Texas Tech football: How Tech can survive realignment

It’s become a summer tradition unlike any other and it’s risen its ugly head again in 2022; college football realignment.  (Though realignment will impact all sports, make no mistake, this is about college football and the money it generates.)  And for Texas Tech football fans, any talk of realignment leads to heightened states of nervousness given the tenuous seat our university holds at the adult table.

That was the case last year when it appeared that the Big 12 was on the verge of crumbling after Texas and Oklahoma announced their intentions to leave for the SEC in 2024.  And though the conference rallied enough to stay on its feet by adding Houston, Cincinnati, West Virginia, and Central Florida, the truth is that this year’s seismic shift in the landscape of college athletics has forced Red Raiders to once again consider our uncertain future.

On the surface, this year’s bombshell, the announcement that UCLA and USC will be leaving the PAC 12 for the Big 10, doesn’t seem like it would directly impact Texas Tech’s long-term future.  However, the aftershocks of those two moves will reverberate throughout the NCAA landscape.

Now, it appears more likely than ever that we are headed away from the world of multiple major conferences and towards a reality that sees only two major conferences in existence, the SEC and the Big 10, the two most powerful and most wealthy conferences in existence.  And with each passing year, the desire of those two leagues to swallow up marketable programs brings us one step closer to a world where only two conferences of about twenty teams each have the ability to vie for a national title.

Naturally, the remaining teams in the NCAA will continue to play football.  But they won’t be playing under the guise that they could conceivably play for a national title.  Of course, you could argue that in reality, only about 10 programs in the nation are true title contenders under the current model anyway.  But it is still a nice fantasy for the rest of the country to believe that they could shock the world and compete for a playoff spot if they catch lightning in a bottle.

However, when the sport goes to a two-conference model, as it seems destined to do, every team outside of those two conferences would enter the season knowing they will, under no circumstances, have any hope of being relevant at the highest level of the sport.

What is truly frightening for Texas Tech football fans is the very real (and perhaps likely) possibility that the Red Raiders will not be included in the Big 10 or SEC world takeover.  If we are being honest, the program that we love simply doesn’t carry with it enough cache on the field or in the world of television ratings to be a target of one of the sport’s two top leagues.

So does that mean that Tech will forever be relegated to the world of the irrelevant?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps there is a way for the teams outside of the Big 10 and SEC to still get their shot at national prominence.  But it is going to take a collective effort and that’s not what college football has been about in recent years.

First of all, the Big 12 must expand in a meaningful way.  Simply adding the two Arizona schools, Colorado, and Utah isn’t going to be enough.  The league is going to have to also find a way to add Oregon and Washington as those are two of the more high-profile brands left in limbo.

Bringing all six of those schools into the fold would give the league a national footprint but, more importantly, would also give the league two teams that, at times, have competed for national titles.  And having schools with that level of pedigree in the mix will be essential for the Big 12 if it wants to entertain any ideas of being invited to the cool kids’ party.

Next, the Big 12 is going to have to perform well enough on the field to be relevant in the national discussion on a yearly basis.  When going head-to-head with other leagues, the Big 12 must win far more than it loses, and virtually every year, the league must have one team in or near the top five of the national rankings.  Doing so will make it far more difficult to leave the Big 12 out of future College Football Playoff discussions, especially when (or if) those discussions turn towards expanding the current playoff model.

Finally, and this might be the biggest reach and longest shot, the Big 12 is going to have to hope that common sense wins out and that there is some sort of mutual consensus among all the major players in the sport that it is in the best interest of college football for there to remain a path to a playoff spot for teams outside of the two dominant conferences.

This seems like a far-fetched idea given that a team from outside of those two leagues hardly ever competes for a national title unless that team is named Clemson or Notre Dame.  Thus, the Big 10 and SEC could argue that the other leagues don’t deserve to have a place at the table, and they could decide to simply leave everyone else out in the cold.

But if those conferences can see that they are getting a king’s ransom anyway and then would like to do what’s best for the sport in general, then there may be a way for more teams to still have a shot.  Of course, given how the Big 10 and SEC have been operating lately, that notion seems laughable.

Still, it is a possibility, albeit a slight one.  But it is the best hope Texas Tech may have for staying in a position to eventually rise up and compete with the elite of the sport.  And during conference realignment chaos, hope may be all many schools have to cling to.