It’s not just you.
If you’re like, well, most of the people who post on the Gator County message boards, you have not been a fan of the 21st Century’s conference realignment moves. Maybe you’re ambivalent about the ACC raiding the Big East over 20 years ago, but especially the stuff that’s gone down since 2010 has largely gone over like a lead balloon in most fan circles.
But it’s not just us cranky die-hards. Bill Moos, a former big time athletic director, appears to have self-published a memoir with the rather verbose title of Crab Creek Chronicles: From the Wheat Fields to the Ball Fields and Beyond. On Amazon the publisher is listed as Story Bridge Agency, which is a company that promises to take your notes and interview you in order to have their staff writers produce you a book. How much editing is on offer is unclear since Moos’s tome is 697 pages. Amazon’s website even warns you the ebook will take longer to download than you might think because of its size.
Anyway, the latest College Football Enquirer (episode 775) with Andy Staples, Ross Dellenger, and Steven Godfrey covered an interesting nugget from the book: Moos wanted to get Nebraska to leave the Big Ten to go back to the Big 12.
Okay, so who is this Moos character and why would anyone care what he had to say about this? He was AD at Oregon for a dozen years before having a fallout with Phil Knight. A few years later he resurfaced as AD at his alma mater Washington State, and then Nebraska hired him to the job in 2017. So, Moos was in a position to try to make that happen as the AD in Lincoln.
The time was 2021, and he was frustrated with the way that the Big Ten handled the Covid-19 pandemic. Some conferences made a stand for not playing in 2020, while others fought to find a way to make it work. The Big Ten was against playing initially, but league leadership did a poor job of consulting with member schools through that time. Several of the schools revolted, and pushing from the heavies like Ohio State did eventually result in the B1G staging games.
Moos was among those unimpressed with how the Big Ten dealt with all that, and he could also see what NU lost when it went to the Big Ten. It lost longstanding rivalries with old Big Eight schools. It lost the ability to play in front of Texas recruits regularly to instead play more games in relatively talent poor Big Ten West states Wisconsin and Indiana along with far-flung cross-division opponents like Maryland and Rutgers.
He actually did reach out to then-Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby in 2021, but ultimately the Huskers’ Board of Regents shut down any consideration of leaving the Big Ten. Of course that wasn’t going to fly. The B1G even back then made substantially more money than the Big 12 did. It’s why Texas and Oklahoma announced plans to join the SEC in that very same year of 2021 (in July, if you don’t remember the timeline exactly).
Maybe the prospect of Nebraska coming back with some other school in tow would’ve given the Sooners and Longhorns pause, but I doubt it. NU didn’t move the needle near as much then as it did in past eras, and boy would Moos have looked foolish if his overtures had become public right before UT and OU made their earthshaking announcements.
I try to maintain perspective, since the history of college sports is a history of teams forming conferences, joining conferences, going independent, and coming back to conference life in one way or another. It’s quaint to think about, say, South Carolina having its only conference title be from the ACC, a conference it left to go independent before later joining the SEC. How old fashioned! Except BYU has done that loop in the last 15 years, leaving the Mountain West for independence in 2011 before joining the Big 12 in 2023.
With that said, it does feel different with the goal being explicitly to chase TV money. I wasn’t alive back then to know for sure, but I’m sure it felt much different than when teams left the Southern Conference to make the SEC in the ’30s and others left to form the ACC in the ’50s. Or when the non-Notre Dame major independents all joined conferences in the late ’70s through early ’90s.
Many of those moves through history were geographical in nature — the Big East being a big exception, as the likes of Miami, West Virginia, and Boston College had little to do with each other in any way before then — and some were driven in part by rivalries. Nearly all were done with issues regarding competition a prime factor.
None of those were much of a factor when, for instance, Maryland and Rutgers joined the Big Ten. Those jumps were solely about money. And the money hasn’t even helped that much, as the Terps have been middling at best in the revenue sports for much of their time in the league and Rutgers is the brokest major conference program by a mile.
You can count me in the group that’d be just fine if the SEC went back to being a 12-team league, before Texas A&M and Missouri joined the league. You probably are too. And hey, maybe even Bill Moos would be as well. It’s no skin off his back.
But also, everyone in charge of anything is going to make the same choice the Nebraska Board of Regents did half a decade ago. To do anything that would cause TV revenue to go down, unless it’s some kind of superleague or playoff-expanding gambit that’s intended to make TV revenue go up, is impossible now. The arrow points in one direction, that being upward consolidation. Would that it were not so.