For the love of Barry Switzer, don't wait. Conferences that sit on their hands these days usually wind up getting their toes gnawed off. When it comes to Florida State and the Big 12, there are only two major questions that need to be posed by the latter to the former:
1. How soon can you get here?
2. And can you bring a date for my friend?
True story: A few years back, the Wall Street Journal conducted a study examining national viewing figures for every bowl game between 1998 and December 2010. The Journal rated Bowl Championship Series schools relative to what the contest usually drew in terms of expected ratings. When all the chips were counted up, Florida State ranked second in the nation, with an average audience bump of almost 23 percent — 22.6 — per bowl game. The Seminoles trailed only USC (28.7 percent).
Twenty-three percent. If you throw a watch party for a Florida State game and expect to draw 200, the trends say 46 more people will show up on top of that, flaming spears in hand, looking for a good time.
The 'Noles are a good time. They're a national football brand, just like Penn State and Nebraska and Notre Dame. The Big Ten grabbed the first two and has been courting the third, without success, for decades now. (Yeah, yeah, we know: Florida State football isn't quite what she used to be. The same goes for the Nittany Lions and Cornhuskers, and Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany is crying all the way to the bank.)
Twenty-three percent. Everybody gets rich, and your boosters might get to meet Burt Reynolds. What's not to love?
And has there ever been a better time for the Big 12 to slip on the armor and go ransack somebody else's castle for a change? New television deals. New commissioner. New mojo.
You've got two types of leagues on the Division I sports landscape now: those doing the plucking, and those about to be plucked. As more dominoes fall, the middle ground, neutral territory, shrinks exponentially. Earlier this week, I got into a discussion with an administrator about the Atlantic 10's additions of Butler and Virginia Commonwealth; he replied — and I'm paraphrasing here — that "you don't know who's willing to jump unless you ask."
So ask already.
The chairman of Florida State's board of trustees, Andy Haggard, will take the call. At least, you'd think. Haggard ripped the ACC's new television deal with ESPN over the weekend, venting to the website Warchant.com that it was "mind-boggling and shocking." Seminoles football coach Jimbo Fisher threw gas on the fire when he told the Orlando Sentinel on Saturday that if leaving the ACC is "what's best for Florida State, then that's what we need to do."
Of course, university officials spent the next 24 hours or so either backtracking from or retracting those statements — Haggard was snarling over misinformation, it turns out — as it headed into the ACC's league meetings Sunday.
But you've got to admit: We've heard this kind of rhetoric before, haven't we? The higher-ups at Texas A&M and Missouri were making similar grunts and groans before they got itchy feet and jumped to the SEC.
Sunday and Monday brought round after round of denials. Big 12 officials insist that no approaches have been made, nor are there any in the works. Look, you can throw as much sand on the flames as you like. We all saw the smoke.
New Big 12 boss Bob Bowlsby has an ambitious streak that runs from Ames to Orlando. He won't get behind a dog that won't hunt. His ascension to the Big 12 wasn't just an indicator of the league's stability — it sowed the seeds of an aggressor.
When asked about expansion recently, Bowlsby played it coy. But he also noted that if the Big 12 were to branch out, that "it's not a geographic footprint anymore. We're talking about an electronic footprint." Translation: If your football team doesn't draw eyeballs to television sets, you're probably not a fit.
Notre Dame fits, although the Irish want it both ways — BCS perks without having to share any of its BCS television stash. Louisville keeps re-entering the conversation, but it's still a basketball-first school in a hoops-first state.
Florida State, however, ticks almost every box. You'd be setting up an outpost in the fourth-most populous state in the land. You'd have tent stakes in Texas to the west and in Florida to the east, just as the SEC can claim once the Aggies are on board. You'd get another baseball power, as well as an up-and-coming men's basketball program that's been to four straight NCAA tourneys under coach Leonard Hamilton.
And did we mention the 23 percent thing? To wit: Last winter's Champs Sports Bowl between the Seminoles and Irish drew a 3.6 rating, according to the Nielsen Ratings, a 64 percent jump from the previous year's contest.
Sure, a posse that features Iowa State and Kansas State at one end and West Virginia and Florida State at the other seems — well, strange. But is it any stranger than the fact that Nebraska now plays in a division with Michigan and Michigan State? Or that Missouri will soon reside in the SEC East alongside South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia? Greed makes for strange bedfellows, sometimes.
The ACC's deal with ESPN reportedly guarantees an average of $17 million a year to each member. The Big 12 programs are reportedly taking home $20 million per school, annually, through their partnerships with FOX and ESPN. Plus, at the moment, third-tier rights — Hello, The Seminole Network! — are potentially more lucrative in the Big 12 than they are in the ACC. And word on the street is that the Seminoles' athletic department is about to go $2.4 million in the red.
Ask. Go on. Ask. Because if you don't, somebody else will.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter @seankeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com
