Post by geauxtigerfan on Jan 17, 2024 11:29:25 GMT -5
College football conference realignment timeline: 124 years of drama, money and bitterness
Stewart Mandel
Jul 14, 2023
The Western Conference, known today as the Big Ten, was formed in 1896 by the universities of Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, Wisconsin and Chicago.
It took only three years for their first round of drama over expansion.
At an 1899 meeting at the Chicago Beach Hotel to hear pitches from three more applicants, representatives from Indiana and Iowa made their cases in person, and their schools were extended invitations, turning the Big Seven into the Big Nine. As for the third, “Notre Dame applied early in the season but failed to send a delegate,” the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported, “and now will be compelled to wait until one of the present members drops out.”
Conference realignment revisited: Why it's the subject college football can't quit
Thus began the now 124-year-old history of conference realignment. It would be impossible to fit it all into one article, but here are some of the more dramatic, transformative and, in most cases, bitter highlights from the power conferences over the decades.
Jan. 13, 1908: Michigan drops out of the Western Conference over its opposition to a set of reforms that included a five-game maximum per season, not to return until 1917. The Chicago Tribune reports “it is now a certainty” that Nebraska will be invited as a replacement,” but nope — that wouldn’t come for another 102 years.
In Michigan’s absence, the conference in 1912 invited a little school named Ohio State.
Dec. 9, 1932: The original Southern Conference, formed in 1921, had as many as 23 members, until 13 of them broke away to form the modern-day SEC. They included 10 current SEC schools plus Georgia Tech, Tulane and Sewanee. It may have been the most amicable conference breakup in history. Upon receiving the news, league president C.P. “Sally” Miles told the group, “I hope you may prosper, and may your gates be bigger and better.”
They very much were.
Journey back to Sewanee, a founding SEC member that has no regrets
Dec. 12, 1948: Nearly a decade after original member Chicago dropped football, the Western Conference becomes the Big Ten again by inviting Michigan State, the culmination of a seven-year lobbying campaign by school president John Hannah. He had to overcome initial opposition from the school’s rival in Ann Arbor, as well as Iowa pushing for Nebraska, and an application from Pitt as well
According to the Detroit Free Press, the league’s faculty representatives spent 15 hours over three weekends debating expansion, but when they finally voted on Michigan State, the ballots were unanimous. They (almost) always are.
Chicago won seven Big Ten titles and a Heisman Trophy before dropping out. (Getty Images)
May 8, 1953: Clemson, Duke, Maryland, North Carolina, NC State, South Carolina and Wake Forest leave the SoCon to form the ACC. In December, they hold a meeting in Greensboro, N.C., to invite an eighth member, Virginia. Minutes into the meeting, the chancellor of UNC calls a surprise motion to invite Virginia Tech and West Virginia as well, but he is ruled by the chair to be out of order because that topic wasn’t on the meeting agenda.
It would be 50 years before Virginia Tech finally got its invite. WVU is still waiting.
Dec. 14, 1957: More than 60 years before the Pac-12’s current fight for survival, its predecessor, the Pacific Coast Conference, did in fact implode, following a series of slush-fund scandals involving booster clubs (a 1950s version of NIL collectives) at Washington, USC, UCLA and Cal. The two L.A. schools and Cal withdrew from the league, and the conference itself disbanded within a year.
“They couldn’t take it,” longtime Washington State coach Babe Hollingbery said of the three defectors. “Making rules and breaking them — then hollering ‘murder’ and refusing to take the consequences. Is that the American collegiate way? Of course not.”
It did not take long for the four cheaters and Stanford to join forces and form what would soon become the Pac-8 with the additions of Washington State, Oregon and Oregon State. Left in the dust: Poor Idaho, a PCC member since 1922.
Jan. 24, 1964: Georgia Tech leaves the SEC to go independent, mostly because of coach Bobby Dodd’s opposition to a rule limiting schools to 140 football and basketball scholarships. Others were complying by running off players that didn’t pan out, which Dodd refused to do.
