Why might conference realignment happen?
Because the Big 10 is hungry, the Pac 10 is feeling left behind, and the SEC is cranky. Many have believed for years that the Big 10 would eventually expand by one school to get to the 12 schools required under present NCAA rules to stage a conference championship game. And while having the ability to have such a game might be a pleasant by-product of its current exploration of expansion, what seems to be fueling the need to expand is the appetite of the unexpectedly profitable Big Ten Network (BTN). Skeptically launched in 2006, the BTN has proven its naysayers wrong. The exact amount of profitability per school is questionable and might be worthy of further exploration in a future edition of the Realignment Chronicles, but it suffices for our purposes today to state that each Big 10 school earns a lot more as a result of the conference’s television contract than each Big XII school does. So, yes, Northwestern makes more on its conference’s TV contracts than Texas. And perhaps more im
