As the days go on and on, it seems to be more likely that the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns could be on their way out of the Big 12 conference and setting their sights on joining the SEC. This move would mean that the SEC would be college football’s first sixteen-team “super-conference” while the Big 12 would then be down to eight teams. They would need to start to look for teams that could join their conference to keep it afloat unless something else happens that I think is a possibility that I talk about at the end of this article.
But first, for this to happen, the two teams would owe the Big 12 conference around $75-80 million to buy out the rest of their grant media rights. If the SEC were to bring them in and strike a deal, this would make it relatively easy for both schools to afford the hefty price tag.
This certainly would shake up the college football world as we know it. Oklahoma and Texas are two of the pioneers of the Big 12 conference that began in 1996 with Texas being the winners of the conference championship in the conference’s inaugural season. Oklahoma has dominated the conference, winning fourteen Big 12 championships which are eleven more than the next best team Texas who has won three conference titles.
The loss of both teams would certainly be a massive loss for the Big 12 who although has some promising teams in Iowa State and Oklahoma State who were two top 25 AP teams, they are in big trouble with having a conference that doesn’t feature two of college football’s bigger programs.
Now how exactly would both teams fare in the SEC? Well based on recent history, they fare relatively well. Since 2010, Oklahoma’s record against SEC competition is 5-4 while Texas’ record in the same time frame has been 3-3. You can’t expect that they will come in and be better than Alabama but the competition and the games are only going to get better.
Now, what does this mean for the rest of college football? I think that we could be in for a lot of change. This type of move from Oklahoma and Texas I think could result in more teams being moved. The SEC having this “super-conference” of sixteen teams could see more of these types of conferences being created in order to bring balance. For example, we saw Notre Dame this year due to COVID-19 seeing them join the ACC for the season, could that become something we see permanently? I think we’re going to see more of this happening and I think a major shift is coming for college football, whether or not this is a good change remains to be seen but expect changes to come in the future.
For now, if this does happen, I am excited as a fan to see the Red River Rivalry come to the SEC and continue to see some good football between both of these squads.