[sterlingice]

Ok, here's my crazy new MWC scenario laid out. It has no chance in hell of happening due to a couple of major issues:
1)Baylor-TCU spat
2)There are probably a couple of parties- namely Mizzou, Kansas, and Utah- who might have better options out there and might act on those
3)The MWC might see a better candidate in some pool of Nevada, Fresno State, Houston, UTEP, SMU, or Tulsa than I listed above
4)Memphis will look at this and say "hey, we said a BCS conference but we didn't mean this frankenstein mess"

But I still like fleshing it out all the same. So here are the dominoes falling:

The Texas 6 is now whittled down to the Texas 5 as the Pac-10 already has Colorado. So, Texas, Tech, A&M, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State come on board. So there's your Pac 16. If A&M goes to the SEC, the Pac-10 might want Utah so, again, another possible pitfall.

The Big 10 keeps slow playing, trying to get Notre Dame and expand their footprint east, taking a giant chomp out of the Big East and forcing Notre Dame to play ball. So, in other words, nothing changes.

That way the Big XII is left with 5- Kansas, Mizzou, Kansas State, Iowa State, and Baylor. They reach an agreement with the MWC to absorb them but some sort of power sharing occurs where everyone is magically happy with their new station in life including both conference presidents, etc (yeah, that'll happen).

Then, with one spot remaining, they offer to Memphis to get their FedEx money and to help the conference in basketball. It doesn't really stretch the geography of the conference much as they're pretty much due south of Columbia, Mo. This way the conference gets a $16M windfall from the new bowl, aka $1M apiece and the bowl now is tied into the conference, something that the Big XII really never had except sortof the Fiesta Bowl. Hell, you really want to stick it to Texas, elevate the Cotton Bowl to just rub it in their face.

Then you come calling for the abandonment fees from the old Big XII schools, which is roughly $10~$20M per school. Now, counting 7 schools at, let's say, $16M apiece to make it easy (since we're splitting it 16 ways), that's $7M in free cash to help improve facilities at some of the "lesser" schools. That can go a long way to help bump up some programs.

Then, you put pen to paper and draw it up. It's probably going to look like this. The notations are are football ranking, bowl/no bowl, basketball ranking, tourney/no tourney from last year.

East:
--/NB/#1/To Kansas
--/Bw/#7/To Kansas State
--/Bw/--/To Mizzou
--/Bw/--/NT Iowa State
--/NB/19/To Baylor
--/--/--/To Memphis
#6/Bo/--/NT TCU
--/NB/#8/To New Mexico

West:
#4/Bo/--/NT Boise St
12/Bo/17/To BYU
18/Bo/--/NT Utah
--/Bo/--/NT Air Force
--/Bo/--/NT Wyoming
--/NB/--/To UNLV
--/NB/--/To SDSU
--/NB/--/NT Colorado St

So, of the 16 teams- everyone except Colorado State either made a bowl game or the NCAA tourney or both including some really high basketball seeds and a couple of BCS bowls. It's not a bad group at the end of the day and there are a lot of built in advantages out there.

SI