ya, If OU & Texas leaving is inevitable I would rather spend the next 7 years building up large state schools like CSU or NMU that might have the alumni and political support to grow into a true P5 instead of commuter schools that are one bad hire from irrelevance.
IMO only the SEC and Big 10 will offer Texas and OU more revenue but I fear OU won't be happy at 2nd most revenue in the Big 12 but trailing half the SEC and a couple of Big 10 teams so maybe acting now on the hopes the teams that are added can help what is left get legit Tier 1 & 2 deals.
Rather than worry about building up other schools, I vote we focus on building up ourselves. If armageddon does come to pass, then that is when we can look for some large state schools to associate with. Nothing UNM does over the next eight years is going to impact their national reputation. They will not be a tv draw, they will not be a recruiting hotbed, they will not develop a large following. An eight year head start will do nothing for them. And it would likely end up hurting us because of the weakened schedules we'd have due to playing all the time.
We have ten schools on our league, nine of which care about football. Let's focus on making our football product the best it can possibly be for those nine schools. Maybe a miracle will happen and the conf will somehow survive. If not, at least we'll have the memories of the good years to hang on to while we slowly fade into the sunset.
Being proactive by inviting CSU and UNM now is like putting a gun to our temple and pulling the trigger. It's not a 100% death sentence because maybe the pistol misfires or something, but yeah, we can all see how that will turn out.
We should be proactive by wrangling all the presidents and ath directors together, and convincing them to sit down and shut the hell up. Stop talking about how weak we are. Stop talking about how we are psychologically disadvantaged. Stop talking about how we need a conf network. Stand pat at 10 and disband the expansion committee. Above all, stop talking about our weaknesses. They are what they are and there is nothing we can do to fix them, so stop acknowledging them and focus on whatever our strengths are, while we wait for some of our conf brethren to start winning some big games.