Tramel: Pac-12 arrogance helped save the Big 12 two years ago and now has league in peril
Berry TramelThe Oklahoman
When Colorado voted Thursday to return to the Big 12, perhaps igniting a rash of other defections that could fortify the once-beleaguered conference while crippling the Pac-12, I thought of two stories.
Lion & Ryan. The old folktale, Androcles and the Lion. And the great movie, “Saving Private Ryan.”
Androcles, remember, is the runaway slave who pulls a bothersome thorn from the paw of a lion. Years later, the recaptured Androcles is sentenced to be devoured by wild animals in the Circus Maximus. But his assigned beast turns out to be the lion, who spares his old friend.
In “Saving Private Ryan,” there is no such grace. Tom Hanks’ soldier character, Captain John Miller, spares a German soldier, Steamboat Willie they call him, who later returns and kills the captain.
The Big 12, a league founded and headquartered and bound by Middle America, said the heck with Heartland values. The Big 12 is going for the kill.
The Pac-12 two years ago spared the Big 12’s very existence, and yet Steamboat Willie took dead aim at the Pac this week.
If more Pac-12 schools jump, the league likely will survive, but in a diminished state.
More:Tramel's ScissorTales: Instability plagued Pac-12 long before Colorado's Big 12 move
All’s fair in love and football. Brett Yormark looked straight at the conference that could have mortally wounded the Big 12. And he fired a shot.
In 2010, and a little less so in 2011, the Pac-12 came after the Big 12 full throttle. OU, Texas, OSU, Texas A&M and whatever other two Big 12 schools were willing to sign on. Kansas, Colorado, Texas Tech. Didn’t seem to matter much to the Pac.
Anything to get OU and Texas and A&M, form a Pac-16 and create an eastern front that would be a bridge to the college football powerbrokers east of the Mississippi.
Such an exodus, with Nebraska pledging to the Big Ten, would have made the Big 12 Dead League Walking. Cobble together some additions like Louisville and Boise State? Maybe the Big East for the left behind? Maybe the Mountain West for Baylor?
Instead, Texas decided to stay wedded to the Longhorn Network, an OU/OSU move West wasn’t particularly embraced by the Pac or the Bedlam rivals, and the Big 12 eventually charged ahead with 10 members. Only Colorado jumped to the Pac-10.
Then two years ago, when the OU/Texas bombshell dropped, the Big 12 was staggered. The Sooners’ and Longhorns’ commitment to the Southeastern Conference rattled the Big 12’s core.
League members feared a 50 percent cut in television money, and most of the schools looked longingly at the Pac-12. OSU, Texas Christian, Baylor, Tech, Kansas State, Kansas, Iowa State. All sought a Pac-12 lifeboat.
The Pac had its pick. Name its favorite four, and the Pac-16 would have been born. The Big 12 would have been left with four members and would either have tried to pry away some American Conference members to been absorbed by the same.
It’s easy to pick on Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff these days. Easy to see how the Pac-12 could have reversed the roles; empowering its position on the college football food chain while severely damaging a marketplace competitor.
But it wasn’t Kliavkoff’s decision to go thumbs up or down on adding Big 12 refugees.
Pac-12 arrogance ended the discussion. The decision to spare the Big 12 was not humanitarian-based. This wasn’t Androcles or Tom Hanks.
This was a superiority complex. The West Coast schools didn’t want to be associated with the Heartland. Not academically, not culturally.
A famous report said Southern Cal had no interest in being in a league with Iowa State. Of course, now USC is about to be in a league with Iowa, so what goes around comes around.
On campuses of Cal and Stanford and UCLA, the intelligentsia was aghast at the idea of mixing with the folks from Stillwater and Lubbock and Manhattan. It’s the same kind of thinking that has the Pac-12 pondering going all the way to Dallas for Southern Methodist, when a more-productive and a better-branded program is just up the road at Boise State.
Understanding the marketplace is a tenet of big business.
Beta once was bigger than VHS. MySpace once was bigger than Facebook. As recently as 1987, Kmart was bigger than Walmart.
I found an alabrava.net story on the Kmart/Walmart comparison, complete with subheads on the reasons for Kmart’s eventual demise.
“They had no real strategy.”
“Kmart was a horse with blinders on.”
“No focus in rural areas.”
“The shopping experience was lacking.”
Sound like anyone you know? Here’s a sentence from that article: “Kmart was so focused on keeping its prices as low as can be that when other opportunities came knocking, they quite literally chased them away.”
Doesn’t take too much editing to write that in a similar way about the Pac-12. The Pac-12 was so focused on keeping its elitist status that when other opportunities came knocking, they quite literally chased them away.
Embattled former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott knew the landscape. He was an arrogant businessman and he helped sink the Pac-12, but Scott knew the future. Creating a bigger, more geographically-diverse conference was the path to sustainability.
And when the Pac-12 again had the chance to do just that in 2021, it passed. And Steamboat Willie returned and fired a shot. We’ll see if the bullet is fatal.
