Jayhawk Central

This is entirely educated opinion and conjecture, without any "inside information," but I think if you're the Big 12, you must be proactive this time around, or you're going to lose Texas and its Southern Minions and be left with accepting SMU, Louisiana Tech, and Southeast Missouri State to fill out your way to 16 teams and settle for being a middling conference. What does proactivity look like? Well, we're apparently really good friends with the SEC now, so call the SEC and agree to divvy up the marketable programs in the ACC and the Big East. Agree on eight athletic departments (some combination of Clemson, Cincinnati, North Carolina, Florida State, Louisville, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame if you can get football, North Carolina State, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh, and Virginia) worth the effort, and get them to agree to blow up the ACC, with two of them going to the SEC and six going to the Big 12/16, putting both conferences at 16. Then you set up your football schedule such that you have two divisions of eight teams and you play your division every season to determine the division champion, and you play one or two of the teams from the other division, never in consecutive years so you can rotate through all eight quickly, and not counting toward who wins the division and plays in the conference championship. For basketball, you set up four four-team "pods" and play home-and-home against everyone in your pod, then one game against the other twelve, alternating home and road.

On the Kansas front, I sincerely hope that Dr. Zenger is spending the entire week on the phone with the commissioners of the Pac-12, B1G, and SEC laying out why Kansas (or Kansas as part of a package with some combination of Texas, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State) makes sense as a national brand for their conference.

In either case, I don't like the outcome, but I dislike the possibility of getting left watching the paint dry while all the weak spots in the super conferences are claimed. Teams like Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Utah, and Texas Tech DARN WELL better not be in the super conference scene while we're left out.

Why no Miami?

That's fair. To me, they're the south Florida media market.

That's kinda my point. I hate this topic as a Kansas fan and as a traditionalist. I wish we could go back to the Big Eight. Since that's not going to happen, I want the Big 12 to stop being one of the ones looking around when a press conference is called and saying "wha...wha...what? we didn't know anything about four of our schools wanting to leave." As tired as I am of the ACC / Big East / B1G shuffle, I'm more tired of our conference being so candy-assed as to be caught flat footed every time. The ACC has brought much of this on themselves with both 2004 and the deal with Notre Dame, but if it's time for the "super conferences" to break out, then Dr. Zenger had better be doing everything he can to be sure Kansas is one of the 64 teams, and the entire Big 12 Office ought to be doing the same for all of the members. If this is the time it actually happens, then be one of the ones that is the trigger, NOT one of the dominoes that falls because someone else says "yes." If you're Dr. Zenger, you need to get in with the B1G, the SEC, the Pac 72, or be pushing the expansion from the Big 12.

I agree that that's the direction we are heading, but I don't see 20 as the number. I see that being 16, with each conference essentially being two eight-team conferences. In fact, I outlined above how I would schedule that, with one or two games against the other half of the conference each season, but not counting in the standings (determining the division champion), especially for football. There's some pressure for something like this from guys like Les Miles because LSU played South Carolina from the SEC East this year and Texas A&M played Florida as their "rotation" game while Alabama played mizery (and their permanent game is Tennessee). If the schedules had been reversed, it's quite possible that Texas A&M or LSU would be playing in Atlanta instead of Alabama (and it wouldn't have even taken Alabama losing to do it since Texas A&M has the head-to-head tiebreaker there).

I'm not buying it unless the Big 12 agrees to let us out of our grant-of-rights for some deal. I can't imagine we'd leave OR the B1G would take us without our first-tier rights for the next decade. We leave only if the entire conference implodes. Most likely scenario is that we expand.