Or was the destruction of the only major conference in the middle of the USA inevitable?
I know a lot of people want to blame Bebee, but really he couldn't stop this. This results was going to happen as soon as college football became so popular and schools started selling their souls to be good at it.
I'm not going to read through the whole thread, so my apologies if someone already mentioned this idea. After NU left for the big 10 and CU left for the PAC, here's what we should have done:
The remaining members of the Big 12 should have rallied support from the ACC and the Big East (and all of the minor conferences, like CUSA, MWC, WAC, MAC, SunBelt) to create two new NCAA rules.
1) You must play a minimum of 2/3rds of your conference every year. If you have 12 members, you must play a minimum of 8 conference games. If you have 14 members, you must play a minimum of 9 conference games. If you have 16 members, you must play a minimum of 11 conference games.
This would not prevent conferences from expanding to 14, but it would make every conference think VERY carefully before expanding. Would the PAC be willing to take OU/OSU if that would mean they could never get Texas? Would the big 10 be willing to take schools like MU and Pitt if that means they fill up their spots and have no room for ND?
2) In order to have a championship game, you must play every school in your half of the conference. This would make the idea of "pods" irrelevant and would guarantee that no conference would ever expand to 16. This also makes it tricky for a conference to expand to 14 because a school in one division would have to play all six of the other schools in the division. Since conferences try to arrange pods to maintain a competitive balance AND maintain as many rivalries as possible, adding one more layer of difficulty like this would make it almost impossible to organize the divisions.
With these two rules, I think that no conference would ever expand beyond 12.
