BIG 12 Cross Country is about to get VERY competitive

I can’t wrap my head around all the realignments. Gonna take like 2 years for it to sink in.

Definitely a lot had happened over the past decade.

This year the big announcement is Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Not clear when, but 3 years at most. If they leave before 2025 there's a $75 million penalty for each school.

This left the big 12 with only 8 schools(Colorado, Texas A&M, Missouri and Nebraska left in 2011-2012, replaced by TCU and West Virginia).

Obviously Big 12 had to make a move. They poached BYU, Houston, Cincinnati, UCF. Unfortunately this makes the Big 12 a pretty terrible football conference, bit still pretty good at basketball.

Oklahoma is one of the worst power 5 XC programs and now they’re in the best conference for track and field. Texas should be okay in the conference though.

runnER/DR wrote:

This left the big 12 with only 8 schools(Colorado, Texas A&M, Missouri and Nebraska left in 2011-2012, replaced by TCU and West Virginia).

Obviously Big 12 had to make a move. They poached BYU, Houston, Cincinnati, UCF. Unfortunately this makes the Big 12 a pretty terrible football conference, bit still pretty good at basketball.

Cincinnati is currently ranked 7th in football, and UCF was good a couple years ago and is currently receiving votes that would have them ranked 28th. And BYU is also receiving votes that would have them ranked 38th. So the teams that make up the future Big 12 still has 7 of the top 40 football teams of this year. Not very top heavy, but a lot of teams just outside of the top 25 (only 2 in the top 25 being Cincinatti and Iowa State). The SEC will now have 8 of the top 25 teams (currently with 6, but Texas and Oklahoma joining). Big Ten has 4 teams in the top 25 and another 4 teams in 26-40th spots. Oddly the SEC has a huge drop off having 7 current teams in the top 29 and then the other half of the conference is below the 45th mark.

This will be huge for Houston recruiting, and UCF/Cincinatti as well. I don't think it will change things too much for BYU, they are sort of an outlier school.

Last year let’s run was claiming that Oklahoma was a mid tier SEC team in XC

runnER/DR wrote:

Definitely a lot had happened over the past decade.

This year the big announcement is Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Not clear when, but 3 years at most. If they leave before 2025 there's a $75 million penalty for each school.

This left the big 12 with only 8 schools(Colorado, Texas A&M, Missouri and Nebraska left in 2011-2012, replaced by TCU and West Virginia).

Obviously Big 12 had to make a move. They poached BYU, Houston, Cincinnati, UCF. Unfortunately this makes the Big 12 a pretty terrible football conference, bit still pretty good at basketball.

The Big 12 should actually be pretty good at football (definitely behind the SEC and Big 10 but probably on par or better with the ACC and Pac-12) and extremely good at men's basketball.

I definitely think this will help BYU's recruiting. Maybe not as much as the others (as you said, BYU is kind of a unique case), but being in a Power 5 conference and playing multiple games in Texas every season is very likely to be helpful in all sports.

Agree to disagree. This will have little to no affect on BYU’s recruitment.

parleys canyon wrote:

bbg95 wrote:

I definitely think this will help BYU's recruiting. Maybe not as much as the others (as you said, BYU is kind of a unique case), but being in a Power 5 conference and playing multiple games in Texas every season is very likely to be helpful in all sports.

Agree to disagree. This will have little to no affect on BYU’s recruitment.

Which sport? If we're talking specifically about cross country, I probably agree. BYU could already win national championships out of the WCC. But in, say, softball, it will definitely help.

runnER/DR wrote:

Definitely a lot had happened over the past decade.

This year the big announcement is Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Not clear when, but 3 years at most. If they leave before 2025 there's a $75 million penalty for each school.

This left the big 12 with only 8 schools(Colorado, Texas A&M, Missouri and Nebraska left in 2011-2012, replaced by TCU and West Virginia).

