Why Memphis is closer to the Big 12 than ever, but still stuck in purgatory | Giannotto

Memphis athletic director Laird Veatch said what he’s supposed to say.

He said Memphis is very much in the conference realignment conversation. He said Memphis has never been better positioned. He said Memphis just needs to stay the course. Keep believing. Keep striving. Keep winning. Eventually, this will all work out.

He said, basically, the same thing he said two years ago when Memphis got snubbed by the Big 12 and left behind in a watered-down version of the league it wanted out from.

“We have, certainly, a level of success and opportunity that we have not yet realized that we can, which is also part of why I took this job and why I love it, why it’s exciting,” Veatch said in an interview with The Commercial Appeal on Monday. “You’re right there on the edge of achieving and being at a place we haven’t been before, but that’s also what makes it really challenging. You’ve just got to embrace that and make the best of it.”

It’s sound advice. It really is.

It’s just that those opportunities increasingly feel finite and fleeting now. As if the best chance for Memphis, or really anyone still saddled with the Group of Five designation, may have already come and gone. That’s the crushing part about this latest round of conference dominoes.

This endeavor has Memphis fans so weary most haven’t even bothered to get their hopes up. They know better by now that the city's passion for the Tigers will be underappreciated or, worse yet, completely overlooked. So there is no easy answer for what comes next for Memphis, only that conference expansion is mostly a misnomer. There are leagues expanding, but they are doing so at the expense of others.

This is actually conference consolidation, with the SEC and Big Ten having emerged as top dogs. The Big 12 and ACC are positioning themselves as the next two in line within the college sports power structure, particularly since the Pac-12 is wobbling from the departure of Colorado and its botched media rights negotiations.

In doing so, the Big 12 seems poised to pass over Memphis for a third time in seven years in favor of several Pac-12 schools. Perhaps the remnants of the Pac-12 will come calling for reinforcements from the American Athletic Conference and Mountain West Conference to stave off disintegration. But we’ve seen that show before. It happened when Memphis momentarily thought it had joined the Big East more than a decade ago.

Spoiler alert: The Big East disintegrated before Memphis ever officially transitioned into the league.

That’s how it wound up here – stuck.

It’s all driven by money, of course, rather than common sense. It’s why another longshot option for Memphis might involve the poaching of the ACC, whenever its football-centric schools can figure out how to wriggle free of the conference’s grant-of-rights agreement.

Memphis, theoretically, could be an option to join whatever remains of the ACC once it’s picked over by the Big Ten and/or SEC. It's probably the best option for Memphis at this point. But that’s also likely years away, and we’re already decades into this chase for a league that fits the dreams and desires of the university.

It’s true that Memphis has never been closer to joining the Big 12 than it is right now. The Tigers might, for the time being, have a better shot at making the College Football Playoff staying in the AAC given its upcoming 12-team structure. The diminished version of the league hasn't slowed down basketball coach Penny Hardaway's momentum so far, either. But that’s also a reflection of how far off Memphis was in 2016 or even two years ago, when Houston, Cincinnati and UCF each headed off to the Big 12.

It was, in retrospect, a rare instance in which schools got the “call up” into the Power Five structure. Over this wacky era of conference realignment, only a few others got so lucky. TCU (Big 12), Utah (Pac-12) and Louisville (ACC) come to mind.

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Memphis is still waiting because it waited too long to act. What if its football resurgence, and the investments that spurred it on, began sooner? What if the stadium situation had been addressed sooner? What if the opportunity school officials keep talking about as in the future is really in the past already?

Memphis has tried to buy its way into the Big 12 with FedEx. It tried to win its way in by producing a historic era of Tiger football . And now it’s trying to say the right things, and play the behind-the-scenes political game the right way, to get in.

But the game is rigged.

You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter: @mgiannotto

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Big 12 expansion: Memphis is closer than ever but still feels stuck