“Tech stands to make a considerable gain financially by its withdrawal from the conference,” wrote United Press International. “Under SEC regulations, Georgia Tech had to share with other league members its proceeds from its numerous postseason bowl games and television appearances.”
Georgia Tech’s old friends in the SEC will soon be making about $30 million per year more than its current friends in the ACC, which it joined 19 years later.
Georgia Tech's realignment roller coaster, from leaving the SEC to Big Ten talks
Dec. 13, 1976: The Pac-8 invites WAC members Arizona and Arizona State, culminating a years-long process in which first ASU, then a football power under Frank Kush, had to be sold on the move, and then two Pac-8 holdouts needed an 11th-hour push to approve the invites.
In a 2018 account to the Mercury News, John Sandbrook, UCLA’s assistant chancellor at the time, described a dramatic final meeting in San Francisco where the presidents of Stanford and Washington shocked the room in declaring they would vote “no” on the Arizona schools. At which point USC president John Hubbard “erupted” and “stated, loudly,” that if that happened, “then USC would announce to the assembled press downstairs that … it would be withdrawing immediately as a member of the Pac-8.”
Stanford and Washington changed their minds.
June 27, 1984: In the seminal case NCAA v. Board of Regents, the United States Supreme Court rules the NCAA in violation of antitrust law by controlling schools’ television rights, opening the door for pretty much every realignment move that follows.
What sparked college football's realignment craze? Ex-Big Ten commissioner explains all
May 31, 1990: SEC presidents vote to authorize expansion, ultimately choosing South Carolina and Arkansas, though not before a good ol’ round of rumors. The previous year, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, citing a source close to the SWC, had reported it a “done deal” that Texas and Texas A&M would join Arkansas in the SEC. The Alabama Journal claimed before either addition that Florida State had already been invited. (That one was likely true, though FSU denied it.)
Getting to 12 teams would allow new commissioner Roy Kramer to pounce on a little-known NCAA rule that allowed the league to split into two divisions and stage a championship game. Ole Miss AD Warner Alford predicted such an event would “be a hot commodity” and could generate “millions of dollars.”
Many, many millions of dollars.
Penn State began Big Ten football play in 1993. (Doug Pensinger / Allsport / Getty Images)
June 4, 1990: After a decade of off-and-on flirtation, the Big Ten’s presidents vote 7-3 at a meeting in Iowa City to add powerhouse independent Penn State, which had previously been denied entry to the Big East. The Big Ten had already extended a previous invite months earlier, but the league’s athletic directors flipped out that they were not consulted beforehand. It was a blockbuster move, one that would mark the beginning of the end for independents not named Notre Dame.
It also meant a conference named the Big Ten now had 11 members. According to a wire report at the time, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany “indicated the conference would change its name in the next 60 days.”
Five more additions later, the name has not changed.
Sept. 14, 1990: Florida State joins the ACC after a courtship befitting a five-star recruit. The commissioners of both the ACC and SEC paid “home visits” in the days leading up to the school’s decision. Many believed it a no-brainer FSU would pick the more prestigious football conference, but Bobby Bowden believed — correctly — his program would be more dominant in a nine-team ACC.
The sentiment did not sit well with folks in SEC territory. Shortly before the decision, a column with the headline “FSU shows lack of vision by considering ACC” ran in the Birmingham Post-Herald. “(FSU’s) haughty attitude toward the SEC is incredible,” wrote aghast columnist Paul Finebaum.
Oct. 1, 1990: The Big East, founded 11 years earlier as a basketball conference, decides it, too, wants in on the Great Football Cash Grab of 1990, first by inviting defending national champion Miami. “To be very blunt with you, our future was at stake,” said commissioner Mike Tranghese, who feared losing its three schools with football, Pitt, Boston College and Syracuse.
Thus touched off an awkward 13-year marriage of big football-driven schools like Miami, West Virginia and Virginia Tech with small private basketball schools like Providence, Seton Hall and Villanova that would ultimately end in an ugly divorce. More on that later.
