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, it’s time for the Big 12 to throw a football schedule party, Deion is staying put and our football guy makes a good point about the almighty dollar.
LET’S BLOW OUT THE SCHEDULE
The College Football Playoff championship game was barely cold and the ACC was already out there announcing its 2025 football schedule. And they’re doing it the right way.
On Thursday, the ACC released its zero week and week one games. Now, there was little drama there because most of those games were already set. But, in working with their TV partners (well, ESPN) they made small tweaks. Week one is over the Labor Day holiday and the ACC does a great job of making sure it has a game on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday that week.
Then, on Friday, the league announced its first three ACC games. The opponents were set long ago. But the league released each team’s first three games.
On Monday, the rest of the schedule will be released.
The NFL has mastered this. When I covered the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 20 years ago (dear God it’s been that long?), NFL Network was still a relatively new thing. The league’s network turned the reveal of the NFL schedule into a two-hour extravaganza. It’s hard to top.
Perhaps it’s time for the Big 12 to try SOMETHING different when it comes to the schedule reveal?
Typically, the league just drops the schedule one day without much fanfare. And there are limits to what the league can do. After all, creating a nine-game conference schedule over 10 or 11 weeks is not an easy exercise. It’s not like you can do it NBA Draft Lottery style, although that would be super-intriguing.
But a one-hour special wouldn’t be out of line? You’d need a TV partner for that, right? Or maybe you don’t. I mean, commissioner Brett Yormark keeps touting the league’s new FAST network. Perhaps this is a chance to leverage that?
Or, how about this Brett — let the Heartland College Sports staff do it. Pete Mundo does video on a regular basis (Subscribe to our YouTube channel here). We can’t promise ESPN level production. But it will, at least, be fun. For instance, Derek Duke does a shot every time we reveal an Iowa State road game. That’s must-see streaming.
Let’s hope the Big 12 mixes it up a little bit this time around. I’d love to see something different in this area.
CHAMPIONSHIP FUEL
I cover Big 12 basketball but I can’t be everywhere. So finding this quote from Iowa State’s Curtis Jones, via Ben Hutchens at the Quad City Times, is the stuff you can build stories around.
Turns out Jones used a Big 12 Championship trophy as fuel for his 33-point outburst against Arizona State — just not the one you’re thinking of.
So, maybe honoring the ASU football team during the Iowa State basketball game wasn’t the best decision, Tempe?
Related: Five Biggest Takeaways From Saturday’s Big 12 Basketball Games
MONEY AND FOOTBALL PARITY
Our Derek Duke wrote earlier this week about whether money has created parity in college football. This was his closing paragraph:
The point of all this just goes to show that no matter where you are in the country, the opportunity to turn your team into a winner is easier than ever before. Whether in Lubbock, Ames, Morgantown or anywhere else, the opportunities are endless if you are willing to open up your wallet.
Derek is right, and he’s not the only one that has written about this. If you think about this logically, this is where we’ve been headed for the past few years.
Everyone wants to win, but only a few dozen teams can truly afford to “open up” their wallet to make it happen. NIL has helped change that to some degree. Revenue-sharing, which starts this summer, is going to democratize the field even more. Not every FBS school is going to share $20 million per year. Some won’t be able to afford to. But most, if not all, Big 12 schools will and that evens the playing field for them within the conference and across FBS.
NIL isn’t going away, but it could be harder to use in the settlement. Schools can now bring NIL management in-house, but those deals are going to come under more scrutiny through a clearinghouse that will review every deal worth more than $600 to ensure it’s not strictly “pay for play.” And, yeah, I know, the NCAA is going to be in charge of it. So we’ll see.
Everyone is saying the SEC is dead after failing to win the last two national championships. The SEC isn’t dead. But the democratization of NIL and revenue sharing closes the gap so significantly that the expanded playoff is going to look more like this year’s — wide open. And that’s fun for college football fans.
That’s why the SEC and the Big Ten will keep pushing for guaranteed playoff berths — and why the ACC and the Big 12 need to keep fighting against it.
DEION IS STAYING PUT
So, Deion Sanders didn’t get the Dallas Cowboys job. Brian Schottenheimer did. I think I speak for most Cowboys fans when I say we wish Jerry Jones would reconsider. His clown-show coaching search ended up with an underwhelming choice.
But it’s good news for Colorado as Coach Prime gears up for his third year. So the Buffs have that going for them.
I don’t know if Coach Prime could have handled being an NFL coach. But at least it would have been must-see TV.
THIS SEQUENCE
After games like Kansas vs. Houston on Saturday, plenty of interesting statistics are unearthed. We wrote about one here. The outcome was the most unlikely between two AP Top 25 teams in the last 15 years when you take into account that Houston was down six points in the first overtime with 20 seconds left?
What an epic sequence.
THIS WEEK’S NIL AWARD GOES TO…
The Clemson Tigers, whose baseball team signed an apparel deal with Absolutely Ridiculous, a company New York Yankees star Jazz Chisholm has a deal with.
Mat Winter, a college athletics attorney who posts about NIL, called it “…a good example of how schools can get NIL dollars to athletes over and above the House settlement’s cap on payments from schools.”
Jon Blau at the Post and Courier, which covers Clemson, originally reported the apparel deal.
This is especially important for Big 12 schools to consider as more NIL comes in-house and schools will be looking for ways to augment income for Olympic sports that don’t generate as much revenue.
I realize some of you may not like this idea, but here’s the alternative.
Cleveland State is shutting down a sport, softball, that won its Horizon League title last year. Sadly, smaller schools are going to have to consider that as everyone sorts out what revenue can be shared and what can’t.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard.
