Big 12 football fans are salivating at the league’s invitation to Texas Christian, which has appeared in two straight BCS bowl games and has cemented itself as a national power during the past decade or so.  With 17 conference titles and NFL stars like LaDainian Tomlinson roaming around, the invitation makes logical and economic sense for all parties involved.

Those Are Known as Empty Seats

There’s just one problem, though: the hoops aspect. The addition of TCU looks like a disastrous scenario for the Big 12 in the short-term. Forget for a moment even the lack of history for the Horned Frogs (and, just a warning, there’s not much). The larger problem is the current state of TCU hoops, which, to put it nicely, can only be described as having “fallen on hard times.” In three years, coach Jim Christian has never finished above .500, and his team limped to a 1-15 record in Mountain West play a year ago. As a whole, the program hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 1998, back when Billy Tubbs coached the team, and it has not finished with a winning record in its league since 2001.

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Welcome to RTC’s Big 12 microsite.

When most people think about the Big 12 Conference these days, they probably think about The Red River Rivalry, conference realignment madness, Bevo, and lots of open space.  What they may not consider is just how good of a basketball conference this league is right now.  Yet, with the loss of two of its worst roundball programs to the Big Ten and Pac-12, the Big 12 may be in a position to put more than half of its members into next March’s NCAA Tournament.  Of course, even a season that sees all ten Big 12 schools reach the Dance may not save this staggering conference from the dustbins of college athletics history, but we’ll be there with it for as long as it still sits at the big boy table.

Our two staffers Danny Spewak (@dspewak) and Clark Williams (@clarkewilliams) are here to keep you up to date on the daily happenings in this league.  Let’s hope that it involves more than constant realignment chatter, and at some point settles down to actual games involving players on the floor.  Regardless, feel free to contact them directly by simply clicking on their names or following them at Twitter — they’re anxious to get going and we are too.  Thanks for dropping by.

The two big stories to come out of the conference realignment circus in the past few days involve Missouri, Texas Christian University, and the Big 12, yet both of these stories have potentially huge ramifications for the ACC. Despite a an attempt at a unity-preserving meeting of the Big 12 schools, it didn’t take long for Missouri’s wandering eyes to fix on to the greenest of green pastures of the SEC. The implications of this move would leave the SEC set at a balanced and reasonable number of 14 teams, making a raid on the ACC football powers like Virginia Tech, Miami, Clemson, and Florida State moderately less attractive. In turn this means that the ACC is more likely to not make additional moves, standing pat itself at a reasonable 14 teams (with a willingness to grow only if Notre Dame is involved). The end result of this domino effect, at least according to some Connecticut fans, is that UConn looks increasingly less likely as a candidate to move to the ACC.

The Wheel of Conference Affiliation Continues to Spin

Now, today, Texas Christian University threw a monkey wrench into all of this conference alignment calculus. Instead of eventually going to the Big East, TCU has received an invitation to join the Big 12, an invitation that TCU seems almost certain to accept. This is not great news for the Big East which seems to be showing more and more stress lines these days. The departure of TCU doesn’t bode well either for West Virginia or Louisville staying in a league that’s about to become even less of a factor in football. If those schools leave, then it seems like Notre Dame’s current positive feelings about the Big East may soon diminish, and maybe the ACC starts to look like an okay place to be. UConn would be only too happy to come along, but it seems that many Connecticut fans see the TCU news mostly as a bad omen, projecting a future where the Big East remains drained and the Huskies are stranded in the ruins of a once great conference.

For the ACC, the story is much simpler: Barring a now-unexpected SEC raid on ACC teams, or some really panicked maneuvering on the part of Connecticut, the Atlantic Coast Conference seems unlikely to expand anytime soon.

Perhaps the most peculiar geographic realignment that we had seen in the last year of schools moving around was Texas Christian University‘s decision to join the Big East.  Located nearly a thousand miles from the two closest other schools (Louisville and South Florida), it made about as much sense as the Dallas Cowboys playing in the NFC East.  And yet, thanks to the meteoric rise in the last decade of Gary Patterson’s Horned Frog football program and its location in the nation’s fifth largest television market, TCU’s cachet had outgrown its affiliation with the Mountain West to the point where it could entertain options.  Well, at least one option, and that option was to join a BCS football conference centered in the Northeast regardless of its culture, religion and location.

Cheer Up Buddy, You're Staying Near Home

But if we’ve learned one thing about the rapaciousness of conference realignment in college sports, your best option today is tomorrow’s $1 pastry in the day-old bin. With the Big 12 seemingly getting picked apart by vultures on all sides, and all indications leaning toward Missouri as only the latest defector, the conference had to make a splash soon.  That happened today, with the pending announcement that TCU will reunite with some of its old Southwest Conference brethren Texas, Texas Tech and Baylor in the new-and-improved Big 12.  An invitation has been extended, and TCU is expected to accept the offer immediately.