Feb. 25, 1994: For the first time — but not the last time — realignment wipes out an entire major conference: the 79-year old Southwest Conference, which had been teetering for years due to too many NCAA scandals and too few TV sets. The Big 8 invites Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor and becomes the Big 12. As word began to leak that the Aggies and Longhorns were leaving, various Texas legislators with ties to Texas Tech and Baylor aggressively lobbied on their behalf to avoid being left behind.
“As I recall, it wasn’t a very veiled threat to cut budgets if Tech was left behind,” Texas president Robert Berdahl later recalled to the San Antonio Express News.
Lost over time is that the conference perhaps could have gone even bigger. A source told the Fort Worth Star Telegram that the league had also targeted BYU and … New Mexico. “Look at the map,” said the source. “You bring in Brigham Young and New Mexico and you’ve got all of Central America.”
It is unclear where this person believed those schools were located.
Feb. 5, 1999: More than 70 years after Michigan coach Fielding Yost effectively blackballed Knute Rockne and Notre Dame’s quest to join the Big Ten, the tables had finally turned. The school had an unofficial Big Ten invite on the table. Students, faculty and alumni had spent months debating whether the fabled football program should give up its cherished independence, its national schedule, its one-of-a-kind NBC deal, etc., but the decision was up to its board of trustees.
This being Notre Dame, which prides itself on doing everything different, the vote was held in, of all places, London. It was 39-0 — no to the Big Ten. Said Delany: “I accept the fact they went through a process and concluded that where they are is the best place for them over the next 25 years.”
Wait a second. Does that mean their vote expires in … 2024?
How close has Notre Dame come to joining the Big Ten? ‘There was no deal to be had’
April 17, 2003: Big East commissioner Tranghese lobs a grenade via the New York Daily News, claiming the ACC has been recruiting several of his schools, most notably reigning power Miami. “I have no use for the ACC right now,” he said. “They’re a bunch of hypocrites.”
Over two-plus months that spring and summer, the league visited and vetted its three primary targets, Miami, Syracuse and Boston College. Finally, on June 25, ACC presidents voted 7-2 to officially invite Miami and … Virginia Tech? The Hokies’ invite, procured thanks to a pressure campaign by Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, came so out of nowhere that Virginia Tech at the time was still one of five plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the ACC trying to stop it from raiding the Big East.
Over the coming months, the Big East did its own raiding, adding Conference USA members Cincinnati, Louisville and USF to salvage its status as a BCS conference, while the ACC went ahead and invited BC to join a year later.
Syracuse would wait another eight years.
Miami and Virginia Tech brought their Big East rivalry to the ACC in 2004. (Eliot J. Schechter / Getty Images)
Dec. 15, 2009: The Big Ten council of presidents releases an out-of-nowhere announcement that they’ve decided the “timing is right” for the conference to explore further expansion and that it has asked commissioner Delany “to provide recommendations for consideration over the next 12 to 18 months.” As such, the public patiently waited 12-to-18 months to see what they decided.
Yeah, right. It was complete madness.
A Kansas City radio station reported that Notre Dame and Missouri had been invited. The Columbus Dispatch found an email from Ohio State president Gordon Gee to Delany letting him know he’d spoken with Texas president Bill Powers. All roads eventually led to Nebraska, which officially accepted an offer on June 12, 2010,
By then, there were already five-alarm realignment fires blaring elsewhere.
June 3, 2010: Right as the Big 12 ADs were meetings in Kansas City, Chip Brown of the Texas fan site Orangebloods drops a bombshell that new Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott is about to invite SIX Big 12 schools — Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and Colorado. Texas, then coming off its second national championship game in five years, was seen as the crown jewel.
The superconference that wasn’t: How the Pac-16 plan changed college sports
Over the next 11 days, Brown and others report on every little development. Scott begins flying from campus to campus visiting the prospective additions, while Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe and the so-called Faithful Four — Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State — work feverishly to keep the league together. A&M starts talking to the SEC. On June 10, Colorado takes Scott up on his offer, and on the morning of June 14, ESPN reports that Beebe has “zero” chance to save the Big 12.
