Originally Posted by
Faustus
Yes. I'm clearly no expert in this, and the old Southwest Conference had already dissolved beforehand (UT just isn't easy to live with, it seems), but as I understand it, it was when the NCAA first announced that if a conference had 12 members, they could then have 2 divisions and a championship football game above and beyond the allowed 12 game season, plus, of course, all the tv money Disney/ABC/ESPN and CBS could bestow upon the ADs coffers for that game, that the traditional conferences began to fall apart. It became a goldmine for the SEC, then the Big 12 followed suit, and then suddenly all the other conferences realized they needed 12 teams too to cash in, thus the poaching from each other that ensued. None of this had anything whatsoever to do with basketball or the other sports, of course, but for football and the TV rights that came from it. (So important is this for ESPN that in the recent renewal of their contract with the SEC they had to promise far more SEC bball games on air - if you wonder why we're on ESPNU a lot more and on ESPN and ESPN2 less, and why this year Bama and South Carolina and Miss State are on a lot more.) And from there sprang the new philosophy that it was no longer time-honored local rivalries that counted, but on the contrary, how far your conference's tv "footprint" spread, the bigger it was supposedly the more money you got, even though the schools you are playing now have no connection or interest to the old-line fans. Do Big10 schools care about Nebraska? Of course not, except maybe Iowa. But they needed a twelfth to reach the feeding trough, so there you have it. Here come the Huskers to play bball at... Penn State.
So the NCAA is not the only culprit - this BCS bunch that has fostered the BigEast banditry in desperately grasping for any schools that will keep them with enough members to stay in the ring of money is the problem there, and behind all of this are all the ADs and college presidents who have willingly played along. But the real derailing in my opinion of the long-standing traditional and regional conferences began when the NCAA's 12 team/conference football championship rule was brought to light.