Reports: The Big 12 Is About To Grow... A Lot

There are a lot of reports out there tonight... Here, here and here... That are saying some very basic things.

The Big 12 is about to get a lot bigger, and things will be official sometime this July.

According to the usual bevy of sources, FSU and Clemson are ready to join from the ACC. Louisville claims they have an offer to join as well. Notre Dame is reportedly going to dump their non-football sports in the conference until their current NBC contract is up (after 2015).

That brings us to 14 total conference members. If you follow many college blogs, you also know that other ACC schools, including Georgia Tech, Pitt and Miami, may be on the way.

Obviously, the goal would be to form the (second) best conference to the SEC as part of our new four conference monopoly. These moves would certainly do that.

As far as non-football sports go (who cares right?), the prevailing idea still appears to be to have four pods, with Texas/TCU/Baylor/Tech all playing each other, with some inter-pod games every year to develop rivalries and engage top ranked programs against each other.

We shall see how this goes, but one thing is for certain: The current revenue package, $20 Million for media rights and an estimated $2 million per school for the new Big 12/SEC Championship Game, will likely increase soon to $25 million or more. If you can make the conservative estimate that TCU could turn its Tier 3 rights into $2-4 Million a year, that means a $30 million a year payout for TCU Athletics... Sounds nice.