Then, almost simultaneously, Brown reports that Texas and the other schools are staying put after all. Crisis averted. For now. Scott adds Utah to form the Pac-12.
A year later, Texas A&M and Missouri jumped to the SEC, and Oklahoma openly flirted with the Pac-10 yet again, but the Big 12 ultimately stabilized itself by bringing in TCU and West Virginia. Other leagues weren’t as fortunate.
Sept. 18, 2011: In stark contrast to its messy process eight years earlier, the ACC goes back for more Big East blood, stealthily adding Pitt and Syracuse. Louisville would join a year later. And the cherry on top: Notre Dame, a partial Big East member since 1995, reached a similar arrangement with the ACC on Sept. 12, 2012.
The Big East makes a last-ditch attempt to salvage its football brand — including inviting Boise State and San Diego State — but the so-called “Catholic 7” basketball schools file for divorce. The league is nice enough to let them take the Big East name with them, while the football schools rebrand as the American Athletic Conference. UConn and Tulsa briefly belong in the same conference, as God had intended.
Nov. 17, 2012: Amid an already eventful late-season Saturday, a bombshell breaks: Maryland and Rutgers are about to join the Big Ten. It sounds no less crazier 11 years later than it did that day. As Delany would later explain it, the then 12-team conference felt it needed to reclaim the East Coast after the ACC’s power play to grab Notre Dame. He even worried they might go after Penn State next.
“We came to the conclusion there was more risk sitting still than there was in exploring other opportunities,” he said.
What they discovered was that the Big Ten Network could now collect lucrative in-market subscriber fees in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.
How the Big Ten sparked a realignment avalanche: Jim Delany on adding Nebraska and more
July 21, 2021: The waves of realignment had remained remarkably calm for nearly a decade. Until one tweet changed everything. On the last day of SEC Media Days, Texas A&M beat writer Brent Zwerneman of the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas and Oklahoma were in discussions to join the SEC, though not for several years.
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the news broke shortly before Aggies coach Jimbo Fisher’s turn at the SEC podium. “I’ll say this: Be careful what you wish for when you jump in this league,” he joked.
Why did such a tectonic change occur when it did? The previous winter, ESPN and the SEC had announced a 10-year, $3 billion deal for the rights to CBS’ game of the week package despite it not starting for another four years. The Big 12 in turn asked its network partners ESPN and Fox if it, too, could get a new deal four years in advance and were politely told no. Greg Sankey’s phone likely lit up with calls from Norman and Austin as soon as the Big 12’s Zoom meeting ended.
June 30, 2022: Another year, another bombshell tweet, this time from Pac-12 authority Jon Wilner. “Source: USC and UCLA are planning to leave for the Big Ten as early as 2024.” The deal was completed that night. Of all the realignment moves over all the decades, this may have been the most radical: The Big Ten, a conference based in Chicago, adding a pair of schools 2,000 miles away, and in doing so, threatening the continued existence of the Pac-12, its Rose Bowl partner since nearly World War II.
The news did not sit well out West, including with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was not pleased he hadn’t been consulted. Thus began a nearly six-month political circus in which the UC Board of Regents discussed potentially blocking UCLA’s move. Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff contended with a straight face that the school would be better off financially in a league with a rapidly expiring TV contract than one that had just signed a $1 billion-a-year deal. That strategy did not work.
Meanwhile, the reconstituted Big 12, with new additions BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF, jumped the line and secured its own new TV deal, and its bold, new commissioner, Brett Yormark, proceeded to spend the entire next year courting Pac-12 schools Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah.
The next chapter in this history lesson will be written soon enough.
Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s Realignment Revisited series, digging into the past, present and future of conference realignment in college sports. Follow the series and find more conference realignment stories here.
