(01-12-2018 05:37 PM)ohio1317 Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 05:29 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-12-2018 09:13 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  

(01-11-2018 02:54 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(01-11-2018 09:36 AM)BadgerMJ Wrote:  For now.

In 4-5 years when new contracts are being negotiated and they won't be getting paid to NOT expand, we'll see.

Not to mention the lack of a conference network which the other P4 all have.

Remember, the last time the Big 12 negotiated media and bowl contracts was from late 2011 to mid-2012, shortly after TAMU and Missouri bolted, and just two years after Nebraska and Colorado bolted. The conference looked like it would be dismembered any day then.

And yet they signed deals worth as much as any other P5 conference.

It's hard to imagine that in 2025 the Big 12 can possibly be worse off than it was in 2011 - 2012, so I will believe that the Big 12 will sign deals then that will make it obviously no longer competitive with other P5 .... when i see it.

But not until then.

It's all going to boil down to what the networks want.

If they feel that it's in their best interests to cull the cream of the crop from the XII and slide them into other conferences they'll simply lowball the XII come contract time.

No one outside of ESPN/Fox is going to bid against themselves when they don't have to worry about the big 2. There's no way OU & TX are going to accept second fiddle money to stay when the SEC & B1G have their checkbooks out.

I honestly don't think the movers & shakers care what the K-States and ISUs of the world think.

Yes, Texas and Oklahoma call the shots and are the big enchiladas for TV. But, again, that's also the way it was in 2011 - 2012, and yet the networks were willing to pony up equal P5 money then.

And FWIW, I don't think networks have ever been the impetus in these moves. They've played a reactive roll - e.g., it was clear as a bell that ESPN didn't want the Big 12 to expand last year and paid them not to. But no network egged on the B1G to raid the Big 12, or the ACC to raid the Big East, or was behind the PAC trying to gobble up the Big 12.

Those moves came from the growth-driven desires of the conference offices and the members they represented. Sure, they make those moves while thinking of how FOX or ESPN might react, but the networks themselves don't move chess pieces around.

Exactly

Have you two met P.T. Barnum? Because he sure described your thinking on this. There's one born every minute!

So we will ignore the president of B.C., the protocol on Missouri to the SEC, the odd path of Poppa Bowden, the reasoning behind the LHN, the stonewalling of the carriage of the then independent Big 10 network, the present stonewalling of the PAC network with regards to carriage, and the use of the market model to try to bust up large state leverage in Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Virginia, and the inability of any conference to add a school without first getting an appraised value from the networks before they could issue an invitation, and all of this just so that we can believe that conferences that had not changed much for 100 years suddenly turned cannibalistic just for the hell of it? Priceless!