maybe Houston has potential. It doesn't matter. Big 12 shouldn't be a school development training program. They (and Cincy, Memphis, etc...but never BYU) should be on their own until they can pay their way in. No other conference is going to steal them from us so what's the rush.
2 things...
1) If you want a bigger contract in 2025, when ours is up, you need to get them into the conference and develop them so that a couple of years before the contract is up for renewal, they're playing at a Big 12 level. You need to generate fan interest, they need to be bowl-level, etc. If you invite them now, the earliest they'll be here is 2017. That gives us eight academic years before the contract gets here. At least 3-5 of those first years, they'll have a partial share, so they won't get full Big 12 monetary allocations while they "pay their way in".
If they're going to be competitive, you need to ensure that they're able to keep paying good coaches, updating and maintaining the facilities they're upgrading, have heavy recruiting budgets, etc. The sooner they get access to a full share, the better.
2) Expansion triggers a look-in provision in our TV contract after the Big Ten resets the market in 2016. We're expecting record payouts at that time. It may cause a bump in our revenue. Also, it would almost certainly extend the GOR out past the ACC's in 2025-2026, which means if any other conferences (i.e. Big Ten, SEC) are hungry, the slowest gazelle is the ACC.
