College Football: Adding and removing a team from each Power 5
By Austin Lloyd
Big 12 Conference
Add: SMU Mustangs
Everything points to Southern Methodist being the prime candidate to join the Big 12 Conference whenever they would be looking to expand, whether it is their location, history facing the conference’s current members, or recent quality of play.
Throughout 2020, the Mustangs looked better than multiple in-state counterparts, including but not limited to Baylor, Texas Christian, and certainly Texas Tech. What do all of those teams have in common? They are all Big 12 schools.
Remove: West Virginia Mountaineers
Boy, the Big East descendants can just not catch a break, can they? The reasoning behind selecting WVU to be booted out of the Big 12 Conference has nothing to do with their ability to compete within it, rather it is about their performance standards not being esteemed enough to outweigh how distant they are geographically from the rest of the league’s members.
Let’s say that the state of Texas is the heart of the conference, as it possesses forty percent of the teams that play in it. The Mountaineers are obviously the furthest program from Texas, but the second-furthest is Iowa State. To put that gap into perspective, three entire states fit between Iowa and West Virginia on the US map.
They were the last team to announce that they were joining the conference, and are vastly misplaced. Sorry Mountaineer fanatics.