Kansas Jayhawks News: The alliance is clearly unclear

All the Kansas Jayhawks and the rest of the Big 12 could do is sit idly by as the Big Ten, ACC, and Pac-12 announced their infamous alliance plans Tuesday afternoon.

This alliance, as the Big Ten put it, “will be guided in all cases by a commitment to, and prioritization of, supporting student-athlete well-being, academic and athletic opportunities, experiences, and diverse educational programming.”

The three conferences even included a scheduling component, which would involve football, and men’s and women’s basketball, allowing them to schedule big matchups throughout the year. The Big Ten release also mentions these matchups would adhere to current scheduling commitments. They understand the importance of historic rivals, leaving the door open for scheduling games with other conferences, not in the alliance.

The most interesting part of this alliance is, per Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, there isn’t a contract involved.

"“There was an agreement among three gentlemen and a commitment from 41 presidents and chancellors. There is no signed document, and there doesn’t need to be. … We didn’t focus on that, we didn’t even talk about that.”"

After seeing what happened between the Big 12 and SEC, this appears to be a bit risky and, at the very least, rushed. But with things like conference realignment that involve boatloads of money, decisions like this need to be made swiftly.

What this whole alliance appears to be about is conserving the league by maintaining the majority vote between the alliance conferences, not allowing college sports to “get out of hand.”

They claim, “student-athletes participating at the highest level of collegiate athletics will remain the driving factor in all decisions moving forward.” But in all actuality, this was a move in a game of chess to strike fear into the SEC, hoping it would lead them to take the other conferences seriously.

In response to the alliance, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey stated to The Athletic, “We have respect for each of our conference colleagues and look forward to our future collaborations. I believe we remain unified by our shared beliefs around the positive impact college sports has on the lives of student-athletes and throughout our communities.”

Another factor to this alliance is halting the college football expansion. It’s not that the three conferences, the Big Ten, ACC, and Pac-12, are against expansion; they want a bigger input on how it evolves, as in how many teams are included and what networks are involved.

As for how this affects the Big 12, it doesn’t appear to be good.

Jim Phillips, ACC Commissioner, offered respect to the conference saying, “We want and need the Big 12 to do well.” Phillips continued, “The Big 12 matters in college athletics. The Big 12 matters in Power 5 athletics and our FBS group.”

It’s obvious why the alliance would prefer the Big 12 stay together. The longer the conference lasts, the more money lost by the SEC. But what will be especially interesting about this comment is if any of the three alliance conferences expand using Big 12 schools.

What does appear to benefit the remaining Big 12 schools is the lack of contract involved. It doesn’t completely rule out future conference expansion for any of the three alliance conferences.

In a statement to ESPN, Pac-12 Commissioner George Kliavkoff said, “We’ll announce a decision on whether or not we’re going to be looking at expansion before the end of this week.”

A statement made by former Pittsburgh football coach Dave Wannstedt on 670 The Score said that he’d heard Oklahoma State and Kansas State to the Pac-12, West Virginia to the ACC, and Kansas and Iowa State to the Big Ten have all but been confirmed.

Whether these rumors appear to be true or not, it behooves the Big 12 to start making moves and make them soon. It’s even been reported they’ve hired former West Virginia Athletic Director Oliver Luck to consult in “assessing opportunities and navigating the landscape.”

The clear assessment of the inevitable downfall of the Big 12 has been in commissioner Bob Bowlsby’s lack of leadership. Maybe this helps them get creative in looking at expansion and/or trying to find a massive network deal to make up for the loss of Texas and Oklahoma.

It’s a bit far-fetched, but maybe Amazon is interested in digging deeper into the sports market and can offer something unique and worthwhile on their Amazon Prime streaming service. Again, highly unlikely it competes with the likes of ESPN and Fox, but the idea is to stay open and be creative.

As all of this unfolds, though, the Kansas Athletic Department remains calm and quiet. Where they’ll end up is a long way away from being decided.

But even with recent events and the newly released alliance, all remains calm and collected along the Jayhawk front. The confidence remains they will be taken care of and happily ever after once the dust settles.