Pac-10 will snub BYU, Utah

Longtime commissioner of the Pac-10, Tom Hansen is leaving his post, and a new face will replace him. This has brought on a debate whether the Pac-10 will once again revisit the issue of expansion.

I've had several people ship me a well-researched speculative piece on Foxsports.com by Greg Welch, making a case that BYU and Utah present excellent candidacies for membership in the Pac-10. The story chronicles and compares Pac-10, BCS and non-BCS football and basketball attendance, athletic budgets, market rankings and rivalries. It spells it out pretty well.

Yes, BYU and Utah would make great members of the Pac-10. In fact, I'd bet my most prized material possession, my golf clubs, that Utah and BYU would be better Pac-10 programs than Washington State and Oregon State.

But if it happens, it won't be any time soon. Changing commissioners won't change a general philosophy in the Pac-10 that they've got the money and the TV exposure, a gob of money and others do not. And they're not sharing.

Simple as that.

Reading this piece by Welch, the quickest reaction I had is of a wayward premise that a new commissioner might matter.

A conference commissioner like Hansen, or even Karl Benson of the WAC or the MWC's Craig Thompson, do not make such decisions.

They carry out policies decided by university presidents.

They have a staff that studies issues and makes recommendations, but they do not decide. It's akin in politics to a city manager doing the bidding of a city council and mayor.

University presidents in the Pac-10 have no desire to expand. Their conference deploys a system where every team plays one another and a true champion is crowned. It has a train-load of money from an ABC-TV contract shared with the Big Ten until 2014.

The Pac-10 has the Rose Bowl, which is exempt from the $6 million fee other BCS bowls must pay to have the BCS label by its name. It keeps Rose Bowl money and BCS coin, and it's a league that isn't going to divide it with new kids on the block.

Imagine a president at USC or chancellor at Washington sitting in his living room during the holidays, turning on the TV to watch the Rose Bowl and seeing BYU or Utah as the Pac-10 representative.

Won't happen until gasoline is back to a buck a gallon or the left coast becomes one big, long beach.

So, an otherwise excellently researched piece with fascinating figures is more fodder for discussion than staple for an actual move that has a voice of flesh and bone. The Pac-10 is set.

When Utah rattled the BCS back in 2004, native Utahn Greg Hansen, a sportswriter in Pac-10 territory, floated the idea of BYU and Utah in the Pac-10. He made a good case, working as an astute observer from the front lines in Pac-10 territory.

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