The following article holds no relevance for fans of Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, LSU, Florida, Texas A&M, Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Clemson, Notre Dame, USC, and Oregon.*
It could happen to you next.
OU and Texas made the news official, confirming what had the college football world abuzz from just a week ago: that the Sooners and Longhorns intend to pack their bags and head to the SEC, effectively stripping the Big 12 of its two most lucrative and prestigious athletic programs.
Though the Longhorns have struggled on the football field in the past decade, they are a behemoth in terms of finances and resources, while the Sooners are winners of six straight Big 12 football titles in a row and are regular contenders in the new four-team College Football Playoff.
The move is not simply the SEC adding two extra schools to its lineup, swelling its membership to 16; it’s the potential dissolution of one of the nation’s five power conferences.
What’s playing out right now in front of everyone to the Big 12 Conference could soon happen to your favorite college football team.
It’s not an inherently bad move by OU and Texas. They’re looking toward the future and might be concerned about a transforming NCAA landscape in which name, image, and likeness deals proliferate and in which the transfer portal has created an unrestricted free agency for the nation’s top players. Finances aren’t looking too hot after a year of COVID restrictions, either. The two schools see more future stability/success/money in the SEC, and they’re not wrong to pursue it.
It will be fun to see OU and Texas compete in the SEC, with the Sooners making road trips to Death Valley to face LSU while the Aggies and Longhorns can renew their annual spat during Thanksgiving weekend. With some crossover games, maybe we’ll get to see Florida-OU and Alabama-Texas once every eight years, too.
It’ll be high-quality football and it will mean some great teams playing in front of packed stadiums on Saturday afternoons.
The next time the carousel spins, though, it could be your team on the outside looking in.
The realignment doors can quickly swing open and shut. To a program like OSU, it strips its home conference since 1960 (the Big 8, now Big 12) of its two biggest football programs and puts the league’s future in doubt.
Why would the SEC stop at 16 schools? At this rate, why wouldn’t they add Clemson and Miami (Fla.), the best combination of resource-laden football programs from the ACC? Maybe the Big Ten will look to add USC, UCLA, and Oregon to counter to “expand their geographic footprint,” a common realignment catchphrase.
No one outside of Winston-Salem, N.C. will care about Wake Forest if Clemson, Miami, and (maybe) Florida State suddenly bolt from the ACC. Indiana, Minnesota, and Michigan State become relatively irrelevant if Ohio State and Michigan were to join forces with the SEC. Think many tears will be shed about the fate of Utah or Washington State if USC and Oregon leave the Pac-12 in the middle of the night?
On that note, who’s to say that the SEC won’t eventually kick out league bottom feeders like Vanderbilt, Arkansas, and Kentucky?
OSU’s football program is not a perennial national title contender, but it’s no slouch. The Cowboys consistently rank among the nation’s top 30 schools in home football game attendance. OSU players hear their names called in the NFL Draft after being honored as All-Americans. During the decade of 2010-2019, the Cowboys ranked No. 13 in the country among power conference teams in terms of overall wins (93).
A rivalries lasting more than a century had little bearing on the decision — not that it did with a series like Kansas-Missouri 10 years ago, either.
Storied men’s basketball programs like Kansas, one of the best of all-time, are again faced with the prospect of losing a conference home. Ditto for Baylor, who just won the national title back in April.
But hardly any of that matters now concerning OSU’s future conference home.
If you’re concerned for OSU’s entire athletic program based on the lack of elite performance from its football team (which hasn’t matched OU, Alabama, Clemson, or Ohio State in the last decade, like literally everybody else in college football), imagine being in the shoes of Texas Tech or Kansas State. The Red Raiders and Wildcats share OSU’s profile without as much football success. TCU and West Virginia aren’t in a much better position.
The SEC might as well make a phone call to Ohio State, Michigan, and Clemson. If the reaction by European soccer supporters to the ill-proposed “Super League” was any indication, maybe a similar reaction by college football supporters of the other 115 FBS programs and the 15 wealthiest would prevent that from happening.
But based on the looming OU-Texas move, don’t count on it.
* Any omissions made in this introductory list of programs were completely intentional and meant to be spiteful.