I just don't get the love for 16 team conferences. I can see where maybe the conference can get some more money from TV, but every other aspect of it has got to suck. If all the teams in the conference were nearly equal, you'd have a 6% chance to win the conference on any given year. If there are teams which are typically considerably better than average, then that chance probably gets cut in half. Who wants that?
I'd bet that down the road you'd end up with two halves of each conference starting to drift apart, so you'd end up with really 8 8 team conferences. 12 seems to be a doable number and the whole conference can share an identity. I just don't see how 16 teams could pull that off.