How will Utes fit into their new Big 12 neighborhood?

Since the Utah Utes are making their Big 12 debut this week in a noncounting “friendly” with Baylor, this seems like a good time to welcome everyone to the newly revamped neighborhood. Step this way, please, for a quick tour.
It’s a big place, but it’s not much to look at, is it? There are some fixer-uppers and some places that have fallen into disrepair (Cincinnati, for instance), but so far nobody’s parking on the front lawn or moving the couch onto the porch.
It’s mostly a middle-class neighborhood that has been going downhill since many of the upper-class residents moved out. We won’t name names, but they rhyme with Soklahoma and Dexus. The Big 12 has had more breakups than Jennifer Lopez (its exes also include Missouri and Nebraska).
Let’s be honest — what’s left is an island of misfit toys, and/or outcasts with a few exceptions. Give us your tired, your poor, your … well, you get the idea. Some of them lost their homes in their old neighborhoods (you know who you are, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State) and/or were rejected by snooty, more glamorous neighborhoods (the Big Ten). Some were just plain homeless, wandering from place to place with their hands out (take a bow, BYU).
Half of the neighborhood’s 16 members are refugees, having moved here from other conferences. They considered this a step up (which ought to tell you something).
There was a little desperation on both sides of the equation. The Big 12 actually paid Colorado a $2.5 million signing bonus to entice the school to leave the Pac-12 and join its ranks. Wall Street has nothing on college football’s hostile takeovers.
The Big 12: Is this (football) heaven? No, it’s Iowa — Ames, to be precise — and a lot of similar places — Lawrence, Waco, Morgantown, Stillwater, Manhattan (not the one in New York, or even the one near LA). The sexiest address belongs to Central Florida (Orlando) and maybe Colorado, if you’re into that sort of thing. Most of the Big 12 destinations require a change of planes to get there, if not a long bus ride, too.
The Big 12 has stuck with the same name, perhaps because the “Big 16″ lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. The Big 12 is an oddity. There’s nothing organic about it. It was put together with spare parts in a laboratory. The league has no regional or geographic location, like the Mountain West and the Pac-8/10/12/2 or the SEC or the Western Athletic. If they tried to name the Big 12 by geography, it would be the Big Southeast/west Mountain/Mid-West Eastern Conference, but that’s a mouthful. Big 12 members are found in 10 states and four time zones and are spread out over 2,100 miles.
That’s not a region, it’s a continent.
The bottom line is that there are few natural rivalries in the league. Anybody looking forward to the UCF-Cincinnati showdown?
If they are old enough to remember, the Utes will recognize a few familiar faces in the neighborhood. Forty-five years ago, Utah, Arizona, Arizona State and BYU belonged to the Western Athletic Conference. They went their separate ways and now they’re back together again.
The reunion of the Utes and Cougars is awkward. You know how it is — there’s a certain neighbor you’d rather not associate with and you go to great lengths to avoid them and then one day you discover that you joined the same club and you’ve got to see each other regularly. BYU and Utah joined the same club.
Despite Utah’s efforts to end it, the annual BYU-Utah game is back on.
There are no big names for the league to hang its hat on anymore a la Texas and Oklahoma. Utah is probably the closest thing to it. The Utes might be the new family on the block, but they already have been voted the preseason favorite to win the league championship. That, combined with their soft schedule — ranked 115th in the nation — put them in a good position to win a berth in the newly expanded national playoff.
Life in the Big 12 is a lot easier than it was in the Pac-12; the Utes could get used to life in the new ‘hood.