BOULDER — The Power 5’s redheaded stepchild is heading back to live with the other parent again.
The People’s Republic of Boulder has always been a drinking town with a slight football problem: CU Buffs donors and alums, by and large, sprawl from Denver to the Pacific Ocean. The vast majority of top-shelf prep gridiron talent and television sets, meanwhile, are east and southeast of Boulder.
The only way for CU president Todd Saliman and athletic director Rick George to truly thread the needle, to appease both sides of that equation, would be as part of the Big Ten, which has remarkable penetration in TV homes nationwide and just added the Los Angeles/Southern California market as a sweetener. Alas, the Buffs don’t see that invite from Chicago coming — not in the next four to seven years, at any rate.
Thus, given a choice between a Pac-12 without SoCal and a television package or a Big 12 with a $2.3 billion deal with ESPN and Fox and without Texas and Oklahoma, CU brass elected Thursday to ride with the latter of two potential evils.
So what does that mean for the Buffs starting in 2024, when they will resume membership in the league they left in 2011? Here are some answers that hopefully shed light on a few of the biggest questions on the minds of CU fans:
So when is this “official”?
CU is expected to officially join the league on July 1, 2024, and will begin playing competitively during the ’24-25 school year.
This is a good thing for football, right?
It’s not a bad thing, if that helps. Deion Sanders bringing his teams to Texas and Florida regularly — or semi-regularly — should only strengthen the recruiting pipelines that were the justification for his hiring in the first place.
While it could be argued that the path to the College Football Playoff is simpler in a Pac-12 without USC and UCLA in the mix, the Buffs would still (presumably) also have to lap Utah, Oregon and Washington along the way — and they’re 2-12 head-to-head vs. those three schools since 2017 (0-9 vs. the Ducks and Utes).
The Big 12, meanwhile, is looking to fill its own power vacuum with the departures of the Sooners and Longhorns in the summer of 2024. The final CFP rankings last December featured only two schools that will be in the Big 12 next fall — TCU (No. 3) and Kansas State (No. 9). The Pac-12 post-L.A. placed four schools within the top 15 in Utah (eighth), Washington (12th), Oregon State (14th) and Oregon (15th). Spin that one however you like.
The short answer is the Buffs are entering a larger league, yes, with more depth in terms of decent football programs, yes — but not as many so-called “elite” ones. Well, unless you consider Baylor, Oklahoma State and BYU “elite.”
What happens to all those Big 12 nonconference games?
CU AD Rick George said early Thursday evening that scheduled contests filled by Houston (2025, ’26), K-State (2027, ’28) and Oklahoma State (2036, ’37) — now conference brethren — are expected to be taken off the schedule and replaced by home games against what are likely to be Group of Five or FCS opponents.
How badly did the Pac-12, in delaying its television deal, mess this up?
Badly. Like really, really badly. George and chancellor Phil DiStefano repeatedly stressed “time slots” and “national exposure” for their student athletes Thursday in rationalizing the move, while also complimenting Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff and their Pac-12 peers.
In this case, listen to the actions, not the words. In short, the Pac-12 lost roughly 35-40% of its potential TV revenue when USC and UCLA left, according to longtime conference scribes Jon Wilner and John Canzano. And projections estimate that league’s per-school payouts will end up landing below the $31.7 million number Big 12 schools are expected to receive through 2031. Several Pac-12 administrations are about to accelerate those same, uncomfortable discussions that the Buffs have been having internally for months.
How will it affect men’s basketball?
Tad Boyle could win anywhere, and it helps that he’s a Big Eight/Big 12 guy at heart, having played at Kansas for Larry Brown and Ted Owens back in the early ‘80s. That said, this could get nasty — the Buffs just jumped from a decent, if top-heavy, Power 5 basketball loop to arguably the best and deepest in the country going forward.
The Big 12 sent seven schools to the NCAA Tournament this past March and six in 2022, and that was before they added Cincinnati and Houston to the mix. (For reference, the Pac-12 sent four schools to the Big Dance in ’23 and three in March of ’22.)
Big 12 commish Brett Yormark is unusually bullish on men’s hoops for a league administrator — and he might not be done, having reportedly pushed to add UConn as a member and even floating Gonzaga, the Duke of the West, as a non-football-playing candidate for Big 12 membership. Boyle’s done a fabulous job, but his job is about to become a bit tougher.
