At its heart, college football is still a regional sport. The more we move away from that the less it is recognizable at the sport we love. I know that money is an extremely important element to the success of a conference but there is a reason the chant "SEC, SaeC, SEC" rings out at bowl games. It says something about where you're from.

The last time that college football was nearly balanced balanced was in the 80s and early 90s. You had the Big East (and eastern independents), ACC, Big Ten, SEC, SWC, Big 8, and the PAC 10.
Fully three of those leagues no longer exist, and you can bump it up to 3.5 with the Big12 as all Big8 members were included but 4 SWC members were not.
The SEC will basically have all of the marquis programs from the defunct SWC (Arkansas, Texas, & Texas A&M) 1/2 of the power from the Big 8 (Oklahoma), and 1/2 of the teams that actually cared about football in the ACC from 1953 to their exit in South Carolina. I'm not mad at the SEC at all, I think they've made extremely wise moves. But from a game theory perspective, what is good for the one may be less than ideal for the many.

With that out of the way. Because I still view the Big12 as a conglomerate of the Big 8 and the SWC I shall refer to them as such. The Big 8 schools have been scatter to the four winds of the earth, with Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, and Oklahoma State remaining. The SWC schools are by and large still available though the heft of Texas and Texas A&M are no longer there to carry the financial load. The six leftover SWC schools (SMU, TCU, Baylor, Texas Tech, Houston, and Rice) could and should join up with the 4 leftover Big 8 schools and that gives you a solid 10 teams as a foundation. Other schools can be added to get the number to 12 or 14 or 16 or whatever, but I would keep an eye out for regional fits as they are likely to stay and build the league when others further away cut out due to the expense of non-revenue travel expenses.
My point is this. Basically the Big13 is screwed without UT and OU. And apart from WVU and Kansas, there are only desperate please from the east coast to the left coast to find a life boat. I say stand together. You are stronger together, keeping regional rivalries, than playing on the left coast with States with vastly different values.

It might take WVU a few decades to pay off an $80 million exit fee after they re-negotiate the TV contracts for their new conference that includes Directional Southern State and (insert metropolitan city).

Makes sense from a geographical standpoint, but fiscally it's suicide.