Conference Talk, Again

I've never been a fan of Mizzou, but they're getting screwed. The Big Ten puts out feelers via a KC radio station that the Big Ten wants to be BFFs with Rutgers, Notre Dame, Nebraska, and Mizzou. So now we have the Cornhuskers moving to let the Big Ten finally have a championship game while Notre Dame resolves to keep collecting its cash from NBC, and apparently the Big Ten Commish is no longer interested in Mizzou, at least if you go by reports.

That's cold.

And even if you do the sports-talk-radio rhetorical promenade where you might opine that Mizzou doesn't offer a major market, they'd certainly draw more cash than flippin' Rutgers.

At least with Mizzou and Kansas you could say the Big Ten would capture the St. Louis and Kansas City markets, which isn't an enormous draw, but it isn't bad. With those two additions, some "Big Ten" basketball teams might actually play solid offense.

The odd aspect of this Pac-16 conception is the tremendous travel costs of the other sports besides football. And I also wonder whether the old Big 12 powers with the old Pac 10 teams would actually make more money once they split up the money sixteen ways.

Or, as you can read by clicking HERE, maybe the Big 12 becomes Big 12 Light since Texas has always wanted its own TV network? And click HERE for an ESPN article about that too. Since the two schools that have left the Big 12 have to pay a fee to get out of the conference, it might make more sense to stick together.

But I guess it's a possibility that A&M could say goodbye to the new Big 12 [10] since the power play here is to let Texas have its own channel. A Longhorn channel certainly wouldn't please or help the Aggies (making them even a weaker second fiddle), and there's also a rumor that OU, like A&M, has had talks with the SEC, which might have scared the Longhorns.

The main problem, in my opinion, at the root of all this though is revenue sharing. And a condensed Big 12 [10] doesn't address that problem.