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Message: [QUOTE="sufandu, post: 5359038, member: 874"] You're overthinking all this. Winning fixes everything. If Nebraska maintains their Osborne era success, Colorado maintains their McCartney era success, Texas doesn't decline under Mack Brown or replaces him better, and Oklahoma doesn't decline, nobody cares who joined who from where, because they would have all made a ton of money. With the PAC nobody has been consistently good in forever, therefore nobody cares. USC has struggled to get back to Pete Carroll era success. Oregon has had blips but has yet to get to consistent contender status. NIL may be the boost they've waited for. With the exception of a year here or there, UCLA has flat out sucked for forever. When you have enough really good teams, the dead weight doesn't matter because they're ignored or forgotten. Nobody talks about how Miss St., Arkansas, Kentucky, or Vanderbilt have been mostly irrelevant because they've spend their time paying attention to Alabama, LSU, Georgia, and Florida. If the Big East had been more than Miami, it would've been fine. The problem was we didn't win enough. See there it is again. When Miami went through its santions, the league champion needed to be undefeated or maybe have 1 league loss and no OOC losses while making NC noise. Nobody stepped up and did that. Instead all the other teams lost big bowl games, lost OOC games, and performed pretty meh when compared to the rest of the country. You're right when you talk about the SEC fanbase, but they had that advantage for a long time. Despite that, other teams from other conferences were pospular on TV for a long time. People all over the country watched the dominant Nebraska teams of the 90's, the bad boy Miami teams, and the Matt Leinart/Reggie Bush USC teams. Those were dominant exciting teams. When they declined the SEC was able to take what was already a strong product and capitalize on the vacuum created by a decline in success across every other region of the country. The timing of this imbalance across the country combined with the rise TV revenue shifted priorities for institutions and have killed everything. Since, as you point out, not all land grant/flagship programs or programs in large markets are strong options, and since all of the truly strong options that fit that criteria are already in the B1G or SEC, there has to be a different approach. We have to find well funded sleeping giants. If they have the large rabid alumni bases and/or are in large markets, all the better. But being well funded and being obsessed with winning need to be the first priority. [/QUOTE]

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