http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/sports/ncaafootball/as-big-12-stands-pat-realignment-dominoes-stay-standing-for-now.html 2016-10-18 22:00:32 As Big 12 Stands Pat, Realignment Dominoes Stay Standing, for Now Moving up through conference realignment has become a sport in itself, and not only for the most powerful programs. === Chris Massaro, the athletic director at Middle Tennessee State, was serene in his reaction Monday night to the Big 12 Conference’s decision that, after several months of “The Big 12 decision in a lot of ways is good because it does not create chaos in the system,” Massaro said. But here is the part that drives home what was at stake in Middle Tennessee State, which is in Murfreesboro, outside Nashville, was not among the 11 institutions that made the Big 12’s final cut — a list that included eminent universities like Rice and Tulane, football powers like Brigham Young and Houston, and former power-conference mainstays like Cincinnati and Connecticut. It was not even among the nearly two dozen institutions from across the midmajor Group of 5 conferences — a seemingly random set that included East Carolina, Southern Methodist and Arkansas State, among others — that petitioned for inclusion when the Big 12 All of the bidders were reasonably seeking the prestige and the financial windfall that comes from membership in one of the Power 5 leagues: the Atlantic Coast, the Big 12, the Big Ten, the Pacific-12 and the Southeastern Conferences. Middle Tennessee State was not a favorite nor even a bidder; rather, it was a secondary domino. Massaro had contacted the second-tier American Athletic Conference in May, according to And why not? “Our goal,” Massaro said of any possible conference realignment, “is to be ready for it and, if there are opportunities, to be in a position to take advantage of it.” Middle Tennessee State’s football program jumped from Division I-AA to Division I-A (now known as the Football Championship and Football Bowl Subdivisions) in 2000 when it joined the Sun Belt Conference, before taking the step up to the comparatively richer Conference USA in 2013. Each leap brought boosts in prestige and payouts. A quick math lesson: Conference USA members receive annual payouts from their league of So while A.A.C. membership to a midtier program would have been like getting a grade changed from a B to a B-plus, joining the Big 12 would have been like turning a B into a Ph.D. For programs like Cincinnati and Connecticut, it was worth a try. Massaro’s outlook, then, was a cold-eyed, realistic one — which made it strikingly different from the view articulated just a couple hours earlier by the Big 12’s commissioner, Bob Bowlsby. “I don’t honestly know what we expected at the very beginning,” Bowlsby said at a news conference, referring to all the institutions that had raised their hands like audience volunteers at a children’s magic show. “It was an opt-in process. We had quite a few people self-identify.” He added, “It was perhaps a little bit more of a sweepstakes than we might have thought it was going to be at the very beginning.” Bowlsby might have been referring to just how public it all got. Brigham Young’s candidacy evolved into a national debate over its honor code, which bans “homosexual behavior.” Several universities openly advocated for themselves, emailing their official case statements to reporters. Houston But is it possible that the Big 12 simply did not expect the scope and intensity of the interest from Group of 5 colleges eager to acquire the magic bean of college sports that is membership in a Power 5 league? In an interview last month, Hunter Yurachek, the Houston athletic director, was blunt about the fate of teams outside the Power 5. “To say you want to compete at the highest level, which is have an opportunity to go to the College Football Playoff and be a part of that, we do not have the resources to do that on a sustained, year-in and year-out basis,” he said. So of course even a crack in the Big 12 door became a massive sweepstakes. Aspirationally competitive in a way F.C.S. programs are not and financially disadvantaged in a way Power 5 institutions are not, Group of 5 programs, as they are currently constituted, had no choice. And, in fact, they still don’t. “They’re going to hope they get invited to the power conferences and make a boatload of money, and that won’t happen in the majority of cases,” said Gilbert M. Gaul, the author of “Billion-Dollar Ball,” which examined the business of college football. “There might be wiggle room for four or five schools to get invited, and they’ll cash in,” he added. “In the meantime, we’re still going to be left with these other 60 to 65 schools trying to play football and losing money.” Recent history justifies Gaul’s skepticism. In the past few years, several colleges lost Power 5 status when they moved from the old Big East to the A.A.C., while only a handful of midmajor institutions were plucked upward. And the opportunities to join the Power 5 may decline, not increase: The Big 12 could implode altogether in roughly a decade, when Texas and Oklahoma could be free to go to one of the other major leagues. At Middle Tennessee State, Massaro remains optimistic. “There’s lots of ways to move forward,” he said. “Recently schools have done it through realignment. Others have done it through their infrastructure and building a better conference than the conference they’re in.” Times change and conferences evolve, he noted. “I don’t know,” he said, “if there is an endgame in college athletics.”