Alright, imagine if you will, a "Pac 20". This is a 20 team conference that will have nearly every major university and team West of the Mississippi. They will have a huge presence in both the Central and Pacific time zones. There will be two ten team divisions that will almost function as two separate conferences. The Big Ten, SEC, ACC, etc. will do something similar. Maybe not 20 teams (I have the Big Ten and SEC down as 18 and ACC as 16, and I can elaborate on that if anyone cares...), but they'll be similar to this.
Pac 20 West (Original Pac-10): USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford, Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State
Pac 20 East (Mostly Big 8/Big 12/SWC): Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, TCU, Texas Tech, Utah, Colorado
In this arrangement, the Pac-10 goes back to playing they way they did before they expanded. Everybody plays everyone like they always did in football and all other non-revenue sports. In the East, six of the old Big 8 teams are back together, plus three Texas schools and Utah. While Colorado may not be thrilled, no one in the Pac 20 would actually care. It would keep a lot of the rivalries together that matter, and everyone would get to keep playing the teams they've grown to have rivalries with in the past 20 years.
You'd get 9 division games. One game each year would be dedicated to playing someone from the other division. You don't want too many cross-divisional games because at the end of the year, you want to have one big championship game that rivals the intensity of a major bowl game.
Imagine the winner of those East/West divisions playing a major championship game in Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, LA, San Diego, etc. every year. They'd rotate between Dallas and some West Coast destination every other year. If each conference had a similar set up, you have your 8 team playoff. No one can tell me that Oregon/Oklahoma or USC/Texas...hell, even TCU/Oregon wouldn't be must see TV...
On the basketball side, you still get 18 conference games a year. Nothing would change from your current configuration. If you wanted to get crazy, you could add a couple of cross-divisional games each year for grins, one home/one away.
But just think of the 18 team conference tournament that could be held in KC, OKC, Dallas, Vegas, LA, etc. every year...THAT would be a tournament worth watching.
Now, from a TV standpoint, this configuration wouldn't water any of the current contracts down. The Big 12 and Pac-12 share very similar T1/T2 deals with ESPN and Fox. In fact, we'd actually be shedding some games because we'd be dropping total content by two schools. However, there's a lot of extra games that we could ultimately put on the Pac-20 network in football and basketball that would make it viable in a new reality. Plus, the Pac 12 would expand it's footprint into the central time zone and into states with 40 million people in the population. You could easily have wall to wall, live prime time basketball in the Central and Western time zones 7 days a week between the men and women. It would be glorious.
This is the vision Larry Scott and Dan Beebe had before all Hell went loose. But they just wanted to keep the conferences separate. That was dumb. Merge them.