Stewart Mandel
Stewart Mandel is editor-in-chief of The Athletic's college football coverage. He has been a national college football writer for two decades with Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports. He co-hosts "The Audible" podcast with Bruce Feldman. Follow Stewart on Twitter @slmandel
Stewart Mandel
Jul 14, 2023
The Western Conference, known today as the Big Ten, was formed in 1896 by the universities of Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, Wisconsin and Chicago.
It took only three years for their first round of drama over expansion.
At an 1899 meeting at the Chicago Beach Hotel to hear pitches from three more applicants, representatives from Indiana and Iowa made their cases in person, and their schools were extended invitations, turning the Big Seven into the Big Nine. As for the third, “Notre Dame applied early in the season but failed to send a delegate,” the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported, “and now will be compelled to wait until one of the present members drops out.”
Conference realignment revisited: Why it's the subject college football can't quit
Thus began the now 124-year-old history of conference realignment. It would be impossible to fit it all into one article, but here are some of the more dramatic, transformative and, in most cases, bitter highlights from the power conferences over the decades.
Jan. 13, 1908: Michigan drops out of the Western Conference over its opposition to a set of reforms that included a five-game maximum per season, not to return until 1917. The Chicago Tribune reports “it is now a certainty” that Nebraska will be invited as a replacement,” but nope — that wouldn’t come for another 102 years.
In Michigan’s absence, the conference in 1912 invited a little school named Ohio State.
Dec. 9, 1932: The original Southern Conference, formed in 1921, had as many as 23 members, until 13 of them broke away to form the modern-day SEC. They included 10 current SEC schools plus Georgia Tech, Tulane and Sewanee. It may have been the most amicable conference breakup in history. Upon receiving the news, league president C.P. “Sally” Miles told the group, “I hope you may prosper, and may your gates be bigger and better.”
They very much were.
Journey back to Sewanee, a founding SEC member that has no regrets
Dec. 12, 1948: Nearly a decade after original member Chicago dropped football, the Western Conference becomes the Big Ten again by inviting Michigan State, the culmination of a seven-year lobbying campaign by school president John Hannah. He had to overcome initial opposition from the school’s rival in Ann Arbor, as well as Iowa pushing for Nebraska, and an application from Pitt as well
According to the Detroit Free Press, the league’s faculty representatives spent 15 hours over three weekends debating expansion, but when they finally voted on Michigan State, the ballots were unanimous. They (almost) always are.
Chicago won seven Big Ten titles and a Heisman Trophy before dropping out. (Getty Images)
May 8, 1953: Clemson, Duke, Maryland, North Carolina, NC State, South Carolina and Wake Forest leave the SoCon to form the ACC. In December, they hold a meeting in Greensboro, N.C., to invite an eighth member, Virginia. Minutes into the meeting, the chancellor of UNC calls a surprise motion to invite Virginia Tech and West Virginia as well, but he is ruled by the chair to be out of order because that topic wasn’t on the meeting agenda.
It would be 50 years before Virginia Tech finally got its invite. WVU is still waiting.
Dec. 14, 1957: More than 60 years before the Pac-12’s current fight for survival, its predecessor, the Pacific Coast Conference, did in fact implode, following a series of slush-fund scandals involving booster clubs (a 1950s version of NIL collectives) at Washington, USC, UCLA and Cal. The two L.A. schools and Cal withdrew from the league, and the conference itself disbanded within a year.
“They couldn’t take it,” longtime Washington State coach Babe Hollingbery said of the three defectors. “Making rules and breaking them — then hollering ‘murder’ and refusing to take the consequences. Is that the American collegiate way? Of course not.”
It did not take long for the four cheaters and Stanford to join forces and form what would soon become the Pac-8 with the additions of Washington State, Oregon and Oregon State. Left in the dust: Poor Idaho, a PCC member since 1922.
Jan. 24, 1964: Georgia Tech leaves the SEC to go independent, mostly because of coach Bobby Dodd’s opposition to a rule limiting schools to 140 football and basketball scholarships. Others were complying by running off players that didn’t pan out, which Dodd refused to do.
