Big 12 coaches don't want to thin Texas recruiting pool with expansion

David Beaty has a point.

The powers that be at the Big 12 Conference don’t much care about what the Kansas head coach thinks about league expansion. He doesn’t get a vote. Nobody will send him a survey.

“I won’t have any choice anyway,” Beaty said. “We’ll do what everyone else does, which is react.”

But still, logic dictates that, if Beaty and his colleagues did have a say, they’d vote no to Houston, SMU or Rice, three schools still alive on the list of possible additions for the conference. The concept is as simple as self-preservation.

Beaty and most other schools in the 10-team league rely heavily on Texas athletes to populate their rosters. So dropping another power conference program in a state already equipped with five seems, in that way, counterproductive to the men in charge of selling their programs to recruits. Still, expansion is much larger than recruiting. It’s about TV markets and conference income and media foot prints. This has little to do with actual football and nothing to do with the recruiting trail.

Still, to say current Big 12 head coaches are staunch supporters of an overcrowded Texas recruiting scene would be tossing logic aside, and Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury isn’t interested in doing that. He doesn’t mind pointing out the obvious drawbacks.

“Any time you add another school in this state to the conference, it legitimatizes them,” Kingsbury said. “…I think it makes it a little bit crowded, when you’re talking about a talent pool that we all basically choose from. I like our conference as it is.”

Likely as such a move is starting to seem, imagining another major program in the state is dealing in at least a slight hypothetical. What’s not hypothetical, however, is the recruiting boost that comes with joining a major league. TCU head coach Gary Patterson has been on that side of the spectrum. If anyone knows what happens when an up-and-coming Texas-based program suddenly finds itself in the Big 12, it’s him.

Patterson held his current position when his Horned Frogs jumped from the Mountain West to the Big 12 in 2012 and was able to cut deeper into the league’s Lone Star recruiting pie as a result. Now, the roles are reversed. Patterson and his colleagues will brace for impact should one or more of the three Texas-based programs being considered barge through the league’s door and set up residence.

“We were always able to get guys in (to visit),” Patterson said “It was whether or not we could get them to say yes. …One of the biggest things that used to be thrown against us was ‘well, they may win but they’re not in the Big 12.

“Once we started winning (in the Big 12) for a couple of years, we saw a lot of increase.”

Ninety-five Texas-based prospects signed with Big 12 teams On Signing Day 2016, a number that made up 41 percent of the total players signed by the conference’s 10 programs. Add in the fact that SEC-based Texas A&M pulled another 15 athletes (six of them rated as four-stars) from the state and the possibility of overcrowding becomes even more of an issue.

The numbers game, Rivals.com National Recruiting Director Mike Farrell says, is going to become a compounded problem should another Texas-based team arrive at the party.

“It would hurt Baylor for sure because they are already headed for some dark times and it hurts TCU and Texas Tech,” Farrell said. “Texas and Oklahoma will always recruit the state well, but these other programs have relied upon being the next choices in many instances, at least in the Big 12.

“Especially Houston. Houston to the Big 12 would just cannibalize recruiting for the league. The Big 12 needs to branch out into the southeast with expansion.”

Conference commissioners and board members aren’t forced to recruit. TV ratings don’t much care about official visits or top-ranked recruiting classes. So Beaty’s sentiment, dismissive as it is, is the only one that matters. Protesting what seems to be getting closer to inevitable is futile.

It’s why even Kingsbury, who seems to be as vocally against adding another Lone Star program as anyone, eventually resigns himself to a verbal shrug resembling Beaty’s.

“I have zero input whatsoever,” he said.