Did the Big 12 just invite its new overlord?

A great irony of the future composition of the Big 12 is the fact some of the new programs may be best positioned to dominate it. Particularly Utah.

It’s possible the Big 12 will add a few more schools before closing up shop for good, particularly if they can nab any ACC schools that would bring value. For the most part though, their task now is simply to figure out how to break up the teams (Divisions? Pods?).

Presumably the fact this conference now spans across three time zones will lead to an East and West Division.

I took a stab at trying to formulate what those would look like and read suggestions from a few other places as well. The most likely formulation is pretty easy to guess at:

Back in the day when the Big 12 had a North and South division, it ended up being awfully lopsided. The South division had three different schools with nationally competitive resources between Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M. The North had plucky Kansas State, Nebraska who started to fall off soon after the league was formed due to the retirement of Tom Osborne (gradually and then all at once), Colorado who was initially strong and then kinda gave up, and Missouri actually emerged as one of the stronger programs with three division titles late in the Gary Pinker era before they moved to the SEC.

Looking at these divisions…I see a similar lack of balance. A pod system would be better, but however you slice it, there are certain attributes of some of these new western programs that are going to be very interesting in the new-look conference. That West division is savage and the new schools invited to the mix have a chance to dominate, one in particular…