And women’s sports?
On the basketball side, there’s serious depth. The Big 12 placed six schools in the Big Dance this past March, same as in ’22. Among the top 60 programs in terms of the NCAA’s NET rankings at the end of last season, seven were schools that will be hooping it up in the Big 12 starting in ’24-25. And the Buffs had a better ranking (20) than all but one (Iowa State, at No. 15). In women’s cross country, only two ’24 Big 12 programs — Oklahoma State and BYU — topped CUs national ranking of 11th in the final ’22 regular-season coaches’ poll.
So do the Buffs have a “rival” now?
Tricky one. There’s still no Nebraska, and the rest of the candidates sort of fall off a cliff after that. No Texas or Oklahoma, either. It depends on who else might also decide to leave the Pac-12 for the Big 12, with Arizona being the option most likely to follow CU out the door. At least all parties can admit the whole “Utes thing” didn’t really take off, right?
Ironically, the most logical candidate for provincial “hate” might still be a Utah school — in this case, BYU, which is joining the Big 12 this fall. Like the Utes and Buffs, the Cougs and CU have some history together, although that history borders on ancient: BYU and the Buffs were both members of the old Rocky Mountain Conference in the ‘20s and ‘30s and the Mountain States Athletic Conference from 1937 to ’47 before CU joined the Big Seven and BYU transitioned to the Skyline Conference with CSU, DU, Wyoming, Utah and Utah State. The Buffs have a winning record vs. BYU in football (7-3-1), but the two haven’t squared off on the gridiron since 1988. The only one of the five “old Big 12” standbys — Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas, K-State, Oklahoma State — that CU doesn’t sport a winning record against in football is Texas Tech (5-5).
Maybe Coach Prime can start some kind of rhubarb down in Fort Worth against TCU in the ’23 season-opener and the rest will take care of itself. We’ll say this much, though: A traveling trophy — better yet, a stolen one — never hurts on the rivalry front.
How will it impact travel?
Farewell, Bay Area, L.A., and Seattle; hello, Ames, Manhattan and Stillwater! (Yeah, we know. Stop groaning.) Actually, the now-closest conference member to the Buffs is still located in Utah — it’s the aforementioned Cougars, which Google Maps tells us is 26 miles closer (488 miles) to Boulder than Kansas State’s Bill Snyder Family Stadium (514 miles), although the latter is the shortest drive (seven and a half hours). Either way, best gas up — or charge up — the Subaru.
What about kick/tip times?
BYU and the Buffs are, for now, the only member schools playing in the Mountain or Pacific time zones. ESPN and Fox would prefer football around the clock on Saturdays, which could mean 7:30 or 8 p.m. Mountain time kicks as the likely second half of an evening doubleheader. It’ll depend on the rest of the membership and the relative television appeal of CU’s game inventory. On the latter front, having Coach Prime really helps. A lot.
We heard a lot over the years about CU and Pac-12 “culture.” What is “Big 12 culture,” and how do the Buffs fit into it?
Less avocado, more brisket? The Big 12 does baseball and softball; the Buffs do not. CU does skiing (and well); the Big 12 doesn’t. Again, CU is one of those landlocked, flyover, autonomous schools that fits in everywhere and nowhere. The Pac-12 made sense on paper, but the distance between the league offices in San Francisco and Folsom Field seemed to grow larger by the year. The Buffs were a weird cousin in the Big 12, too, the “Berkeley of the Big Eight” that didn’t always align with the big oil and big hats of a league whose heart shifted from Kansas City to Texas.
The Buffs’ undergrad population has been something of a Colorado-meets-California sandwich for decades, and the school’s bean-counters sure as heck didn’t mind the out-of-state tuition rates — approximately $41,000-$45,000 per year, including fees — paid out by mountain-loving students from the Golden State.
CU will join Kansas and West Virginia as the only three Big 12 members who are the largest, or “flagship,” colleges in their respective states. The Buffs and Jayhawks are also the only league schools who are members of the prestigious Association of American Universities. Basically, there are lot more so-called “little brothers” and religious institutions than in the Pac-12. CU just hit the portal and transferred into a league where it’ll probably move to the head of the class, academically. Football, we’ll see.