“Tech stands to make a considerable gain financially by its withdrawal from the conference,” wrote United Press International. “Under SEC regulations, Georgia Tech had to share with other league members its proceeds from its numerous postseason bowl games and television appearances.”
Georgia Tech’s old friends in the SEC will soon be making about $30 million per year more than its current friends in the ACC, which it joined 19 years later.
Georgia Tech's realignment roller coaster, from leaving the SEC to Big Ten talks
Dec. 13, 1976: The Pac-8 invites WAC members Arizona and Arizona State, culminating a years-long process in which first ASU, then a football power under Frank Kush, had to be sold on the move, and then two Pac-8 holdouts needed an 11th-hour push to approve the invites.
In a 2018 account to the Mercury News, John Sandbrook, UCLA’s assistant chancellor at the time, described a dramatic final meeting in San Francisco where the presidents of Stanford and Washington shocked the room in declaring they would vote “no” on the Arizona schools. At which point USC president John Hubbard “erupted” and “stated, loudly,” that if that happened, “then USC would announce to the assembled press downstairs that … it would be withdrawing immediately as a member of the Pac-8.”
Stanford and Washington changed their minds.
June 27, 1984: In the seminal case NCAA v. Board of Regents, the United States Supreme Court rules the NCAA in violation of antitrust law by controlling schools’ television rights, opening the door for pretty much every realignment move that follows.
What sparked college football's realignment craze? Ex-Big Ten commissioner explains all
May 31, 1990: SEC presidents vote to authorize expansion, ultimately choosing South Carolina and Arkansas, though not before a good ol’ round of rumors. The previous year, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, citing a source close to the SWC, had reported it a “done deal” that Texas and Texas A&M would join Arkansas in the SEC. The Alabama Journal claimed before either addition that Florida State had already been invited. (That one was likely true, though FSU denied it.)
Getting to 12 teams would allow new commissioner Roy Kramer to pounce on a little-known NCAA rule that allowed the league to split into two divisions and stage a championship game. Ole Miss AD Warner Alford predicted such an event would “be a hot commodity” and could generate “millions of dollars.”
Many, many millions of dollars.
Penn State began Big Ten football play in 1993. (Doug Pensinger / Allsport / Getty Images)
June 4, 1990: After a decade of off-and-on flirtation, the Big Ten’s presidents vote 7-3 at a meeting in Iowa City to add powerhouse independent Penn State, which had previously been denied entry to the Big East. The Big Ten had already extended a previous invite months earlier, but the league’s athletic directors flipped out that they were not consulted beforehand. It was a blockbuster move, one that would mark the beginning of the end for independents not named Notre Dame.
It also meant a conference named the Big Ten now had 11 members. According to a wire report at the time, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany “indicated the conference would change its name in the next 60 days.”
Five more additions later, the name has not changed.
Sept. 14, 1990: Florida State joins the ACC after a courtship befitting a five-star recruit. The commissioners of both the ACC and SEC paid “home visits” in the days leading up to the school’s decision. Many believed it a no-brainer FSU would pick the more prestigious football conference, but Bobby Bowden believed — correctly — his program would be more dominant in a nine-team ACC.
The sentiment did not sit well with folks in SEC territory. Shortly before the decision, a column with the headline “FSU shows lack of vision by considering ACC” ran in the Birmingham Post-Herald. “(FSU’s) haughty attitude toward the SEC is incredible,” wrote aghast columnist Paul Finebaum.
Oct. 1, 1990: The Big East, founded 11 years earlier as a basketball conference, decides it, too, wants in on the Great Football Cash Grab of 1990, first by inviting defending national champion Miami. “To be very blunt with you, our future was at stake,” said commissioner Mike Tranghese, who feared losing its three schools with football, Pitt, Boston College and Syracuse.
Thus touched off an awkward 13-year marriage of big football-driven schools like Miami, West Virginia and Virginia Tech with small private basketball schools like Providence, Seton Hall and Villanova that would ultimately end in an ugly divorce. More on that later.
