Mustangs seek wealthier league
In big news this week: the Big 12 is reportedly in deep discussions to add six members of the Pac-12. Oh, and the Pac-12 is reportedly eyeing a “loose” alliance with the ACC for the second realignment in a row. Oh, and Notre Dame could reportedly…
You get the picture. If it isn’t obvious already, the dust of college realignment is in the air and still not close to settling. What does that mean for SMU?
For the better part of the decade, the Mustangs have eyed a jump to a power conference but have been unsuccessful. They pitched the Big 12 in 2016, only to see the conference resist expansion. Then, when the losses of Texas and Oklahoma forced the Big 12 into survival-mode expansion, the conference chose BYU, Central Florida, Cincinnati and Houston instead of SMU.
After last year’s conference shuffle, there was a feeling around SMU that the next wave would be the one that finally gave the Mustangs admittance into a bigger conference. That wave, thanks to the shocking move of USC and UCLA to the Big Ten, is now here.
SMU has had conversations with leaders in the Big 12, the ACC and the Pac-12 recently, sources with knowledge of the situation told the Dallas Morning News. Bigger decisions, such as Notre Dame’s future and the direction of each of the three aforementioned conferences, still need to be figured out before SMU could potentially make a move, but there’s internal optimism the dust could eventually settle in SMU’s favor.
“You have to feel good about where we’re at,” one source said.
The pitch
Where SMU is located is a major reason for the optimism.
In terms of realignment, the most important factor is TV. The Big Ten, with the additions of USC and UCLA, is set to cash in on its next TV deal. The Pac-12 moved up its timeline for actively negotiating a new TV deal so it can offer tangible evidence of future revenue to its current members and potential new ones.
The Dallas-Fort Worth market is the fifth-largest in the country, according to Nielsen’s 2021 rankings, broadcasting to nearly 3 million total homes. Los Angeles, for example, is second with over 5.7 million homes.
The Big 12 already has a presence in Texas and Dallas-Fort Worth, but what if the Pac-12 (hampered by losing two schools in its biggest television market) and the ACC (wanting to keep up with the Joneses, realignment style) wanted to get a presence in Texas?
In meetings with prospective conferences, SMU would have to explain exactly how much of the market it could bring with it now and how much potential there is for growth. The Mustangs’ largest home attendance last season was 29,121 against North Texas.
In addition, their largest TV audience game was against eventual College Football Playoff participant Cincinnati (938K). In 2019, SMU’s largest audience was on ABC in a top-25 matchup against Memphis. Nearly 3 million tuned into that game.
With competition from an automatic qualifying conference, SMU leaders believe those numbers could increase.
That’s an idea that would take some selling and it’s been part of the pitch to the Big 12 that’s gone unsuccessful, but this time around there could be other options.
With the Big Ten going national, other conferences may see a chance to do the same. Dallas is approximately 1,100 miles from the ACC’s headquarters in Greensboro, N.C., and about 1,800 miles from San Francisco, which was the location of the Pac-12’s last headquarters. Having a presence in Dallas could give both a chance to stretch their conferences without stretching themselves too thin.
And having a presence in one of the most fertile recruiting grounds in the country wouldn’t hurt those conferences’ schools, either.
Other factors SMU could pitch:
• A $2 billion endowment fund
• A top-70 school in U.S. News and World Report’s national rankings
• Plans for a $100 million end zone expansion to Ford Stadium
The path
Part of the reason SMU leaders feel so optimistic is because they believe they’re the best nonPower Five option remaining.
The question: will a conference seek out another non-Power Five school? If the Big 12 steals six members from the Pac-12, and Oregon and Washington find a way to the pot of Big Ten gold at the end of the rainbow, there might not be a reason for another conference to add from the Group of Five.
But what if the Pac-12, Big 12 and the ACC can’t tear away members from each other, leaving only Group of Five options as points of improvement?
Jon Wilner of the Bay Area News Group reported on Wednesday that Oregon and Washington — two potential catalysts in realignment moving forward — would likely have to choose between “making it work in the Pac-12” or joining the Big 12, with the preference being the former.
That could open the door for Group of Five schools.
If that were to happen, some perspective on SMU’s potential competition: John Canzano of the Bald Faced Truth reported this week that Fresno State, San Diego State and Boise State — in addition to SMU — had inquired with the Pac-12. SMU sits in the largest TV market among those schools. The other three schools also don’t have Association of American Universities or R1 research affiliation.
Any Group of Five school making the jump would likely have to come with a front-end discount in terms of TV deal payout. That’s one way to entice other conferences to add a potential member.
SMU, for the last decade, has hoped to join the club. Those around the athletics program point to other private schools in Texas such as Baylor and TCU — a school with a similar enrollment — as examples of what steps the Mustang programs could take if they were in a more prominent conference.
This time around, SMU is internally optimistic, though history has shown that anything can happen in realignment before the dust settles.