Last day of August and we may finally have some movement on the expansion front…maybe. I don’t usually include SBNation articles, but this did pull from a premium site reporting that the Big 12 has trimmed its list.
Big 12 reportedly trims list; Mountain West teams miss the cut
Mark Blaudschun of TMG College Sports ($) says the list includes American schools in Cincinnati, Houston, Connecticut, Memphis, Central Florida, South Florida plus a pair of unnamed AAC schools and then BYU.
Navy and Tulsa didn’t apply, so the 2 unnamed schools have to come from East Carolina, SMU, Temple, & Tulane
Oklahoma football: Big 12 expansion has no clear answer or result
And if it works, that’s great. A strong Big 12, with Oklahoma playing Texas, Oklahoma State and its old Big 8 brethren on a regular basis would be a fine home for all Sooner sports. And I don’t want to see a school like Iowa State left out in the cold because everybody else got greedy.
And if this expansion gambit fails? Well, that’s fine for Oklahoma, too. Keep recruiting well, keep investing in coaches and the Sooners will be successful, especially in football.
And about a decade from now, just take all that extra cash and the national brand that is Oklahoma football and park it somewhere else. There will be plenty of takers.
Tulane AD Troy Dannen acknowledges Big 12 talk: ‘I can’t say a thing’
“All I can say is this: I can’t say a thing,” Dannen said. “I honest to goodness cannot say a thing because, as everyone knows, there are confidentiality agreements that everyone signed that have interest in Big 12 membership. And we signed it.”
USF season ticket sales up by more than 3,000
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/bulls/usf-season-ticket-sales-up-by-more-than-3000/2291508
The school reported Tuesday 15,842 season tickets have been sold for the 2016 season, in which USF is expected to contend for the American Athletic Conference title. The total is an increase of 3,028 from last season, and represents a 33-percent increase in general-public season ticket sales from '15.
Temple on Big 12’s list to interview
“The most important quality of any potential addition to the Big 12 is the size of the television market,” Atkins wrote. “This was the main reason that the Big 10 admitted Rutgers a few years ago. Temple blows most of the other candidates away on this criteria.”
