Nah. Its just misguided. We shouldn't go back to AAC 2.0 because a bunch of people (not you, obviously) want to drink in an East Hartford parking lot and never actually enter a game. And NOW you think that is going to change? In CONNECTICUT? Because we can put UCF , Houston and Cincinnati on our schedule again?
Until UConn is offered membership in the Big 12, Kansas is the only flagship state school in the conference. Kansas. Yet we are to believe that this league has somehow permanently emerged as the #3 conference in college sports over the Pac 12 and ACC? It doesn't feel real, at all.
The upside case is that the Big 12 somehow becomes the Big East circa 2002-2011, the Island of Misfit Toys that goes on an epic and unexpected run of success for a decade that no one can explain, and the top programs somehow find a soft landing when the next round of realignment hits when the ACC contract expires. That's the upside. I can talk myself into this being a possibility, but I don't think it is the likely outcome.
The downside case is literally everything else. Somehow the ACC blows up their GOR and there is another round of musical chairs where UConn ends up without a home. Or the SEC and/or Big 10 pick off a couple of Big 12 schools, which starts a stampede for the exits and UConn is without a home. Or these programs just revert back to their historical means for basketball and football, and kind of suck, and when the next broadcast contract comes along, the Big 12 is compensated commensurate with its on field/court performance.
I think that the reports of the ACC's and Pac 12's demise are very premature. The West Coast will continue to be a player in college athletics, one way or the other. There are just too many people west of the Great Plains for the West not to be part of the solution. And the ACC, with its basketball history and academic prestige, will also continue to be a player in college athletics. What does the Big 12 have again, other than a handful of programs that have all seem to have had their best seasons in program history in the last 5 years.
If UConn does this, and it doesn't work out, we will be in the A10 with UMass. It will be catastrophic for the athletic program and the university. And there are a lot of ways that this might not work out. Leaving now, after the Big East saved UConn's athletic department, is burning the bridges with the Big East with gasoline and then dropping a few bombs on whatever is left. There is no going back if the Big 12 doesn't work out.
Are the pro-Big 12 fans THAT confident that the Big 12 is going to succeed?
