Postscripts: What the Big 12 Offers ACC Schools, Plus the NCAA Transfer Portal Fight is Dead
What’s going on in the Big 12 and beyond? I expand and explain every Sunday in Postscripts at Heartland College Sports, your home for independent Big 12 coverage.
This week, Florida State just triggered the next stage of the reshaping of college sports (and potentially the Big 12), Texas wins another natty and the transfer portal is getting an overhaul that will probably work about as well as the last one.
The Beginning of the Middle of the End
Think of the reshaping of college football as a three-act play. The destruction of the Pac-12 — in its current form anyway — was Act 1. Ten of the 12 teams have new homes now and the Pac-12 will never be what it was.
Act 2 started on Friday as Florida State filed suit to challenge the ACC’s Grant of Rights. Never before has an undefeated Power 5 team left out of a College Football Playoff gone full rage-monster on its own conference like FSU is on the ACC. Of course, this is also the first time an undefeated team has been left out of the CFP so … not much precedent there. Is this what we can expect in the future if undefeated teams get left out of playoffs?
Of course, this isn’t just about the CFP. It’s about money. It’s about positioning. It’s about the ACC’s terrible TV deal, in comparison to the SEC and the Big Ten.
Strictly from a spectator sport standpoint, this should be tons of fun to watch, mostly because It doesn’t involved a Big 12 existential crisis. We’ve learned the following just in the past few days:
Before Florida State even filed its lawsuit against the ACC, the ACC filed a lawsuit against FSU pre-emptively on Thursday, saying FSU wasn’t allowed to challenge the grant of rights and that any case should be decided in North Carolina where the ACC offices are located.
Apparently if you want to see the ACC’s GOR you have to go to its home office and review it on site. You can’t take photos or copy anything down verbatim. I mean police reports are more accessible than this stuff.
FSU’s filing included some pointed words about the ACC’s newest additions — Cal, Stanford and SMU. The Mustangs took some strays. They don’t deserve that.
This nugget, by far, is the most significant. Apparently, the ACC’s TV contract, which has always been reported as being through 2036, has a bit of a loophole. There’s an option, which ESPN can exercise unilaterally, that triggers the final 10 years of the deal. As The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach and others pointed out, there actually is no “guaranteed” TV money for the ACC past 2027 unless ESPN pulls the trigger.
And you thought ESPN was putting its thumb on the scale when it came to Oklahoma’s and Texas’ move to the SEC? That’s nothing compared to this. ESPN, in a real and profound way, holds the ACC’s future — or death — in its hands.
So let’s walk through this. We know several members of the ACC were contemplating challenging the Grant of Rights this summer. We also know from reporting that if more than half the league challenges it, there’s a good chance the GOR could go away. We have one school challenging it now in FSU. My guess is they’ll have company soon. We have a league with little leverage because it needs that TV deal option to keep its membership. And we have a TV network that is starting to get really choosy about what it spends its money on.
We have a recipe for the next stage of college realignment. Sure, the SEC and the Big Ten have SAID they’re done. But, that’s different when there are chess pieces on the board. And if FSU hits the board, let’s just say we’re one move closer to checkmate.
The Big 12 would naturally benefit from this because some of those ACC programs would need a home, and with a strategy to be a national conference, geography matters less these days. The Big 12 could expand — and quickly, assuming ESPN and Fox are cool with adding to the existing pro rata (and if ESPN doesn’t have to pay the ACC, they probably would be).
The Big 12 doesn’t have the TV contracts the SEC and the Big Ten does, but it does have something the Pac-12 didn’t and the ACC appears to be losing — stability.
Who would have put money on that nearly three years ago?
Oh, by the way, what’s Act 3 you ask? The most powerful teams in the game spin off to play in their own league with their own commissioner, playoff and revenue sharing model that benefits players and leaves the NCAA in its wake. That will probably include most of the Big 12. That’s where we’re headed. The trigger point for Act 3 is likely when a judge somewhere concludes that student-athletes are either employees or, at minimum, entitled to revenue sharing and not just NIL money.
There’s a case out west, one that includes TCU’s Sedona Prince as a plaintiff, that could tip that scale soon.
Texas Volleyball Reigns Again
The Texas volleyball team defeated Nebraska volleyball to win its fourth national championship last weekend. It marks an end of an era as it was the end of Texas volleyball’s reign in the Big 12, which has been a successful one.
Texas beat Stanford, Wisconsin and Nebraska in its final three games. If you’re not familiar with volleyball, that would be like, say, Alabama beating Georgia, Michigan and Texas in three straight football games to win a national championship. It’s that kind of gauntlet.
By the way, Alabama has already beaten Georgia and will face Michigan in the CFP semifinal on New Year’s Day. Then … Texas? Just saying.
The NCAA’s Transfer Fight Is Toast
Along with all of the Florida State stuff came this note late in the week. With the judge’s ruling on two-time transfers in Ohio vs. NCAA, the NCAA circulated a memo to member schools that told them, based on the ruling, that multi-time transfers, in football and other sports, would be eligible to play at their new school *next year* without a waiver.
This comes as football players are making transfer moves for the 2024-25 season. So, if you’ve transferred twice, you *may* not have to sit out in 2024-25. Here’s the full language provided by the NCAA:
It is not certain at this time whether the preliminary injunction will remain in effect during the 2024-25 season; however, as long as the undergraduate student-athlete transfers to another Division I institution during the 2023-24 academic year, the student-athlete will not be subject to Bylaw 14.5.5.1 during the 2024-25 academic year. The student-athlete would still be subject to any academic eligibility standards required for competition that may be developed or modified for the 2024-25 academic year.
The last sentence is tricky — “any academic eligibility standards required for competition that may be developed or modified for the 2024-25 academic year.”
So, we just went through this with Ohio vs. NCAA. The whole reason that happened was because the NCAA applied new rules to older transfers. They pushed back and won.
This note also slipped under the radar. The NCAA is again mulling changes to the transfer portal, per Yahoo! Sports. Among them?
“Abolishing the year-in-residency penalty, increasing transfer academic eligibility requirements and levying financial penalties on schools that don’t meet academic benchmarks.”
If the NCAA can’t win with the athletics, they’ll come after the academics, which is a little twisted since the NCAA really does want student-athletes to get degrees, despite what you might think.
Among the potential changes is increased credit hour requirements for eligibility from six hours to nine hours (I’m assuming this is on a semester basis), developing a path to graduation for transfers and developing a new metric for transfers like the Academic Progress Rate. Much of this would be tied to financial penalties for the schools for either not complying or falling short of standards.
Mark my words — the NCAA will change its academic rules but won’t learn from its last mistake and apply them immediately instead of allowing a transition period (they all but said that above). Then they will be right back in the same boat, only it will be the schools suing them and not the athletes.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard.
