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Bill Connelly, ESPN Staff Writer
We careen toward the fall of 2024 with college football in a state of epic transition. Thanks to conference realignment — and a total lack of centralized leadership — most of the sport’s big brands now reside in just two conferences, the Big Ten and SEC. They threw their weight around to assure a dramatic share of future College Football Playoff money, and they convinced smaller conferences to take on a disproportionate share of settlement-related back payments, assuring they will hog an even larger percentage of money moving forward (when they already had the most). Two other power conferences, the ACC and Big 12, are in an odd state, clearly ahead of the rest of the pack but far behind the Power 2 from a revenue standpoint. The “rich get richer” vibes are hard to ignore.
Here’s a dirty little secret, though: A large portion of SEC and Big Ten fan bases are going to be absolutely miserable moving forward. Making more money isn’t going to suddenly make Illinois’ football program better than Clemson’s, and with more strong programs in your conference come more loss opportunities. We’ve seen increasingly irrational head coach buyouts through the years, but we’ve only begun to see how irrational a program and its boosters can get. As fans of Chelsea or Manchester United in the English Premier League can attest, sometimes having more money just makes you sillier, not better.
Meanwhile, the Big 12 is set to become the most entertaining conference on the planet.
Actually, it already was.
Conference games decided by one score, 2018-23
Big 12: 46.5%
MAC: 44.6%
Pac-12: 41.3%
Sun Belt: 41.0%
ACC: 39.3%
AAC: 39.1%
Conference USA: 37.5%
Big Ten: 36.3%
Mountain West: 36.2%
SEC: 33.0%
Nearly half of the Big 12’s conference games finished within one score over the last six seasons, and that was with two fence-post programs, Oklahoma and Texas, that dominated the field financially. The Big 12 traded its two heavyweights for four programs — Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah, who officially became conference members Aug. 2 — that are far closer to the rest of the pack in terms of spending and potential. This trade didn’t make the conference comparatively better or richer, obviously, but it all but assured that a conference already known for an abundance of close games and chaos will only become more chaotic moving forward.
You can have your blowouts and huge buyouts (and, yes, national title aspirations). The Big 12 is going to have all the fun.
Into the great wide open
In each of this summer’s conference previews, I included conference title odds based on SP+ projections. They were pretty revealing when it came to intra-conference parity.
The top four teams in the Big Ten, for instance, had a combined 91.8% chance of winning the conference title, leaving the other 14 programs to share just 8.2%. The top four in the Big 12? Just 68.9%. In fact, the top eight projected teams in the Big 12 had lower combined title odds (91.3%) than the Big Ten’s top four, and because of a good amount of dead weight in the Big Ten, the Big 12’s projected average SP+ rating (5.6) was closer to the Big Ten’s (9.9) than the Big Ten’s was to the SEC’s (16.1).
The top eight Big 12 teams are all projected within 20 spots of each other. The top-ranked team, per SP+, is No. 17 Kansas State, followed closely by No. 18 Utah, No. 20 Oklahoma State and No. 24 Arizona. No. 30 Iowa State, No. 34 West Virginia, No. 36 TCU and No. 37 Kansas are not too far behind, and hell, No. 42 Texas Tech and No. 48 UCF are only a couple of surprises away from contention too. This all says nothing of 2021 champion Baylor, 2021 CFP participant Cincinnati or 2024’s ultimate wild card, Colorado.
This is something we don’t usually see in major college football. Historically, major conferences have had a selection of bluebloods that dominate more often than not: Oklahoma and Texas in the Big 12 (just like Oklahoma and Nebraska in the Big 8), Michigan and Ohio State in the Big Ten, Alabama and Georgia recently in the SEC, Florida State and Clemson currently in the ACC, and so on.
The new Big 12 has no established hierarchy. In the last six seasons alone, 13 of 16 current Big 12 teams have finished ranked in the AP poll at least once, but only three teams have done it more than twice. Utah and Oklahoma State have each done it three times in that span, and the only team to do it more than that (Cincinnati, four times) also plummeted to 3-9 last year.
