by Sandy » Sat Jun 05, 2010 11:46 am
As a native of Pac-10 country (Bear Down, Arizona!) I've been watching this discussion and approach with interest. It is clearly all about the money. Baylor's problem is that it is relatively small in the two areas where the $$$ roll in, television market and alumni base. A year or so ago the talk was about expanding to 12, or perhaps even 14 teams by adding in some schools related to their geography, with Utah, BYU, Colorado and Boise State being the most often mentioned, but that didn't really do anything for the television markets, with Denver being the only real viable one, and Colorado having to share it with professional sports. But talk of adding Texas, A&M, Tech, OU, OSU and Colorado, and creating two eight team divisions by putting the Arizona schools in with the six captures from the Big-12, and the old Pac-8 schools in the other, and that's generated some excitement. You keep the natural rivalries, you have schools with large enrollments and large alumni bases and the conference has the six largest television markets in the west in LA, Phoenix, Seattle, Denver, SF Bay area, Austin-San Antonio plus you add in Oklahoma City, and a good chunk of Dallas and Houston. Baylor and Waco would not be major players in that league.
Baylor's last big hurrah in football, the last year Grant Teaff was coach, they got an invitation to the Sun Bowl in El Paso to play Arizona, the third place team from the Pac-10. I was there. It was a great matchup, the two teams were pretty evenly matched on the field, and Baylor, the underdog, eventually pulled it out. The game was a complete sell-out, equally distant between the two schools, but Arizona sold over 35,000 of the 50,000 tickets, and then bought about 2,000 more that Baylor couldn't sell. But they have 40,000 students, and an alumni base ten times the size of Baylor's.
It's the money.