Big 12, SEC Join Forces For Transparently Money-Grubbing New Year's Day Bowl

It's been a busy offseason for the Big 12 and the SEC. Both added two new teams to their conferences—the Big 12 replaced Texas A&M and Missouri, who defected to the SEC, with TCU and West Virginia—and their commissioners, Chuck Neinas and Mike Slive, shilled for the new four-team playoff that will follow the 2014 season. Today, both conferences announced a new bowl featuring the champions of both conferences, beginning in 2014. They'll play on New Year's Day in primetime. The message behind this new bowl? Eat shit, rest of college football.

Here's their triumphant statement:

The champions of the two conferences will be in the matchup unless one or both are selected to play in the new four-team model to determine the national championship. Should that occur, another deserving team from the conference(s) would be selected for the game.

"A new January bowl tradition is born," said SEC Commissioner Mike Slive. "This new game will provide a great matchup between the two most successful conferences in the BCS era and will complement the exciting postseason atmosphere created by the new four-team model. Most importantly, it will provide our student-athletes, coaches and fans with an outstanding bowl experience."

"Student-athletes." Heh. Anyway, this is a brilliant move for both sides. It gives them their own Rose Bowl challenger and lands yet another blow against the ACC and Big East, the obvious weak links in the college football world. The ACC's Florida State and the Big East's Louisville were already considering heading to the Big 12. Now, with another premier bowl game and millions more potential dollars at stake, how can they say no? And even though the SEC doesn't need to lure new members, it'll always take more money, and it'll get that here.

The new bowl—which has no name yet, obviously, because the conferences are waiting for some repulsive highest bidder to come along and brand this thing—is nakedly craven, stripped of the pretense of amateurism or tradition or any of that. It's all about money, which is indeed, Mike Slive, a fine way to give birth to a new January bowl tradition.

Big 12 And SEC Champions To Meet In Postseason Bowl Game [Big12Sports]