Even with Texas and Oklahoma, recent Big 12 races were driven primarily by who won a truckload of close games in a given year. The thing about close wins, though? They’re dramatically unreliable. Iowa State went 4-1 in one-score Big 12 finishes in 2020, but starting with that year’s Big 12 championship game, the Cyclones then lost 13 of their next 16 one-score games. Baylor and Oklahoma State went 5-2 combined in one-score Big 12 games in 2021, then went 4-6 the next year. TCU and Kansas State went 6-1 in such games in 2022, then 1-8 in 2023. Texas and Oklahoma State went 7-2 last season, but Texas was 3-9 in such games the previous two seasons before finally getting on the right side of the god of close games again.
In a given season in the 12-team CFP era, then, the Big 12 is likely to produce a champion — and, almost certainly, a top-four seed with the current rules — that is like TCU in 2022: reasonably flawed but battle-tested, experienced and good in the fourth quarter. The Horned Frogs were capable of both upsetting No. 2 Michigan with clutch plays and getting their doors blown off by No. 1 Georgia; future Big 12 champions will be capable of both too. If you’re looking for a bracket-busting chaos agent for the CFP moving forward, the Big 12 champion will always be a candidate.
Could the Big 12 produce a Clemson?
When the four-team playoff came about in 2014, it seemed to help spur dynasties in several conferences. The teams that saw early success in this era were able to reinforce their success with the money, exposure and built-in recruiting bumps that came from playing in the CFP.
In 2014, Ohio State won its first Big Ten title since 2009; the Buckeyes then either won the title or won enough games to still reach the CFP again in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022. In 2015, Oklahoma won its first Big 12 title since 2010; the Sooners then won in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 as well, before some parity began to kick in again. Of course, the Buckeyes and Sooners have almost always been elite. The slumps of the early 2010s were more of an outlier than the title streaks. It’s hard to state that the CFP helped Ohio State more than hiring Urban Meyer in 2012 did, and you can draw a pretty clear line between Bob Stoops’ hire of offensive coordinator (and eventual successor) Lincoln Riley at OU in 2015 and the Sooners’ surge.
Clemson, on the other hand, seemed to leap from solid, top-15 program to superpower almost overnight. The Tigers had won just one ACC title in 24 years before their 2015 breakthrough, in which quarterback Deshaun Watson led an unbeaten run to the second-ever CFP Championship Game before falling to Alabama. Recruiting had been solid in recent years, but it skyrocketed after 2015. From 2012-15, 42% of Clemson’s commits were ESPN 300 prospects; from 2016-21, that leaped to 62%. Watson felt like a once-in-a-generation prospect, but Dabo Swinney succeeded him with another generational quarterback in Trevor Lawrence. Success bred success, and Clemson won six straight ACC titles as well as the 2016 (with Watson) and 2018 (with Lawrence) national titles.
In theory, something similar could happen in the Big 12, especially if, after its two-year test run, the “only conference champions get top-four seeds” rule in the new 12-team CFP sticks. (Although I guess that’s not a given.) What if Kansas State rides blue-chip sophomore quarterback Avery Johnson to a couple of Big 12 titles and top-four seeds in a row? What if the Wildcats make a run to the CFP semifinals in one (or both) of those seasons? It seems those circumstances would make it quite a bit easier for head coach Chris Klieman to find Johnson’s blue-chip successor. The same goes for Utah or Oklahoma State or virtually any team that figures out how to knock out an early run of success in this new era.
Maybe the conference as a whole enjoys a certain level of recruiting uptick; maybe the conference’s overall playoff exposure (and chaos) makes certain schools more appealing to certain prospects, or, perhaps more likely, maybe top Big 12 schools become top transfer portal destinations in the coming years. TCU did, after all, land seven former blue-chippers through the transfer portal after its 2022 title run; it wasn’t enough to overcome the wrath of the close-games god in 2023, but it was something.