Obviously Big 12 had to make a move. They poached BYU, Houston, Cincinnati, UCF. Unfortunately this makes the Big 12 a pretty terrible football conference, bit still pretty good at basketball.

agree--not a bad move for the Big 12 taking some of the better programs from the American conference which will likely be done in a few years; The prelude to this was about 10 or 11 years ago when Nebraska jumped ship to the Big-10 along with Maryland--miss the Oklahoma/Nebraska Big 8 rivarly but money talks; Texas will be in tough in the SEC in football and baskets (SEC improved a lot in the past few years); Kind of goes full circle with Texas and Arkansas being Southwest Conference rivals in the 80s along with A and M.

bbg95 wrote:

parleys canyon wrote:

Agree to disagree. This will have little to no affect on BYU’s recruitment.

Which sport? If we're talking specifically about cross country, I probably agree. BYU could already win national championships out of the WCC. But in, say, softball, it will definitely help.

Why do you think that?

BYU recruits a certain type of person and that person already knows BYU exists whether or not they’re playing OSU or Houston in softball.

If you’re gonna go to BYU your mind is already made up.

Texas wasn’t even good at Big12 football. Why would they suddenly get better in a harder conference?

idjogger wrote:

bbg95 wrote:

Which sport? If we're talking specifically about cross country, I probably agree. BYU could already win national championships out of the WCC. But in, say, softball, it will definitely help.

Why do you think that?

BYU recruits a certain type of person and that person already knows BYU exists whether or not they’re playing OSU or Houston in softball.

If you’re gonna go to BYU your mind is already made up.

I think that because I went to school at BYU and understand how recruiting there works. Yes, they tend to recruit a certain kind of person, but the idea that other recruiting factors (e.g. the conference they're in and the attending locations of those games, not to mention who the coaches are and how well the team has performed recently) doesn't affect BYU is just not true. For just one example, Haloti Ngata chose Oregon over BYU because of these factors. And Kristin Richards chose Stanford over BYU in part because BYU volleyball just happened to be having their worst year in program history when she was a senior in high school (her sister was even on BYU's team). Maybe the effect is less than other schools, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

parleys canyon wrote:

bbg95 wrote:

I definitely think this will help BYU's recruiting. Maybe not as much as the others (as you said, BYU is kind of a unique case), but being in a Power 5 conference and playing multiple games in Texas every season is very likely to be helpful in all sports.

Agree to disagree. This will have little to no affect on BYU’s recruitment.

It will not have an effect in XC of course. But it absolutely will change things for football and basketball. There isn't even a debate here.

bbg95 wrote:

parleys canyon wrote:

Agree to disagree. This will have little to no affect on BYU’s recruitment.

Which sport? If we're talking specifically about cross country, I probably agree. BYU could already win national championships out of the WCC. But in, say, softball, it will definitely help.

Sorry, I was referring to cross country. Regarding football, youd certainly be correct.

parleys canyon wrote:

bbg95 wrote:

Which sport? If we're talking specifically about cross country, I probably agree. BYU could already win national championships out of the WCC. But in, say, softball, it will definitely help.

Sorry, I was referring to cross country. Regarding football, youd certainly be correct.

Ok. So now, more Mormon players will decide to go to BYU instead of Alabama, et.al.?

Crow-Magnon wrote:

parleys canyon wrote:

Sorry, I was referring to cross country. Regarding football, youd certainly be correct.

Ok. So now, more Mormon players will decide to go to BYU instead of Alabama, et.al.?

I think it will be a swaying factor amongst people who were previously on the fence. A huge influence on their football team has been the Pacific Islander population with very few African Americans. They also lose a number of instate mormons to the university of Utah.

The conference change certainly isn’t going to be a detriment to their recruiting. Why are we talking about football, anyway?

So you claim that Big 12 XC will be VERY competitive. You also state that the new conference will be a slight upgrade in competition compared to the WCC. You didn't seem to be speaking in jest as far as I could tell so not sure what to make of your post in total. Oh and you refer to every XC program in the new Big 12 as "trash" outside of Iowa State, Oklahoma State and BYU.

mrmagont wrote:

So you claim that Big 12 XC will be VERY competitive. You also state that the new conference will be a slight upgrade in competition compared to the WCC. You didn't seem to be speaking in jest as far as I could tell so not sure what to make of your post in total. Oh and you refer to every XC program in the new Big 12 as "trash" outside of Iowa State, Oklahoma State and BYU.

The point is that BYU makes the Big 12 far more competitive than it was in XC. But that it doesn't change a ton for BYU specifically in cross country. Pretty simple, really.