Every year, right around the time when the weather reaches the point where it’s just too uncomfortable to don long pants and a dress shirt and walk across the Plaza in Kansas City, Mo., an alarm clock goes off inside my head.
That ring-a-ding-ding sounded loudly the other day, when, after a Memorial Day spent tracking the KU baseball team’s draw in the NCAA Tournament, I wondered when the Big 12 Conference’s spring meetings were coming to KC.
The answer? They’re not. They’re in Dallas this year, Irving, Texas, to be exact, and they kicked off Wednesday, with athletic directors from all 10 conference schools and various league reps joining together to talk about all of the issues and items of interest currently impacting the conference and college athletics.
On the outside, everyone wants this year’s meetings to be about the recent rumors regarding BYU’s interest in joining the Big 12. But that won’t be anywhere near the agenda and there certainly won’t be any kind of formal discussions about adding BYU or any other team for that matter. The Big 12, as you surely know by now, is happy with its 10-school membership. Adding more would simply force the conference to share its annual revenue from television and other deals with another university. And at this point in time, who would vote in favor of giving up cash?
The reason BYU and expansion is on the mind of anyone who chooses to follow these meetings is simply because before the whole conference realignment craze hit a few years back, no one even knew that these meetings took place. Sure, media members in charge of covering the conference were acutely aware of the business conducted at such annual get-togethers. But outside of that, nobody cared. The reason? Historically speaking, what always had taken place at these deals prior to the realignment frenzy was pretty boring. Consultations with lawyers here, an amendment of conference bylaws there and so on and so forth. Yawwwwn.
When realignment hit and media members, including yours truly, began stalking hotel conference rooms and parking garages hoping to get some sort of comment relating to the goings on from the sports world’s equivalent of As the World Turns, the public began to take notice. And who could blame them? Even though Big 12 ADs and commissioners did their best to say that everything was fine and that nobody was going anywhere, we all knew what really was happening and, even if we didn’t at the time, we all know by now that four teams left the Big 12 (Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Texas A&M) and two others (TCU and West Virginia) joined.
In many ways, the increased interest in these types of annual meetings has fallen in line with the overexposed sports world we know and love. With the 24-hour-a-day news cycle and social media networks like Twitter and others shining a much brighter light on even the smallest issues, it’s almost impossible not to care if you’re at all passionate about college athletics.
With that in mind, here’s a quick look at some of the more interesting notes and quotes, taken mostly from Twitter, that came up on Day 1 of the Big 12 spring meetings.
**• As they’ve done for a few years now, Big 12 officials continued to bang the drum for the round-robin scheduling format** in football and double-round-robin in men’s and women’s basketball being the best way to crown a true conference champion.
This is particularly interesting given the SEC’s recent fight to keep its football schedule flexible and avoid playing every team in the conference each year.
**• Various reports from the media in Dallas indicated that the NCAA’s new rule allowing universities to provide student-athletes with unlimited meals** — which goes into effect Aug. 1 — could cost each institution between $700,000 and $2 million annually. I’ve talked to some people at KU recently about this very topic and they estimate that KU’s number could be right around $1 million.
While that’s obviously a lot of money, it pales in comparison to what each school would be on the hook for if paying players were allowed and certainly seems like a good move given that these athletes are required to burn so much energy to represent their chosen schools at practices and during games.
**• Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby was asked about the upcoming college football playoff system,** which will pit the nation’s top four teams, as chosen by a selection committee, against one another in what’s essentially a plus-one format, with the 1 seed playing the 4 and the 2 seed playing the 3, with the winners meeting for the national title. Not long after the playoff system put an end to the BCS era, people began clamoring for the format to expand from four teams to eight or even 16. Bowlsby said Wednesday he did not see that happening any time soon, saying doing so would decimate the existing bowl system.
**• Scheduling, in general, was another big topic on Wednesday,** and several Big 12 representatives were more than happy to point out that the Big 12, in all sports, would not be afraid to play and/or schedule any program from any conference in the country.
This comes, most likely, in reaction to the recent moves by the ACC and SEC to dictate which teams its schools play during the non-conference portion of the season. In the near future, programs in those leagues will be required to schedule more schools from the so-called “Big Five” conferences (Big 12, Big Ten, ACC, SEC and Pac-12) as non-conference foes, a move that directly led to some of the speculation about mid-major program BYU becoming more desperate to hitch its wagon to one of the big conferences.
**• Speaking of the power conferences,** Fox Sports Southwest’s David Ubben noted on Twitter that nearly everyone who spoke Wednesday took great care to make sure they referred to such a grouping as “high visibility conferences” and not “Big Five.”
Nothing major there, but, much like we saw with conference realignment where even the smallest words or details wound up playing major roles, it seems the Big 12 is being careful not to create too much of a power play regarding the ongoing speculation that the nation’s biggest, richest and most powerful conferences may be moving closer and closer to gaining autonomy from the NCAA and functioning more as its own governing body.
**• K-State athletic director John Currie, whose turn it is to serve as the chair of the Big 12 ADs, said he did not envision the Big 12 pushing for an early signing day in football** like the SEC wants.
**• Another strong soundbite from Currie on Wednesday** came in support of the Big 12’s coaches: “Top to bottom, 1 to 10, we have the strongest group of (football and men’s basketball) coaches of any league in the country,” he said.
**• Other topics that were addressed Wednesday and will continue to be discussed today and Friday include:** a closer look at the fifth-year senior transfer rule that has become wildly popular across the country; discussion about pending lawsuits against the NCAA which may have a major impact on the future of college athletics; returning the conference’s postseason men’s and women’s basketball tournaments to the same city in the near future; and full disclosure of the financial gains made under the Big 12’s newest television deals, which, though solid at $198 million in 2012-13, ranked behind the recently reported totals of the Pac-12 ($334 million, not all of which was distributed to its members), Big Ten ($318.4 million) and SEC ($315.4 million) in total haul. However, because the Big 12 is splitting its revenues just 10 ways, the longstanding conference schools still brought home about as much as the rest of the schools in the other Big Five conferences. Only TCU and West Virginia, which are still in the process of being eased into the conference, earned less than the $22 million the eight other programs earned. (These revenues do not include gains from third-tier rights deals) TCU and West Virginia brought home a 50 percent share of the conference earnings from 2012-13 and that percentage will go up to 67 percent this coming year and 84 percent for 2014-15 before becoming equal in 2015-16.