Yormark’s ambition
Of course, there’s another way to end up with a Clemson-type of story in your conference: You could just add Clemson.
There’s no question which schools are most likely to set off the next chain of conference realignment moves: They’re the ones currently trying to sue their conference to get out of their grant of rights. Clemson and Florida State are publicly testing the boundaries of their legal requirements to the ACC, and it’s possible that at some point they might lay down a large sum of money to leave. Obviously the Big Ten or SEC — and the riches that both conferences offer — would be the most highly desirable landing spots, but nothing is promised in that regard. (For whatever it’s worth, and it’s probably not worth much, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey recently went out of his way to suggest his league is happy with 16 teams.)
And if we’ve learned anything about Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark to date, it’s that he’s willing to take a big swing when it comes to trying to catch up to college football’s two new super-heavyweight conferences. If that means selling the conference’s naming rights, so be it. Inviting the private equity vampire into the college sports realm, no matter what havoc it might wreak later on? Yormark is open to it. Expanding the Big 12’s roster beyond anything we’ve seen to date and/or attempting predatory moves on another conference? If anyone’s willing to do it, it’s the former Roc Nation CEO.
“I wake up every morning and I think about one thing, the Big 12 being the best version of itself,” Yormark said at Big 12 media days last month. “Everything else doesn’t really matter. If we take care of business, we’re going to be just fine. I’m a firm believer in that. We’re more relevant now than we’ve ever been.”
When asked about further expansion, Yormark told the Sports Business Journal that he valued the advice he once received from NBA commissioner Adam Silver: “Be ready for success, make the right investments [and] surround yourself with the right people, so that when success comes, you can strike and take full advantage of it. I look at realignment the same way.”
Maybe “taking full advantage” means promising Florida State and Clemson an enhanced revenue percentage to join the party and giving the conference a couple of genuine recent heavyweight football programs. Maybe it means further stockpiling of programs at the level of the current Big 12 — Oregon State and Washington State, perhaps, or Memphis and Boise State, or any number of ACC programs that might become available if FSU and Clemson jump to the Big Ten or SEC (NC State? Virginia Tech? Miami? Georgia Tech? Louisville?). Maybe it means standing pat and doing none of the above. Maybe it means doing all of the above and expanding into a Big 24 or Big 36. (If that happens, remember who first suggested it.)
A conference commissioner’s ambition doesn’t always translate into grand success. You have the cards you have, after all. Barely a decade after we were lauding Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott for his creative ideas and grand ambition, the Pac-12 had become defunct both because its moves were limited and because it misplayed its proverbial hand. Still, if any conference is going to push the envelope in the coming months or years, we know which one it’s most likely to be.
No matter what, 2024 should be wildly entertaining
Maybe a program enjoys a Clemson-like rise in the coming seasons. Maybe the conference makes wild new additions. Maybe the Big 12 and the landscape as a whole look vastly different — even more than they already do — in the years to come. In the meantime, let us enjoy the rarest of rare entities: a genuinely balanced conference.
The Big 12’s most proven quarterbacks this year play for Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Arizona and West Virginia. The best running backs are at Oklahoma State and Texas Tech. The best receivers are at Arizona, Iowa State and UCF. The best young offensive talent is at Kansas State. The best recruiting class might be TCU’s or Baylor’s. The best transfer classes might be Colorado’s, UCF’s or TCU’s. Everyone has standout talent somewhere, but no one has too much of it.
A loaded September slate — Arizona will play at Kansas State in Week 2 (a pre-scheduled nonconference game), Utah will visit Oklahoma State in Week 3, and we’ll get Oklahoma State at Kansas State and Arizona at Utah in Week 4 — will set the table for what could, or should, be the wackiest major-conference race we see. Prepare to be entertained.