Feb. 25, 1994: For the first time — but not the last time — realignment wipes out an entire major conference: the 79-year old Southwest Conference, which had been teetering for years due to too many NCAA scandals and too few TV sets. The Big 8 invites Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor and becomes the Big 12. As word began to leak that the Aggies and Longhorns were leaving, various Texas legislators with ties to Texas Tech and Baylor aggressively lobbied on their behalf to avoid being left behind.
“As I recall, it wasn’t a very veiled threat to cut budgets if Tech was left behind,” Texas president Robert Berdahl later recalled to the San Antonio Express News.
Lost over time is that the conference perhaps could have gone even bigger. A source told the Fort Worth Star Telegram that the league had also targeted BYU and … New Mexico. “Look at the map,” said the source. “You bring in Brigham Young and New Mexico and you’ve got all of Central America.”
It is unclear where this person believed those schools were located.
Feb. 5, 1999: More than 70 years after Michigan coach Fielding Yost effectively blackballed Knute Rockne and Notre Dame’s quest to join the Big Ten, the tables had finally turned. The school had an unofficial Big Ten invite on the table. Students, faculty and alumni had spent months debating whether the fabled football program should give up its cherished independence, its national schedule, its one-of-a-kind NBC deal, etc., but the decision was up to its board of trustees.
This being Notre Dame, which prides itself on doing everything different, the vote was held in, of all places, London. It was 39-0 — no to the Big Ten. Said Delany: “I accept the fact they went through a process and concluded that where they are is the best place for them over the next 25 years.”
Wait a second. Does that mean their vote expires in … 2024?
How close has Notre Dame come to joining the Big Ten? ‘There was no deal to be had’
April 17, 2003: Big East commissioner Tranghese lobs a grenade via the New York Daily News, claiming the ACC has been recruiting several of his schools, most notably reigning power Miami. “I have no use for the ACC right now,” he said. “They’re a bunch of hypocrites.”
Over two-plus months that spring and summer, the league visited and vetted its three primary targets, Miami, Syracuse and Boston College. Finally, on June 25, ACC presidents voted 7-2 to officially invite Miami and … Virginia Tech? The Hokies’ invite, procured thanks to a pressure campaign by Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, came so out of nowhere that Virginia Tech at the time was still one of five plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the ACC trying to stop it from raiding the Big East.
Over the coming months, the Big East did its own raiding, adding Conference USA members Cincinnati, Louisville and USF to salvage its status as a BCS conference, while the ACC went ahead and invited BC to join a year later.
Syracuse would wait another eight years.
Miami and Virginia Tech brought their Big East rivalry to the ACC in 2004. (Eliot J. Schechter / Getty Images)
Dec. 15, 2009: The Big Ten council of presidents releases an out-of-nowhere announcement that they’ve decided the “timing is right” for the conference to explore further expansion and that it has asked commissioner Delany “to provide recommendations for consideration over the next 12 to 18 months.” As such, the public patiently waited 12-to-18 months to see what they decided.
Yeah, right. It was complete madness.
A Kansas City radio station reported that Notre Dame and Missouri had been invited. The Columbus Dispatch found an email from Ohio State president Gordon Gee to Delany letting him know he’d spoken with Texas president Bill Powers. All roads eventually led to Nebraska, which officially accepted an offer on June 12, 2010,
By then, there were already five-alarm realignment fires blaring elsewhere.
June 3, 2010: Right as the Big 12 ADs were meetings in Kansas City, Chip Brown of the Texas fan site Orangebloods drops a bombshell that new Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott is about to invite SIX Big 12 schools — Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and Colorado. Texas, then coming off its second national championship game in five years, was seen as the crown jewel.
The superconference that wasn’t: How the Pac-16 plan changed college sports
Over the next 11 days, Brown and others report on every little development. Scott begins flying from campus to campus visiting the prospective additions, while Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe and the so-called Faithful Four — Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State — work feverishly to keep the league together. A&M starts talking to the SEC. On June 10, Colorado takes Scott up on his offer, and on the morning of June 14, ESPN reports that Beebe has “zero” chance to save the Big 12.
