On Tuesday, the Big 12 shocked plenty of people by actually voting to explore the candidates for expansion of the conference by two to four teams.
It sent waves through the college athletics world and another stretch of realignment news appears to be on the horizon just a few short years after most of the craziness ended.
With the announcement of potential expansion for the Big 12, the league also made it very clear that suitors would have to come to them and not the other way around. Immediately names like BYU, Cincinnati, Memphis, UCF and UConn were thrown out as likely candidates to be looked at.
However, one Southeastern school that wasn’t mentioned has thrown its hat into the ring — Tulane.
Yes, the mighty Green Wave, with little football tradition and even less in the way of college basketball (kind of a big deal in the Big 12) wants in.
According to a report by the New Orleans Advocate, Tulane is already angling itself for Big 12 membership. Those in the know shouldn’t be too shocked at Tulane’s interest thanks to its move to hire athletics director Troy Dannen back in December.
Dannen has been very aggressive in promoting the need for the university to get in to the Power 5 game, or at least act like more than a middling football program going forward:
“When I was introduced as athletic director last December, my goal was to ensure Tulane University was in a position, athletically, to take advantage of opportunities which may come our way,” Dannen said in a statement to The Advocate on Wednesday. “If an opportunity for candidacy in the Big 12 Conference presents itself, that is an opportunity we will certainly explore.”
As for the Big 12’s interest? Well, that may be debatable at best. The one big thing going for Tulane is the reported want to establish the conference as a player in the Southeast, and you can’t get much more Southeast than New Orleans.
Should the Big 12 look to Houston as a potential addition, getting Tulane would only make geographic sense and it would give the league a stake right in the backyard of the SEC after losing Texas A&M a few years back.
There’s also the personal factor working in Tulane’s favor, as Dannen and Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby have a closer personal and working relationship. Dannen considers Bowlsby his mentor and Bowlsby was instrumental in Dannen landing the job at Tulane.
Dannen is already in the business of selling his program, the university and the city of New Orleans hard.
“Tulane’s greatest assets in this regard include our academic reputation, our standing among the nation’s top research institutions as a member of the AAU and our location in the one of the premier cities in the country, New Orleans,” Dannen’s statement read. “We have made over $120 million in capital investments to our athletics facilities over the last several years and we have a veteran group of coaches on staff who have experienced competitive success at all levels.
It just may be the case of right place, right time for a candidate that is outside the mainstream of thought given all of those factors.
