loaded — like 2016, for example. And as revenues grow for BYU's Power 5 opponents, including Utah, competing with them will become even tougher.
Of course, it is possible that having proven they're willing to do some things differently, such as creating two divisions and staging a championship game, administrators of Big 12 schools will follow through with expansion discussions. But now I've just added to the problem. The emotional swings of reacting to every suggestion of the Big 12's expanding — or not — must be wearing out BYU fans. The transcript from the latest meetings in the Dallas-Fort Worth area went something like this:
Texas athletic director Mike Perrin said, "I think the prudent thing for us to do as a conference is stay where we are."
But then Texas booster Red McCombs said, "I love [Perrin] dearly. That doesn't mean he's always right. He's dead wrong on this."
The Dallas Morning News reported that at least six schools and as many as eight favored expansion.
But then expansion advocate David Boren, Oklahoma's president, said, "I have no theological positions on expansion."
CBS Sports' Dennis Dodd reported that adding four schools could generate another $1 billion in television rights, and the conference could create a phase-in of revenue sharing to give the current members more money, as the Pac-12 did with Utah.
But then the league announced a 20-percent revenue increase in 2015-16 — even without expansion or a championship game, which will be relaunched in 2017.
Those developments led Fox's Stewart Mandel to conclude the Big 12 "no longer [has] incentive to expand."
But then Boren left the meetings saying expansion talks are ongoing.
See what I mean? This stuff is exhausting. Utah fans should be happy they didn't have to endure much of it. One day in 2010, Texas and Oklahoma chose to stay in the Big 12. The next day, the former Pac-10 added Utah and Colorado. That's pretty much the duration of the buildup and ultimate action, in contrast to BYU's interminable waiting game.
All BYU can do is keep playing football — with no promises of what's to come. The Cougars crushed Texas twice in this decade, and what did that accomplish?
Twitter: @tribkurt