(07-10-2017 08:53 AM)Hokie4Skins Wrote:  Six years ago, Pete Thamel reported that the original schools the Big 12 was interested in were Notre Dame, Arkansas, Pitt and BYU. That was pre-Bowlsby though.

The problem that I've always had with the Big 12 leadership (through multiple regimes) has been their complete and utter delusion regarding poaching power. Notre Dame never had any interest in the Big 12 and Arkansas certainly wasn't ever going to leave the SEC. Pitt and BYU were plausible targets, but Pitt ended up taking an ACC invite while BYU talks broke down over TV contract issues. Later on, the Big 12 had another round of delusional focus on Clemson and FSU. All of this created unreasonable realignment expectations from the Big 12's leadership and fan bases, which further led them to waste time on pie-in-the-sky scenarios, mistakenly pass on truly viable options like Louisville and stifle the Big 12 from making any realistic expansion decisions overall.

The Big 12 isn't necessarily the weakest conference financially as of now, but they're the weakest conference in terms of poaching power because there's literally nothing keeping them together OUTSIDE of money (namely, the Texas haul from the LHN). All of the other P5 leagues have institutional commonalities (e.g. academics, institutional fit, geographic continuity, network effects among multiple major metro areas, etc.) that the Big 12 doesn't really have, which is why they were and continue to be the most vulnerable to poaching by the other P5 conferences. (Note that I don't necessarily believe that the Big 12 will end up splitting even though I believe that they're the weakest P5 league relative to the others. I think the need for Texas to outright control a conference is so strong that they legitimately don't want to leave and other valuable schools like Oklahoma and Kansas have serious political hurdles even if they do want to leave.)