SALT LAKE CITY — A big factor in sports fandom revolves around the ability to ask questions: Can we win the next game? Who should start at quarterback? Did the coach make the right decision?

It’s a major part of both preparing for and reflecting on any game, season or decision your favorite team makes. It’s the right of every fan to question their team, regardless of whether they’ll find an answer or not.

Even for the most snakebitten fan bases, there is one question that few fans ever have to ask: what now?

A team may lose an individual game, a playoff series or a player to injury, but the answer for what comes next is always available. There is always another game, another season or another player on which to hang your hopes.

The Chicago Cubs are on a 108-year drought since winning their last World Series. The fan base has rallied around the lovable losers 108 times with the uniting sentiment that next year will be the year.

You may have the worst football team in your conference, see last year’s Colorado Buffaloes, but even they were only a year away relevancy. Eventually, next year can pay off.

Hoping that the future may hold better things is an essential part of being a fan. But what happens when hope leaves a fan base?

On Monday, the Big 12 Conference unanimously voted against expansion, a process in the making for over two years. Oklahoma President David Boren said the presidents of the conference’s current 10 teams never discussed individual schools when deciding whether or not to move forward with the process.

All this, after hosting a reality show-like event, asking prospective schools to audition for the Big 12 through interviews and video conferences. If what Boren said is true, and that no individual schools were actually discussed, it seems apparent that any talk of conference expansion was just a ploy for the Big 12’s financial gain.

Related:

Big 12 decides no expansion following meeting Monday

The Big 12 Conference announced Monday afternoon that they have come to a consensus not to expand.

For most teams that auditioned for acceptance into the Big 12, their goals remain unchanged. They have a conference title chase to concern themselves with, and hope of making the best bowl possible.

Even as a Group of Five team, Houston still has an opportunity, if it finishes as college football’s highest-ranking Group of Five conference champion, of appearing in a New Year’s Six bowl game, one of the sport’s most prestigious six games played every year.

For a team like Cincinnati, no Big 12 invite simply means it goes back to hoping to compete for an AAC championship. Even if it isn't competing now, there’s always next year.

But what about BYU?

The Cougars are an independent team with no conference affiliation and no conference chase. The move to independence was designed solely to make itself more attractive to Power 5 conferences if they were to decide to expand. The Pac-12 has already passed on BYU once, as has the Big 12, and the Big 10, SEC and ACC don’t make much sense, geographically. And none of these conferences has any sense of urgency to expand.

It seems the next series of conference realignment will coincide with a change of the four-team college football playoff, which is scheduled to remain as-is through 2025.

When BYU moved to independence, it sacrificed the opportunity to compete for conference championships in favor of competing to make a Power 5 conference. It was an all or nothing gamble. For now, and through the foreseeable future, that gamble has come up empty.

If the Cougars continue on this independent path, their next meaningful competition might not come until 2025 when they again compete with the top Group of Five schools for an opportunity to get into a major conference, assuming the conference landscape changes at all.

Whereas every other school in college football can believe in the hope of next season, BYU, as an independent, will have to set its sights another 10 years down the road. It's a preposterous proposition for a fan base that’s already waded through five and a half years of independence.

For BYU, what’s next is a question without a clear answer. Should it stay independent and wait for further conference realignment? Should it join a Group of Five conference and compete against lesser competition for a chance at a better postseason? At this point, both options seem like a disappointing settlement of a once promising idea.

Independence may bear fruit, if the college football playoff committee, the group of experts tasked with selecting the teams that compete in the New Year’s Six bowl games, opts to grant BYU special consideration for a New Year’s Six bowl appearance. Or, if one of the current Power 5 conferences makes a special alignment with BYU, agreeing to play a certain amount of games against the Cougars every year, as the ACC does with Notre Dame. However, if those opportunities haven’t presented themselves in the past five years, why would that change now?

Likewise, belonging to a Group of Five conference would provide benefits. BYU could compete for a conference championship and potentially appear in a New Year’s Six bowl game, but would lose the exposure, and potentially the money it earns as an independent team. Stretches of games like it had to begin this season, featuring six high-profile opponents over the season’s first seven weeks would be replaced by long stretches of lower-level competition.

BYU has more games on the schedule, and next fall it will feature a young, exciting team deserving of optimism. But optimism for what? The wins don’t get BYU closer to a conference championship or closer to a Power 5 conference. For the Cougars, as currently situated, next year won’t ease their burden.

Whereas Houston, Cincinnati and other Big 12 hopefuls will look at their future and understand their goals, BYU is left asking itself what now?

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