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1. Is UCLA on the verge of being back?  Ben Howland rebuilt the west coast’s premier program in the mid-2000s with strong recruiting in his home state, culminating in three straight Final Four appearances from 2006-08.  But in the last few years, the talent pool in the Golden State has dropped a bit and Sean Miller at Arizona has aggressively entered the picture for the best of the rest, leaving Howland to look elsewhere to fill his roster.  With Kyle Anderson’s decision to leave New Jersey for the fairer weather of SoCal combined with the distinct possibility that UCLA will also pull #1 prospect Shabazz Muhammad out of Las Vegas, the Bruins program may be on the verge of re-joining the elite and doing it by recruiting as a nationally relevant program should — nationally.  Luke Winn examines this recent phenomenon in addition to NC State, Kentucky, Houston, and Providence’s recruiting prowess in a compelling analysis this week.
2. Speaking of Anderson, the overall #4 player in the Class of 2012 according to RSCI, his high school coach, Bob Hurley, Sr., told Adam Zagoria recently that the 6’8″ guard might be the best player he’s ever had at powerhouse St. Anthony’s.  Hurley’s alumni include a number of high-profile prep players dating back to the 80s, so this is very high praise indeed.  He even goes so far to call Anderson a “modern-day Magic Johnson” with his ability to see the floor and direct his team from the perimeter with the size of a big man.  These sorts of comparisons almost always seem lacking in some way, but if Anderson can bring even a smidge of Showtime back to LA over at the new and improved Pauley Pavilion next season, Bruins fans will certainly let us know.
3. In conference realignment’s worst kept secret, Missouri is prepared to accept an offer from an unstated conference to the south and east of its geographic base that may or may not start with the letter “S” and end with the letter “C.”  Like a jilted bridesmaid, Mizzou brass would have much rather received an offer from a certain midwestern conference (last year, this year, or any year), but such an offer does not appear to be forthcoming, so as a Missouri official put it on Wednesday, the S[…]C is “what’s left.”  Mike DeCourcy points out that even if Missouri ultimately joins that league, the conference could face a dilemma where its lack of a buyout could end up biting it if that other league comes calling.  Quite the chess game that is going on behind the scenes here, we imagine.
4. As for the practical effects on Missouri’s presumed move, Kansas head coach Bill Self had quite a bit to say on the matter Wednesday.  He told the KC Star that he, and by proxy, Kansas fans, would hate to see the Border War basketball games between Missouri and KU come to an end.  “I don’t want them to leave. I think it’s too good. What we have, what we have going is one of the best five basketball rivalries in all of America, and I’d hate to see that go away.”  He went on to implicitly suggest that if Mizzou in fact leaves the Big 12, the resulting frayed relationship may in effect make it impossible for the schools to play each other again for a while.  It’s a well-taken point, actually, but unfortunately not one that schools seem to be giving much thought to these days.  Syracuse-Georgetown, Texas A&M-Texas, Syracuse-Connecticut… all traditional rivalries that arguably are finished for some time unless school administrators are more forgiving than we think they are.
5. Hall of Famer Bill Russell filed a lawsuit in Oakland on Wednesday accusing the NCAA and EA of using his likeness without his consent or compensation.  Russell’s case joins former NPOY Ed O’Bannon’s in claiming that both parties violate antitrust laws by selling game footage and video games with players’ images as a material component of the content while getting nothing in return.  For a greater discussion of the legal doctrines and likely positions from both sides, click here, but numerous legal experts have stated that the NCAA and EA could face a disastrous financial burden here (possibly a ten figure judgment).  Russell provides another powerful name to add to this lawsuit as it winds its way through the courts.

