OU's David Boren Wants Big 12 To Expand - His Bosses Don't

For almost a year, OU President Davis Boren has bee publicly stumping for the Big 12 to become mathematically correct, add a championship game, and do something about the LHN.

Now his boss, Max Weitzenhoffer, wants Boren to forget about expansion.

Weitzenhoffer is the OU Chair of the Board of Regents, and he made it clear that if Boren pushes the addition of program through, he will be going against the wishes of members of the BOR.

At least one other regents member, Oklahoma City Thunder chairman Clay Bennett, is against expansion, Weitzenhoffer said.

"One-hundred percent [with] what we've been talking about," Weitzenhoffer said of Bennett's position. "We just want to let him [Boren] know, we don't like it.

"If it goes forward, it may get to the point where we may not be able to stop it."

The Board is scheduled to meet this coming Thursday and Weitzenhoffer is obviously not happy with Boren's public stand - one he apparently took without bothering to find out if there was any opposition among the Boar of Regents.

"We will have a lot of input [on Oklahoma's view of expansion]," Weitzenhoffer said of the regents. "The problems is, the reason I got so bent out of shape on this is we're coming to that crunch time and they're all trying to decide what to do.

"We think all these Big 12 presidents can do this thing without going through boards of regents. We're not sure about Texas. The fact is we just want to make sure he [Boren] understands where we are. I don't want to speak for all of us.

"We're going to force the president to tell us where we stand."

Boren is chair of the Big 12 Presidents committee. He serves with West Virginia President Gordon Gee and Baylor's Ken Starr on the Composition Committee, which is charged with looking at the possibility of expanding to 12 teams.

Weitenhoffer is on the record as believing expansion is of little benefit, unless it comes from another Power 5 Conference.

"I don't think anybody can [be shaken loose]," Weitzenhoffer said, adding, "We've been fiddling with Notre Dame for years ... but they're not going to be leaving."

Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports also reported that back in 2010 Oklahoma was "30 minutes from "leaving the Big 12 for the Pac 12."

The idea of expanding the Big 12 has been discussed ad nauseam.

It is my position that it is shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic to bring in two of the usual suspects: Boise State, BYU, UCF, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Houston, Memphis or South Florida, among others. Six have stadiums smaller or the same size as the two smallest stadiums in the conference Baylor & TCU), and none of them are a legitimate national TV draw (yes even BYU).

Might as well pull up a chair and get some popcorn, because this topic will dominate Big 12 conversation all summer long.