The Southeastern Convention is getting larger and, in some way, even stronger.
Three different main conferences have fashioned an alliance, no matter meaning.
And the Huge 12 is useless man strolling.
After a interval of relative stability, faculty soccer heads into a brand new season wobbling from the aftershocks of one other main earthquake.
Not even Nostradamus can be keen to enterprise a guess on the way it’s all going to shake out.
However this a lot is obvious: the SEC will turn into a 16-team behemoth with the addition of Huge 12 powerhouses Oklahoma and Texas, a transfer that happens by 2025 on the newest and doubtless sooner.
The Huge Ten, Atlantic Coast Convention and Pac-12 have all dropped again on protection, hoping that some form of obscure partnership will in some way preserve the SEC from spreading its tentacles even farther.
Which leaves the Huge 12 because the odd man out, seemingly destined to hitch the Southwest Convention and others within the pantheon of defunct leagues, remembered solely by those that decide up a historical past e-book.
The SEC’s motives are clear: consolidate its stranglehold on faculty soccer — and, by extension, all of school athletics.
However the swiftly assembled partnership introduced this week between its three most viable Energy 5 challengers (plus Notre Dame, a quasi-ACC member) should provide you with a clearly outlined imaginative and prescient if it needs to maintain the SEC in test.
That’s not a straightforward process.
Contemplate the unwieldiness of the Huge Ten-ACC-Pac 12 alliance — 41 colleges stretching from Boston to Los Angeles, from Miami to Seattle, a hodge-podge of establishments which have little in frequent apart from ensuring the SEC doesn’t block all the daylight.
Given how shortly this all needed to come collectively, perhaps it’s not stunning that little was supplied in the best way of particulars.
“There’s no contract. There’s no signed document,” Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff stated. “There’s an agreement among three gentlemen and a commitment from 41 presidents and chancellors and 41 athletic directors to do what we say we’re going to do.”
Effectively, everyone knows how a lot gents’s agreements and non-contractual commitments are price within the cut-throat world of school athletics.
Frankly, we’ll wager a thousand payments to your greenback that each one 41 colleges will proceed to focus primarily on what advantages them individually, not the collective good.
Heck, they couldn’t even conform to agree on what stance they’ll tackle a proposal to develop the School Soccer Playoff from 4 to 12 groups (a transfer that regarded sure to occur till everybody hit the re-set button after the SEC wolfed up the Oklahoma and Texas like some form of Pac Man run amok.).
“This is not a voting bloc. We’ve not committed to voting together on anything,“ Kliavkoff said, each word making this sound less and less like a viable alliance. ”We’ve dedicated to debate all of those points, and to attempt to provide you with options which might be in the most effective curiosity of long-term faculty athletics.”
Okey-dokey.
For now, the alliance’s solely actual goal appears to be some form of loosey-goosey dedication to not go after one another’s members.
However suppose the SEC comes sniffing round Clemson — an ACC powerhouse that has been considered one of its few severe challengers? Or maybe Florida State, if the Seminoles can as soon as once more turn into related in faculty soccer?
As we all know, the SEC normally will get what it needs.
The convention has just about been the solar that the remainder of faculty soccer revolves round since its first main enlargement three many years in the past, which blew up the acquainted convention mannequin that had ruled the game by way of its trendy existence.
When the SEC poached Arkansas from the Southwest Convention (as a part of an enlargement that additionally included then-independent South Carolina), cut up into two divisions and arrange a convention championship recreation, it endlessly modified the look of the game.
The Southwest Convention crumbled, the Huge Eight convention swooped in to select by way of the stays (changing into the Huge 12), the Atlantic Coast Convention grabbed Florida State earlier than the SEC may, and the Huge Ten started scrambling for colleges to hitch its eleventh member, Penn State.
The SEC made its subsequent huge transfer in 2011, swiping Texas A&M and Missouri from the Huge 12. The Huge Ten and ACC have been busy increasing, too, changing into 14-team leagues, whereas the Pac-10 grew into the Pac 12.
The Huge 12 shrank to 10 colleges however managed to outlive by conserving Texas and Oklahoma within the fold.
However that was all the time a tenuous association at finest, and it lastly really feel aside with phrase this summer season that each the Longhorns and the Sooners had secretly been in talks to hitch the SEC — pulling the set off on a profitable transfer that has just about been on the radar for the reason that starting of this 30-year-long realignment scramble.
Now, there’s no hope for the Huge 12 — particularly after it wasn’t included within the new alliance organized by the opposite Energy 5 members.
All it obtained have been hole phrases.
“We want and need the Big 12 to do well,” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips stated. “The Big 12 matters in college athletics.”
Not for for much longer.
Iowa State and Kansas may wind up within the Huge Ten. Oklahoma State and TCU are attainable candidates for an expanded Pac-12. West Virginia matches geographically with the ACC. Texas Tech, Baylor and Kansas State might need to drop all the way down to a Group of 5 convention such because the American or Mountain West.
If nothing else, let’s hope a viable challenger emerges to the SEC.
The convention has dominated faculty soccer for a lot too lengthy, claiming 11 of the final 15 nationwide championships and exhibiting no indicators of slowing down, definitely not so long as Nick Saban is at Alabama.
When Oklahoma — ranked No. 2 behind the Crimson Tide in The Related Press preseason ballot — and Texas come aboard, the steadiness of energy will tip even additional in its favor.
That’s nice for the SEC.
It’s not so good for faculty soccer.
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Paul Newberry is a sports activities columnist for The Related Press. Write to him at pnewberry(at)ap.org or at https://twitter.com/pnewberry1963 and take a look at his work at https://sociallytrend.com/search/paulnewberry
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More AP faculty soccer: https://sociallytrend.com/Collegefootball and https://twitter.com/AP_Top25
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