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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/MannOSteel on 2023-08-11 17:30:56.
When the Big 8 and Southwest Conference came together to dissolve and create the Big 12, why weren’t more members of the old SWC involved? I understand that there was a lot of political meddling to get certain schools in or keep others out, so why didn’t they just include them all? The alignment could’ve been something like this:
North: Colorado, Iowa St, Kansas, Kansas St, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma St
South: Arkansas, Baylor, Houston, SMU, TCU, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech… sorry Rice
This would’ve been an ideal alignment because it’d keep the original conferences more-or-less intact. Oklahoma wouldn’t have had to only play Missouri and Nebraska every other year, for example.
The best (and I suppose the most rational) explanation was that they wanted to take as few members as possible while still being eligible to have a conference championship game so that they could maximize the revenue distribution. Is this the case for why they only took 12?
I’m a Pitt fan so I didn’t follow everything super closely at the time, so I’m curious to learn more about this. TIA.