Notes from Pac 10 Country

I'm here in Estes Park, Colorado, and you're not - more's the pity for you.  While I was driving across I-70 Saturday with my youngest and getting pelted with rain, the FCCJC sign up was interrupted, then canceled due to the same weather.

Only two of our players made it through, so the rest of us will have June 26th, July 10th, and July24th, as the three remaining sign up dates. Plenty of chances yet. Please let us know if none of those remaining dates work for you, and we can see about some alternative arrangement.

If you're not familiar with it, Estes Park is a very pretty little town just at the foot of the Rocky Mountain National Park. It is also just north of Boulder, which officially became Pac 10 country last week.

The locals here seem more interested in the outdoors than what conference their local college team calls home. I think that's one of the criticisms of Colorado college sports, but I also think that makes them fit just nicely with their new Pac 10 brethren.

I'm not sure what to think of the new deal. The Big 10 is taking a breath, and I assume the Pac 10 will too. But will the Big 10 make another play for Notre Dame?  Will they use the threat of asking Missouri, Rutgers, Syracuse and Pittsburgh to force Notre Dame's hand? And then will they go ahead and do it?

Nebraska is in for another year, and Colorado is in for two more, last I heard. Will the Big XII look to replace either or both? Would any school in its right mind join this conference, held together as it is with spitballs and bailing wire?

For our age group, I hear rumors of a top-flight team thinking of leaving the Blue Valley League and joining FCCJC. This is piled on top of rumors I heard throughout the spring of who was leaving FCCJC for Blue Valley.

Really, we're just like the big boys - just less money involved.

Finally, dad and baseball coach Joe Pavlovich made me laugh with this drawing of the Big XII's new logo. Hope all of you are having a great summer, and travel safely!

FCCJC Registration #2 on Saturday

The second FCCJC registration day will be this Saturday, from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Heritage Park Football complex at 162nd and Pflumm. Be sure to bring a checkbook and either an FCCJC registration card from a previous season, or a copy of your son's most recent grade card and birth certificate.

Kansas, K-State, Iowa State, and Missouri will be there checking in for their new division, the Leftover Lightweights. Baylor has not been admitted to this point, though sources say the 8th grade National division has made inquiries.

Warning - Another College Football Conference Re-Alignment Post

Rumors are moving VERY rapidly in college football. We've had confirmation of Texas-Big Ten discussions from leaked E-Mails, deadlines imposed on MU and Nebraska, offers rumored on the way from the PAC 10 for six or more Big XII - all this in the last 48 hours!
 
Are we headed toward four 16-team super conferences?
 
One rumor has the Pac 10 inviting half the Big XII (Texas, Texas A&M,  Colorado, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State) into it's conference. Presumably then Missouri and Nebraska would bolt to the Big 10. If Rutgers from the Big East says yes to the Big 10 as well, that would put them momentarily at fourteen teams.
 
There are two major BCS conferences in the east - the Big East, with eight football playing teams, and the ACC with 12. And the big cheese in all this is the Southeastern conference, with 12 teams and the best football in the country.

Question 1 - will the Southeastern conference sit idly by while the Big XII is pillaged, without making a play for Texas, the Oklahoma schools, or at least A&M?  Question 2, and perhaps the answer to question 1 - will the television contract already in place for the SEC bind them from expansion during this round of expansion free-for-all? Or will they bite the bullet and make a play for four of the Texas/Oklahoma schools?

Back to the east - the ACC is the stronger football league compared to the Big East. Rutgers is already rumored to the Big 10, leaving the Big East with just seven. The football plum remaining in the vulnerable Big East is oddly South Florida - put them down as a target for a sooner-or-later forced-to-expand SEC. The ACC could go after the top four of the remaining six - with it's basketball panache, imagine Syracuse, U-Conn, Louisville, and Cincinnati being in the cross-hairs for the ACC.
 
That would leave Pittsburgh as easy pickings for the Big Ten. Confused? To help clarify (or muddy things further, depending on your point of view) here are the members of what seem to be the target conferences. For the Big East, I've listed the football schools. Remeber, we're talking about four 16-team super conferences - you have to play both football and basketball to be a member.

The 20 Targets

Big 12	Big 12	Big East (fb)	Big East (fb)
Texas	Missouri	South Florida	Rutgers
Texas A&M	Nebraska	Louisville	Pittsburgh
Oklahoma	Colorado	Syracuse	Cincinnati
Oklahoma St	Kansas	U Conn	West Virginia
Texas Tech	Kansas State
Baylor	Iowa State

Let's examine what I call the Pac 10 Grab. In this scenario the Pac 10 successfully swipes the four Big 12 schools they are rumored to desire, and several of the Big East teams move off to greener pastures.

Pac 10 Grab

Pac 10 W	Big 10 W	SEC W	ACC Atlantic
Washington	Missouri	Arkansas	BC
Washington St	Nebraska	Ole Miss	Clemson
Oregon	Iowa	Mississippi St	Florida St
Oregon St	Illinois	LSU	Maryland
Cal	Northwestern	Auburn	NC State
Stanford	Wisconsin	Alabama	Wake Forest
USC	Minnesota	?	Syracuse
UCLA	?	?	UConn
Pac 10 E	Big 10 E	SEC E	ACC Coastal
Arizona	Indiana	Florida	Va Tech
Arizona St	Purdue	Georgia	Ga Tech
Texas	Michigan	Kentucky	Miami
Texas A&M	Michigan St	South Carolina	Virginia
Oklahoma	Ohio St	Tennessee	UNC
Oklahoma St	Penn St	Vanderbuilt	Duke
Texas Tech	Rutgers	South Florida	Louisville
Colorado	?	?	Cincinnati

That scenario leaves two openings in the Big 10 and three openings (someday) in the SEC.
 
