The Big Southwest? The Big 12? The Big Eight and Southwest Four?
Some sort of new name may be needed if Southwest Conference schools Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor accept reported offers to join the Big Eight to form one big made-for-televison conference.Many newspapers published stories today saying the offer was on the table.
"We've had some informal conversations," University of Texas president Robert Berdahl told The Associated Press Monday night from his Austin home. "I guess one could say that it amounts to (an offer)."
The four schools reportedly must decide by Friday whether to head north, a move that likely would cripple the nearly 80-year-old SWC.
Officials for Baylor, Texas and Texas A&M say they'll meet later this week to discuss proposals. There was no immediate word on plans for a meeting by Texas Tech regents.
The SWC would be hard-pressed to survive with only Southern Methodist, Texas Christian, Rice and Houston. Those four reportedly were told by the Big Eight in a conference call Monday that they will not be invited.
A Big Eight expansion involving Texas, A&M, Tech and Baylor would put the league in a better position to negotiate a television contract - the original reason the two leagues began talking about getting together.
Talks sped up the last several weeks once it became obvious there was no way to continue any form of the College Football Association, the affiliation of conferences that negotiated the current television deal that expires after the 1995-96 season.
With the breakup of the CFA, the SWC and Big Eight are doing what they can to wrangle the most lucrative contract possible beginning with the 1996-97 season, officials said. The first step may be forming a new conference, then negotiating TV deals with the networks.
At this point, officials are tight-lipped about what exactly is going on between the conferences.
"We haven't got any firm arrangements yet," Colorado chancellor James Corbridge, president of the Association of Big Eight Universities, told the AP late Monday from his Boulder, Colo., home.
"We've got feelers out and we're waiting to see what the position is in the Southwest Conference. We're still negotiating and looking at all possible arrangements we can come up with to arrange for our future."
Corbridge said he hopes to have something worked out soon so they can begin finalizing a television package.
If the plan involves the four teams mentioned, that sets up many other things that would need to be considered:
Will there be one division or two? Will there be a postseason football championship game like the Southeastern Conference has? What happens to the Cotton Bowl? Where will the other schools go?
Several published reports said the new 12-team league could be split into divisions, with the four SWC schools joining Oklahoma and Oklahoma State in a southern division, leaving Nebraska, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri and Colorado in a northern division.
One interesting aspect is that the new league would be cut off from Houston and Dallas, the two largest markets in the SWC and home to the largest alumni base of most of the four schools being invited into the Big Eight.