Then, almost simultaneously, Brown reports that Texas and the other schools are staying put after all. Crisis averted. For now. Scott adds Utah to form the Pac-12.
A year later, Texas A&M and Missouri jumped to the SEC, and Oklahoma openly flirted with the Pac-10 yet again, but the Big 12 ultimately stabilized itself by bringing in TCU and West Virginia. Other leagues weren’t as fortunate.
Sept. 18, 2011: In stark contrast to its messy process eight years earlier, the ACC goes back for more Big East blood, stealthily adding Pitt and Syracuse. Louisville would join a year later. And the cherry on top: Notre Dame, a partial Big East member since 1995, reached a similar arrangement with the ACC on Sept. 12, 2012.
The Big East makes a last-ditch attempt to salvage its football brand — including inviting Boise State and San Diego State — but the so-called “Catholic 7” basketball schools file for divorce. The league is nice enough to let them take the Big East name with them, while the football schools rebrand as the American Athletic Conference. UConn and Tulsa briefly belong in the same conference, as God had intended.
Nov. 17, 2012: Amid an already eventful late-season Saturday, a bombshell breaks: Maryland and Rutgers are about to join the Big Ten. It sounds no less crazier 11 years later than it did that day. As Delany would later explain it, the then 12-team conference felt it needed to reclaim the East Coast after the ACC’s power play to grab Notre Dame. He even worried they might go after Penn State next.
“We came to the conclusion there was more risk sitting still than there was in exploring other opportunities,” he said.
What they discovered was that the Big Ten Network could now collect lucrative in-market subscriber fees in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.
How the Big Ten sparked a realignment avalanche: Jim Delany on adding Nebraska and more
July 21, 2021: The waves of realignment had remained remarkably calm for nearly a decade. Until one tweet changed everything. On the last day of SEC Media Days, Texas A&M beat writer Brent Zwerneman of the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas and Oklahoma were in discussions to join the SEC, though not for several years.
Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the news broke shortly before Aggies coach Jimbo Fisher’s turn at the SEC podium. “I’ll say this: Be careful what you wish for when you jump in this league,” he joked.
Why did such a tectonic change occur when it did? The previous winter, ESPN and the SEC had announced a 10-year, $3 billion deal for the rights to CBS’ game of the week package despite it not starting for another four years. The Big 12 in turn asked its network partners ESPN and Fox if it, too, could get a new deal four years in advance and were politely told no. Greg Sankey’s phone likely lit up with calls from Norman and Austin as soon as the Big 12’s Zoom meeting ended.
June 30, 2022: Another year, another bombshell tweet, this time from Pac-12 authority Jon Wilner. “Source: USC and UCLA are planning to leave for the Big Ten as early as 2024.” The deal was completed that night. Of all the realignment moves over all the decades, this may have been the most radical: The Big Ten, a conference based in Chicago, adding a pair of schools 2,000 miles away, and in doing so, threatening the continued existence of the Pac-12, its Rose Bowl partner since nearly World War II.
The news did not sit well out West, including with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was not pleased he hadn’t been consulted. Thus began a nearly six-month political circus in which the UC Board of Regents discussed potentially blocking UCLA’s move. Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff contended with a straight face that the school would be better off financially in a league with a rapidly expiring TV contract than one that had just signed a $1 billion-a-year deal. That strategy did not work.
Meanwhile, the reconstituted Big 12, with new additions BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF, jumped the line and secured its own new TV deal, and its bold, new commissioner, Brett Yormark, proceeded to spend the entire next year courting Pac-12 schools Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah.
The next chapter in this history lesson will be written soon enough.
Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s Realignment Revisited series, digging into the past, present and future of conference realignment in college sports. Follow the series and find more conference realignment stories here.
Stewart Mandel
Stewart Mandel is editor-in-chief of The Athletic's college football coverage. He has been a national college football writer for two decades with Sports Illustrated and Fox Sports. He co-hosts "The Audible" podcast with Bruce Feldman. Follow Stewart on Twitter @slmandel