1. We’ll have a more detailed analysis of this later today, but the 2011-12 Wooden Award list was released on Monday, and there were more than a few interesting  trends with this preseason’s offering.  Keeping in mind that freshmen and transfers are not eligible for the opening list, the 50 players broke out in the following ways.  The Big East has ten players on the list; there were nine from the Big Ten; the SEC merited seven.  The Big 12, Pac-12 and ACC represented with only four players each, and all four of the ACCers came from the nation’s consensus #1 team, North Carolina.  That left 12 players from the non-power conferences, with the Atlantic 10, Conference USA, and Big West each earning two spots.  There are 26 seniors on the list, nine juniors and 16 sophomores, while positions were split between 23 guards, 23 forwards and only four centers.  Stay tuned later today as we’ll present a more thoughtful analysis of the preseason Wooden Award selections.
2. The Big 12 Monday appeared to take a significant step toward self-preservation for at least the next several years by announcing that its conference board of directors unanimously approved a measure that will equally share all Tier I and Tier II broadcasting revenue from its football and basketball telecasts.  It would not include Tier III broadcasts such as those planned for Texas’ Longhorn Network, which of course is largely the reason the conference ended up in this situation in the first place.  League interim commissioner Chuck Neinas was careful to say that such an arrangement was by no means a done deal, and that each school would still have to go through its own internal processes to approve such an agreement.  Missouri, still said to be interested in leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, will have its Board of Curators meeting tomorrow where this will certainly be on the agenda.  Assuming Mizzou does not receive its coveted invitation from the SEC, you would have to presume that this revenue sharing agreement will shore up the conference for at least a… season or two.  That is, until Texas figures out some way to leverage the LHN into even greater riches, at which time the conference will once again threaten to implode from within.
3. We mentioned in this space yesterday that the Big East came out of its Sunday meetings in Washington, DC, with a greater resolve to keep its remaining core together and to do whatever it takes (“by any means necessary?”) to find solid replacements for the soon-departed Syracuse and Pittsburgh.  Mike DeCourcy makes the case suggesting that, despite what appears to be a race to the bottom of a new conference for those moving around, the best athletic deal for those existing members is to stand pat.  His key point — that the Big East represents the easiest route to a BCS bowl and multiple NCAA Tournament trips — is a salient one, but we’re not sure that citing Boston College and Miami (FL)’s departures as ‘disasters’ captures the overarching reasons for their subsequent failings.  Miami football, for example, has certainly fallen considerably from its national relevance while a member of the Big East — but did that drop-off have more to do with coaching (Larry Coker to Randy Shannon) or conference affiliation?  With Hurricane basketball, is the U’s mediocrity as an ACC member more attributable to its conference affiliation or Frank Haith (who began there in 2004 simultaneous with Miami’s jump)?  We think it’s rather tough to make that case, especially when there are so many other confounding factors at play in situations like these.
4. Class of 2012 power forward and overall top five prospect Mitch McGary has reportedly narrowed his college choices to Duke, North Carolina and Michigan.  The 6’10” star originally from the northern Indiana town of Chesterton, announced on his personal blog (via ESPN) that he has taken three visits to those schools and he has no plans to go anywhere else.  If you read the tea leaves, he’s considered a Michigan lean among folks who follow this stuff for a living, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise us to see him in either shade of blue down on Tobacco Road either.  For what it’s worth, #1 Shabazz Muhammad and #3 McGary represent the remaining two uncommitted jewels of this year’s class, according to Rivals’ rankings.
5. Quick, what’s the capital city of Kentucky — Lexington or Louisville?  Or so goes the joke among those who live there, because, as far as we know, the actual seat of government in the Bluegrass State hasn’t yet moved from its central Kentucky town of Frankfort.  UK head coach John Calipari may be in need of a geography lesson himself, as the quotable top Cat took a tongue-in-cheek shot at his biggest state rival in an interview on KSTV recently.  In answering a question as to what makes his program special, he made a comparison to other states that have multiple powerhouse basketball programs: “There’s no other state, none, that’s as connected to their basketball program as this one. Because those other states have other programs. Michigan has Michigan State, California has UCLA, North Carolina has Duke. It’s Kentucky throughout this whole state, and that’s what makes us unique.”  Queue Rick Pitino’s acerbic passive-aggressive response in 3… 2… 1…

