Well, the leap of Colorado to the Pac-10 first reported on two days ago has been made official.
ESPN broke the news earlier today, including comments by UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel on the move.
UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel, who coached at Colorado earlier in his career, said he was “thrilled” to have the Buffaloes in the Pac-10. Colorado was put on two years’ probation in 2002 mostly for recruiting violations that occurred while Neuheisel was the coach there.
Neuheisel said he has a “fond place in my heart for Colorado.”
“From a proximity standpoint, we used to say, it’s closer to Los Angeles than Seattle is.
“So it’s got a lot of natural geographic relationships with the current Pac-10 and I think it’s going to be a natural fit,” Neuheisel said.
Previous reports have said that Colorado was just one of six teams that would make the jump to the Pac-10, along with the Universities of Texas and Oklahoma as well as Texas Tech.
However, from the same article, it seems that Texas and Texas A&M have not yet fully committed to leaving the Big 12.
Texas and Texas A&M officials were to meet Thursday at an undisclosed location to discuss the future of their athletic programs and the Big 12 amid speculation the league could be raided by rival conferences and broken apart.
Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds has said he wants to keep the Big 12 together.
If Nebraska leaves, it’s possible that the Big 12 could still stay together despite losing two members. The conference could also possibly survive the moves of Utah and Missouri to the Pac-10 and Big Ten respectively. If the big money in Texas decides to leave the conference, however, it will almost certainly cease to exist.
Should that happen, it seems likely that the Pac-10 and Big Ten would gobble up most of the conference teams, with the remainder either staying independent or looking to join some of the smaller conferences such as the MWC, Sun Belt, or C-USA.