https://www.si.com/college/tmg/mark-blau...-expansion
"""...Right now it's in the hands of the lawyers,'' said one source familiar with the talks being held in the conference offices. "It's all about settling on a price to let schools leave early.''
Right now Oklahoma, Texas, UCF, Cincinnati and Houston are lame duck members of their conferences.
No one on either side thinks that is a good situation for even one year, much less two or three years.
I"ve seen it before in the Big East (Boston College in 2004 before going to the ACC the following year,'' said one former conference administrator, ""and it was horrible.''
The solution seems obvious.
Negotiate a price for each school to leave after this season, write the check and
Carry On.
We're talking a lot of money--in the 80 million dollar range for Oklahoma and Texas and perhaps as much as $30 million each for UCF, Houston and Cincinnati.
But those are starting points in the talk, open to negotiations. There are ways to design compromises, spreading out the payments over several years or having schools borrow money from their new conferences against the projected increased income those schools are projected to make...."