1. Southern Mississippi head coach Larry Eustachy received a three-year extension on his contract.  You might recall that Eustachy gained some notoriety in 2009 for giving back a $25,000 bonus to his employer because he didn’t feel as if he had earned it.  In the two seasons hence, his Golden Eagles have gone 42-24 and were invited to the CIT postseason tournament in 2009-10.  Southern Miss was in the conversation for an at-large bid in last year’s NCAA Tournament prior to hitting a tough stretch during the last two weeks of the season.  His extension does not include a salary boost, but it will keep him employed at the school through the 2013-14 season.
2. Rick Pitino really must not want to end up in the ‘fertile’ recruiting grounds of the Big 12, searching for talent in a place like Manhattan, Kansas, rather than Manhattan island.  In an interview with Adam Zagoria on Tuesday night, he went on a somewhat incomprehensible tirade about why Connecticut would be “dumb” to leave the Big East for the ACC if there was another spot available for the Huskies.  He invokes none other than the legendary John Wooden to explain why UConn should not consider such a move: “Do you ever think [leaving the Pac-10] crossed his mind? No, when you’re great winner, those things don’t cross your mind. The only thing that crosses your mind is the ability to win a championship and carry on the great tradition you’ve built.”  He even goes so far as to suggest that the Huskies might be less successful in a conference like the ACC, citing Boston College’s one soccer title as a relevant example.  But… didn’t Pitino tell us a hundred times in March that the Big East was by far the best basketball conference?  Why would leaving the best basketball conference for a weaker one hurt them, Rick?  We haven’t seen video of this interview, but it reads like the rantings and ramblings of a man desperate to avoid irrelevance.
3. We’re all aware that Syracuse is headed to the ACC, although the when behind that move is still up in the air.  What might also be up in the air is the idea Syracuse chancellor Nancy Cantor floated on Tuesday — Syracuse possibly playing some home ACC games in New York City.  Calling the Orange “New York’s college team,” Cantor strongly stated that one of the must-haves for her school was to play some home ACC games in the Big Apple.  Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim fired back with unequivocal statements to the contrary on Wednesday.  Suggesting that Cantor was mistaken about which games might be played in NYC, Boeheim said, “we absolutely would not take conference games to New York City. It was never the intent… She meant games in New York. Yes. And bringing the ACC Tournament to New York.”  From an economic standpoint to the school, it makes a lot more sense to bring elite ACC teams to upstate New York and the enormous Carrier Dome than to try to play the likes of Duke, UNC, Maryland and others in the much smaller venues of Madison Square Garden or the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
4. Speaking of the new NYC arena, we’re already loving this place.  New York always felt like it should be a two-arena kind of town, and the Barclays will now allow some interesting simultaneous events for people in the city to enjoy.  The first example of this will now occur in 2013, as the Atlantic 10 has signed a five-year deal to bring its conference tournament to Brooklyn.  If the league keeps with the format it has now so that the quarters, semis and finals occur on Selection Sunday weekend, savvy hoops fans might be able to commute between the Big East extravaganza at MSG and the best A-10 games over in Brooklyn.  With a mere half-hour trip by subway line between the two arenas, hoops junkies like ourselves could find themselves in a heavenly situation.
5. Let’s finish with some really good news.  Arizona’s Kevin Parrom is back on campus in Tucson and is set to resume classes and begin rehabilitation from the shooting injury he suffered last weekend in his hometown of New York.  The bullet entered his leg in the back of his right knee but head coach Sean Miller said on Tuesday that it’s unclear how the injury will impact his basketball activities this season, suggesting that it will be at least a month before a true assessment can be made.  Parrom, a junior who averaged 8/3 last season while knocking down 41.8% of his threes, is a key contributor for Miller, but at this point everyone is just happy that he’s alive and not critically injured.  Even in what has to be trying times for a young athlete, he still has his humor intact, tweeting at former conference rival Isaiah Thomas, “Idk what hurts more your shot that went in at the end of the game or the 1 i got this weekend smh lol.”  Well played, sir.

There’s reason to believe that the Big 12 will survive for at least another year with the news Thursday that two of the conditions most desired by several of its remaining member institutions will come to fruition.  Well, they hope, at least.  The first condition, reportedly required by Oklahoma (but presumably other schools as well), was that Commissioner Dan Beebe be ousted from his position as a result of what is widely viewed as executive incompetence in the face of serious and repeated threats to the existence of the league.  His mutually agreed-upon ‘resignation’ was accepted by the remaining schools Thursday night.

The conference’s board of directors conducted a wide-ranging teleconference Thursday on the future of the league as Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe negotiated a “mutual agreement” with the league to leave his job immediately. Beebe will be replaced on an interim basis by former Big Eight commissioner Chuck Neinas, 79, one of the most widely respected insiders in college football.

Facing the destruction of his conference for the second time in 16 months, Beebe was the easy scapegoat here, but the bitter irony he must taste in retirement is that some of the very measures he attempted to institute — namely, better revenue sharing and stronger disincentives to leave — are now getting pushed by several remaining schools as absolute necessities to safeguard the future of the league.  One of those remedial measures (and the second condition) involves locking schools into a long-term commitment to the conference by collectively agreeing to give up their ‘first-tier’ and ‘second-tier’ rights to televised broadcasts of their games for the next six years, otherwise known as a “grant of rights.”  From the NYT:

