Wow, I leave for two days and I see that A&M is going, then they're not going, then they may be withdrawing and then going?
Regardless, I think the SEC has to think hard about whether or not they really want to get to 13+. For starters, as sys mentioned a while back, conferences with 12+ members haven't fared well in the past. That's not to say they can't in the future, but at some point, there is a law of diminishing returns at work, and you never want to be the guy that goes from 12 to 16 and have it be a monumental bust. At this point, with the money, lawyers, and politics involved, it's going to be incremental change (in even numbers, of course). They'll wait to see if 14 makes them more money and makes the conferences and their members happy, and then they'll look towards going to 16.
To me, personally, the one conference that would probably have the most incentive to go to 16 is the Big Ten, and that's because the larger their conference is, the more inventory they have for their network, and the network makes more money for all of the members. But, as stated before, they are very picky about who they will invite. Nebraska would probably get a lot more scrutiny now that they aren't an AAU school. But, going forward, their pool of schools is pretty small. You're looking for AAU schools in major markets that will force cable providers to pay higher rates for the BTN. You're looking at Maryland (Baltimore/DC), Georgia Tech (Atlanta), Missouri (KC & St. Louis), North Carolina (Charlotte and the Triangle), and Virginia. I'd say Rutgers and Pitt, but really, no one in NJ or NY cares about college football, so adding Rutgers is pointless. And Pitt...well, the Big Ten already has Penn State, so it's not like adding Pitt would really make them that much money. They may be on the list, but I'd think the schools I listed above would be bigger draws for them. And, as always, Notre Dame is the first team they will put on their speed dial.
Here's the thing...in the super-conference scenario, you have three leagues that are "safe": Big Ten, Pac-12, and the SEC. That's 48 teams. You still have to have one more. And who's to say that all of the current BCS schools want to be a part of a super-conference? I mean, if the ACC got raided, is there really any guarantee that Duke would give a crap about being in a football super-conference? What about Wake Forest? At some point, a lot of these small, private schools will probably just cash out and join the rest of the basketball-centric schools in the Big East because the price of playing poker is going way up, and they'll never compete in these kinds of leagues.
One scenario that I have seen is one where the football playing schools of the Big East (that remain) break off from the basketball schools and form an alliance with whatever remains from the ACC. What I haven't seen is one where some of those schools like Duke and Wake (that obviously don't have the passion or alumni base to support big time college football) just say, "eff it, I'm out," and they just go join a conference with Georgetown, Villanova, St. John's, and drop football to FCS. That reduces the number of schools that are a "threat" to schools like KSU, KU, and ISU that may not have that football sex appeal or a huge number of TVs to draw from.
At some point, if this comes to fruition, there will be a refugee super-conference, and most likely, no one league will be doing the driving of it since the rest got raided. The price to join that conference will simply be how seriously you take football, and we take it seriously enough that we'll get a seat at that table. We've got a 50+K seat stadium that we fill, a moderately successful history in the past 20 years, and we're a package deal with KU, so the odds of us getting swept up in that arrangement are pretty high.
Basically, I envision us falling into some sort of strange refugee conference with schools that are above mid-major in terms of stadium size, success, money invested in football, etc. We can get into that conference.
