It’s official, the University of Utah will be a part of the Big 12 Conference starting in 2024. On Monday, University President Taylor Randall and Athletic Director Mark Harlan held a press conference concerning the wild week of conference realignment that saw the Pac-12 conference fall apart as fast as the USC Trojans did in last year’s conference championship game.
One question that many fans kept asking on social media was, what are Randall and Harlan doing? Why weren’t they keeping fans updated? Were the Utes going to get left hanging leaving them looking from the outside looking in on “power” conference? Were they doing anything? Some of those questions were addressed in Monday’s press conference.
“To our students, particularly our student-athletes, administrators, our coaches, fans, trustees, we just want to say thank you very much for the patience as we’ve navigated this extraordinarily complex situation,” Randall said. “I am very, very optimistic about the future.”
The situation was quite complex. After Colorado officially bolted for the Big 12 conference earlier in the week, the Pac-12 held several meetings trying to keep everything together, but ultimately, the deal presented wasn’t palatable enough to entice Oregon and Washington to stay, and those schools elected to follow in USC and UCLA’s footsteps and accept invitations to join the Big 10. This left the remaining Pac-12 schools in a precarious situation, and Utah, along with Arizona and Arizona State, acted quickly to accept invitations to join the Big 12.
“We spent the last year working diligently together to try to keep this conference together,” Randall said. “But as I mentioned in my written release last weekend, ultimately the dynamics of collegiate sports and media markets bring us to where we are here today. I want to say that we’ve spent 12 great years in that conference and I believe that the relationships will continue.”
Harlan added that he and Randall had done all they could to keep Utah in the Pac-12. A media deal was presented that would largely use Apple + streaming television as the way of distributing games, and that deal was clearly not enough to keep the conference together.
“I will just tell you that we expended every energy to try to figure out how this deal could move forward,” Harlan said. “It was an innovative construct. It certainly on its upside had the promise to do something very different to the way we view television. I think everybody in the room caught that view. At the end of the day, each university was plugging in the numbers and making their own decision. And obviously, the outcome is where we are today.”
While it is bittersweet to be moving on from such a historic conference, Harlan was optimistic about the future of Utah athletics in the Big 12.
“Charmelle Green, our incredible Chief Operating Officer…will lead a transition team that will dive into every single possible issue on every single possible sport,” Harlan said. “I told her, I want to know how those teams think, I want to know everything about everybody. We want to get in there and win, and win right away. We have no reason to believe that we can’t.”
There are still several questions yet to be answered, such as what to do with future former non-conference football games that are now conference games (like BYU and Baylor in 2024), but it is currently too early in the process to have every answer at this point.
One thing is settled, and that is that it won’t be long until the Big 12 gets to see what it is to compete against Utah sports.
