Why the Big Ten wouldn't add just a Missouri or a Pittsburgh or a Rutgers

College football Web site The Wiz of Odds had a link today to this very good blog piece by Tim Stephens of the Orlando Sentinel.

Stephens says to forget conventional wisdom when it comes to conference-expansion in college sports. Forget about relatively small things like getting the Big Ten Network into homes in Missouri, or New York. Forget the importance of adding a 12th member so the Big Ten could have a league-title football game. It's not that important.

Here's a passage from Stephens' essay:

Radical realignment will be about making conference owned-networks and network-affiliated packages - and the revenue streams to come beyond television - national in scope. It will not be about gaining specific markets, but about making conference-owned media relevant on a national level. Markets will be a benefit but they are not the end game here.

If radical realignment occurs, it won't be about something as small as getting the Big Ten Network on in St. Louis. It'll be about getting it on EVERYWHERE, with a lineup of games so deep each Saturday that every football fan in America wants it and will be willing to pay for it. It will be about innovation and monetization of revenue streams we haven't even dreamed of yet. The consolidation of college sports is an extension of the consolidation of mass media, and this is why the conventional wisdom of the past will not be particularly relevant to the decisions. There are billions to be made once the media/internet landscape clarifies - but the biggest brands have to be grouped together for that money to materialize.

My opinion:

This is inevitable, and you know the Big Ten will be a major player, perhaps one of just three or maybe four major conferences left standing.

When the Big Ten makes its move -- and it dare not make one -- it will be significant. It may be more than one school that gets added. It may be three, or five. It may cause a current conference to stagger, perhaps crumble. That conference wouldn't be the Mid-American or Mountain West, you can be sure.

I've heard that people in the Big Ten office people read and hear all the expansion speculation and laugh at all the guesswork out there. They know no one out there knows or gets what's coming, whatever it turns out to be.

People frequently have noted how much money Kirk Ferentz makes as Iowa's football coach. But if there's one thing that justifies that salary more than anything, it's keeping Iowa viable as a national program for when all this super-conference expansion comes down.

Forbes Magazine, as Stephens' post notes, has five Big Ten teams among its 20 "most valuable" college football programs in the nation. Iowa isn't among them, but it has to be bubbling right below the top 20 on the heels of its Orange Bowl victory and 11-win season, and the national exposure those things bought.

The Big 12 has five teams in the Forbes' top 20, as well. But you don't hear anyone saying the league is looking to grow. Instead, people wonder if Missouri or Nebraska could enter the Big Ten. People wonder if Texas would leave for another league, totally tilting the scales and damaging the Big 12.

The quartet of Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State would make a very potent Southwest quadrant of the SEC or Pac-10. Can you picture the SEC with those four in tow? Holy smokes. That would give them a super-strong 16-school conference that still made geographic sense when carved into two divisions.

 Where would that leave Baylor and Texas Tech, Kansas State and Iowa State? You know Nebraska wouldn't sit around, waiting to wind up in a Great Plains version of the Mountain West.

See, there is an unspoken truth out there. Which is, not everyone in BCS leagues will be in the super-conferences of the future. Football drives all this. It's more imperative than ever that schools show they have stable, competitive, watchable football teams that people from all over the nation can identify with to some degree.

That's not asking for much, is it?

This is why I hope Boise State runs the table and wins the BCS title next season. Just to cast doubt and confusion on everything involved with major-college football. Can you really have super-conferences if the No. 1 team plays in the WAC?

That would be wacky-WAC.