It was very weird to see Big 12 football fans cope with a really bad weekend for their conference. The Big 12 had a fantastic offseason thanks to commissioner Brett Yormark, who ran rings around Pac-12 boss George Kliavkoff and the Pac-12 CEO Group. Yormark secured the Big 12’s long-term future with savvy and well-timed deals. The Pac-12 CEO Group, meanwhile, rejected a 2022 ESPN deal which would have kept the conference intact and unified. Kliavkoff, aware of how Larry Scott failed to exercise good leadership in the past, failed to tell the Pac-12 CEOs to get in line and accept the conference-saving deal. He allowed himself to get steamrolled, and in the process, he didn’t lead the conference with toughness or courage in its hour of peril. He allowed the CEOs to take down the conference, which will soon die.
Big 12 fans should be happy that their conference will live while the Pac-12 will not. It’s what they wanted. Big 12 fans should be able to easily shrug off what happened on the field this past weekend. So what if the Pac-12 didn’t lose a game, and the Big 12 suffered several bad losses? The Pac-12 won’t exist next year. Four Pac-12 schools will join the Big 12.
If the Big 12 is bad in football this year while the Pac-12 is great, it shouldn’t matter to Big 12 folks. They have a future, and they will add Pac-12 member institutions. The Pac-12 is dying.
Yet, the Pac-12’s success in Week 1 really seemed to get under the skin of Big 12 fans, who watched their conference stumble on several occasions. Insecurity apparently didn’t end with the offseason realignment skirmishes which dominated the conversation in college sports.
See for yourself how unsettled and restless Big 12 fans were. More specifically, notice how often a Big 12 fan would point out the Pac-12’s long-term failures when the discussion point was only the 2023 season, not the past seven to 10 years: