OU President David Boren: What Big 12 Must Do to Make Expansion Viable
By Chip Rouse
The Big 12 is nowhere near ready to make a decision on whether or not to expand, but University of Oklahoma President David Boren believes it is very possible a decision could come by the end of the year.
No Big 12 institutional representative has been more vocal about the need for the conference to expand its membership in order to remain competitively strong for the long haul than OU’s Boren.
It was reported earlier this week in this space and elsewhere in the media that University of Oklahoma Board of Regents chairman Max Weitzenhoffer was not in agreement with the OU president on the issue of conference expansion. The Board of Regents met on Thursday in a regularly scheduled meeting, but there was no topic on the published agenda having to do with the conference expansion issue.
Speaking to members of the media following the Board of Regents meeting on Thursday, Boren said that Big 12 representatives, including himself, are in the process of gaining information and relevant data on the subject of expansion and all that goes with it from outside consultants and would not be taking a vote when the member presidents and athletic directors met at the end of this month.
Ryan Aber of the Oklahoma City Oklahoman reported that Boren stands by a three-part process that he says the Big 12 needs to go through and in a certain chronological order.
The Oklahoma president has been saying from the beginning that the idea of league expansion, a conference network, league expansion and a championship game in football are all intertwine, but he told The Oklahoman’s Aber and others in the media that they are also chronological.
According to Boren, the data the Big 12 board of directors has reviewed from consultants says that in order to successfully launch a league-wide television network you should have 12 to 14 member schools. Boren believes that the Big 12 needs to have its own network, similar to what other Power Five conferences like the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference have done. Of course, the Longhorn Network, the property of the University of Texas, is a major obstacle that needs to be dealt with before a Big 12 Network would be viable.
Actually, if there was a decision first to move forward in adding more schools to the conference membership, the idea of a conference network would be a natural outgrowth, and with 12 or more members, there would be no reason not to hold a conference championship (with the idea of having a round-robin schedule, in which everyone plays everybody in football and therefore results in what the Big 12 has been calling “one true champion,” becoming impractical).
We will have to wait a while to see what happens with the difference of opinion between OU President Boren and the chairman of the Board of Regents, the governing board to whom Boren is ultimately accountable, on the subject of Big 12 expansion.
Right now, it appears that Boren is the strongest conference advocate in favor of moving ahead with the addition of two or more new members. Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby also has voiced a favorable opinion on the idea of pursuing a growth strategy for the conference and not being left behind if, and some college football experts are saying “when,” the notion of four super conferences comes closer to reality.