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1. As we’ve said before, one of the few positives that’s come out of the conference congealment/realignment mess is that some writers have simply had enough and are pulling out all the stops in their critiques, and the readers are benefitting from it. The latest example of this came yesterday from Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel, who explains why the current system blows, the new superconference system will be even worse, and that it’s not too late to save these conference and school administrators from themselves and try to save college athletics, certainly (our favorite section coming here), “…for the average fan, who just appreciated things like the Big East basketball tournament or Backyard Brawl or the myriad other traditions that seem a lot cooler than protecting the salary of the guy who runs the Great Idaho Potato Bowl.” Enjoy.
2. So, in that vein…Dan Beebe is out as commissioner of the Big 12, and it looks like this conference — which looked extremely wobbly at best just a week ago — will now survive. You probably remember that it was Oklahoma that said it would only stay on board if Beebe was removed AND if Texas‘ brand new Longhorn Network would be restricted in what it could show, especially regarding high school games/athletes. As for the “victory” yesterday and the discussion among the member schools that lasted for just over an hour, OU president David Boren said, “We achieved substantial reforms. We feel extremely good.” We assume now that it’s only a matter of time until the remaining schools gang up on Texas and that TV network to try and hammer out a few more substantial reforms.
3. It’s been just over 18 months since March 3, 2010, a night on which Maryland defeated Duke in a basketball game. It’s also the night that Maryland student John McKenna was beaten with riot batons by a couple of police officers during the celebratory mayhem that followed the game. McKenna and his family hired a private investigator who found a tape of the incident, showing that McKenna was not provoking the officers and was unarmed. The tape didn’t support the officers’ story that McKenna was belligerent to the policemen’s horses and it was the horses that caused McKenna’s injuries. A Prince George’s County, MD grand jury saw that tape recently. The officers are still innocent until proven guilty, but the grand jury indicted them earlier this week, charging them with first- and second-degree assault.
4. On May 13, UNLV senior Chace Stanback was pulled over for suspicion of DUI and ended up testing positive for marijuana. The summary of his punishment is as follows: $585 in fines, 40 hours of community service, attendance at DUI school, and participation in a victim impact panel. Yesterday, the school also suspended Stanback for the Rebels’ season opener on November 11 against Grand Canyon as well as an exhibition ten days earlier. The 6’8” swingman will be UNLV’s leading returning scorer, averaging 13.0 PPG last season (2nd on team), and led the Rebs last year in rebounding (5.9 RPG) as well as efficiency rating (13.5).
5. Speaking of November 11, that’s Veterans’ Day, and the night that Michigan State and North Carolina will face off in the first-ever NCAA game on an aircraft carrier, lovingly called the “Carrier Classic,” specifically aboard the USS Carl Vinson docked in San Diego. The combatants for the 2012 edition now look to be Arizona from the Pac-12 and Connecticut from the Big East ACC…well, whatever. We understand the reasons they’re doing this on the Vinson and why the ship has to be docked, but as we wrote in our original article on the carrier game, at some point in the future this has to be played on an active ship in the middle of missile drills. Talk about preparing a team to play on the road, man. The sight of a bird being launched in the middle of an 18-year old’s one-and-bonus will make a couple of snarky signs or synchronized cheers from some day-drinking poli-sci majors look pretty tame.

Kenny Ocker (@kennyocker) is an RTC contributor.

With the flurry of conference expansion that has taken place since the conclusion of the NCAA Tournament, the biggest focus has been upon two subsets of teams: those that would be taken to new conferences, and those whose conferences would be dismantled around them. The former teams — a collection of powerful programs such as Syracuse and Pittsburgh, and basketball also-rans like TCU and Nebraska, and schools in between — have understandably been analyzed because they are the institutions affecting the change throughout the collegiate sports landscape. The latter programs — Big 12 litigious ursines Baylor chief among them — fear being left behind and have received plenty of attention about the prospect of falling out of the upper echelon of big-time, big-money college athletics.  But there’s a third subset of programs affected by the changing composition of the conferences: the teams already within them. For the average team in an expanding major conference — teams like Oregon, Arkansas, or Georgia Tech — the impact of the expansion is one that hasn’t been looked at with the same level of scrutiny.

What Happens to Teams Like These in Conference Realignment? (AP/G. Broome)

So what is in store for these programs after this time of transition? The primary theme of uncertainty permeating the entire expansion process is just as applicable to these schools, and given the lack of coverage, it may actually be a more uncertain path. They possess similar conference structures, budgets and players, but they will face two fundamental problems exacerbated by the potential (or actual) growth of their conferences.

The first problem is likely to be the decreased amount of available challenging non-conference scheduling for teams. As their conferences grow, the pool of programs with similar statures that are available and willing to play them will diminish, both because teams will be able to play fewer teams as a result of the increased size of their conference and because of schools’ general unwillingness to play too many games against a single conference in one year.

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