Big 10 Commissioner Delaney would give his eye teeth, left gonad, and his mother's wedding ring to get Notre Dame into that open slot in his eastern division. But Notre Dame is already BCS automatic, already has its own TV network, and probably won't budge. They are comfortable as a major independent.
 
Assuming the Irish stand pat, there are six other remaining current automatic BCS teams without a chair as the music winds down. KU and K-State are a nice pair for a basketball conference, but neither the SEC nor the Big 10 think basketball first. KU and Iowa State are members of the American Association of Universities - Baylor and K-State are not. I think those two are both great schools, but somehow the Big Ten seems to think membership in that club is important.  Pittsburgh is an AAU member and OUGHT to be attractive, but they're a private school in a pro-sports, blue-collar type of town. West Virginia has had some football success, and Huggins is an interesting basketball coach - but they're also firmly on the BCS bubble, and not an AAU member.
 
The SEC could invite nearly any of them of course when their television contract expires, and without anywhere else to go, any of them would jump. But perhaps the SEC goes after all four Texas schools to make the Texas legislature happy. That would throw a wrench in the Pac 10's plans, though Colorado and the Oklahoma schools would still be in play for them. But they'd need two more, and KU and K-State would be just sitting there.
 
That scenario I would call the SEC Swallows Texas, and it looks like this:

SEC Swallows Texas

Pac 10 W	Big 10 W	SEC W	ACC Atlantic
Washington	Missouri	Arkansas	BC
Washington St	Nebraska	Ole Miss	Clemson
Oregon	Iowa	Mississippi St	Florida St
Oregon St	Illinois	LSU	Maryland
Cal	Northwestern	Texas	NC State
Stanford	Wisconsin	Texas Tech	Wake Forest
USC	Minnesota	Baylor	Syracuse
UCLA	?	Texas A&M	UConn
Pac 10 E	Big 10 E	SEC E	ACC Coastal
Arizona	Indiana	Florida	Va Tech
Arizona St	Purdue	Georgia	Ga Tech
Colorado	Michigan	Kentucky	Miami
Oklahoma	Michigan St	South Carolina	Virginia
Oklahoma St	Ohio St	Tennessee	UNC
?	Penn St	Vanderbuilt	Duke
?	Rutgers	Alabama	Louisville
?	?	Auburn	Cincinnati

Nothing says the Pac 10 couldn't counter such an SEC play by dumping their bid for Colorado, holding their noses, and offering Baylor - a scenario that should be extremely worrisome to CU.

By the way, no disrespect on my part for Baylor - great school - it's just that Californians aren't clamoring to hang around with Baptists from Waco, TX (and more's the pity - it would be a big cultural improvement for them.)

The flaw in this I think is that the SEC would have trouble breaking OU from Texas - they seem to like playing each other. But since you probably can't break OU and OSU, and you clearly can't break Texas and the Aggies, whether the SEC could get any or all of those, assuming they wanted them, would then probably depend on the Texas legislature.

My latest scenario I call the BigPac.
 
In this alignment, the Big 12 southwest six to the Pac 10 was never really going to happen - it was a rumor designed to flush MU and Nebraska out, as they seemed to be headed that way anyway. The Pac 10 and Big 12 defend themselves against further attrition by jettisoning those two upper Midwestern schools off to colder confines, leaving the remainder free to create a 20 team western super conference. The BigPac would have a Big division and a Pac division. Could this dramatic step have been what Cal-Berkeley Chancellor Rober Birgeneau was alluding to when he predicted a revolution in college athletics?
 
In football each team would play 9 division games games, then a 'tournament' game - 10 plays 10, 9 plays 9, etc. against the other division at the end of the year. The 1 v 1 game is the conference championship, and would move around. Obviously the remaining Big 12 teams all play each other, and the Pac 10 plays all its long-time rivalries, and then there would be the end-of-the-year game. The host for the cross-division game would be determined as each match up was determined, based on whichever team had hosted fewer end-of-the-year games in conference history. In case of tie, the second tie breaker would be evening up the division hosting. You'd do a coin flip after that.


In basketball you'd play your division twice (18) and the other side once (10) creating 28 games. There would be very little non-conference season, absolutely maximizing basketball revenue.

The revolutionary aspect is that it is an entire level beyond what anyone else is thinking. The natural progression of four 16-team super conferences has everybody agog. But does Texas really want to travel further? Do they really want to dump Baylor victories from their schedule? I think this would be an incredibly appealing, have-cake-and-eat-it-too outcome for them. Suddenly they're in a conference that has more competition than the SEC and a full 20 of the 65 auto-bcs teams under it's umbrella. That's quite a sandbox for the Horns to play in.

But for this to happen, the Big 12 and Pac 10 have to know that Nebraska and MU are gone. If those two schools want to stick around and see whether this bigger thing would be a better thing, then fine and we go from there. But Texas really doesn't want to play footsie much more. They have players to buy and championships to win, and all of that is needlessly complicated and delayed while these second-tier programs are fiddling around.

That may be why there is a deadline. Commit - and it's a big financial commitment, you can bet - or go, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

As a Kansas fan I like this BigPac scenario second best. My first preference is status quo. But you may accuse me of whistling past the graveyard, and you could be right.