Says The Sporting News.

According to TSN, Big XII officials recently met with officials from the University of Cincinnati. Cincinnati officials were told that the league had not decided to expand, but that Cincinnati would be a candidate if the Big XII decided to do so. These meetings occurred even before the league's snub by the playoff committee.

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Big XII officials also met in New York last week at a time that just happened to coincide with an annual national meeting of athletic directors. Brett McMurphy of ESPN has tweeted that his sources say the league is not expanding, but in the last round of expansion, everyone denied that they were expanding until they were.

Whenever expansion is discussed, we always hear the same old refrain: it's about money. True, but what's not being discussed is the potential money the Big XII is losing by not expanding. Each playoff participant gets a conference $6 million, and each NY6 bowl participant chips in $4 million; both types of participants also net the conference $2 million for expenses. With TCU and Baylor in NY6 bowls, the Big XII is going to get $8 million, but the lack of a conference championship game probably cost them a playoff spot, costing the conference at least $4 million, and possibly much more.

When you consider the situation the SEC is in with that of the Big XII, the numbers can really grow. The SEC has 3 schools in the playoffs/NY6. That means the conference will get $43.5 million. With just 10 schools and no CCG, it's highly unlikely that the Big XII will ever be in this situation, basically costing the conference a chance at a chance of as much as $8 million before the season even starts. The potential losses can be bigger. Let's say that the Big XII gets a team in the playoff, but can't land another team in a NY6 bowl; the loss of the money from the Sugar Bowl, a Big XII/SEC contract bowl, could be as high as $27.5 million. Mississippi State, for instance, is going to net that kind of money for the SEC for being in the Orange Bowl, which is the other contract bowl along with the Rose.

If that isn't enough, the Big XII is also losing out on peripheral bowl money. The SEC is sending 12 teams to bowls. Even leagues that most of us haven't thought are all that good this season, the B1G and the ACC, are sending 10 and 11, respectively. The Big XII is sending just 7. That basically a forfeiture of 3 bowl games--and all the revenue they could produce--before anyone's snapped a down. They're also not earning the money from a championship game, which nets most Power 5 conferences around $20 million.

Things are complicated severely by the Big XII's Tier 3 media model. Unlike the other leagues, the Big XII schools have each individually retained their own Tier 3 rights. Longhorn Network is obviously the biggest of these, and the other school's Tier 3 aren't valuable enough to do what Texas has done. However, LHN hasn't been a financial success, and in many ways it can be regarded as an early wrong guess about the future of college football on television. LHN has netted Texas athletics about $4 million annually (the figure is closer to $8 million for all of UT, but the money is split 50/50 between the AD and the rest of the university). The SEC Network package has netted each school nearly $30 million. Financially, it would make more sense to get rid of LHN and create a Big XII network, adding schools to add inventory.

Things are going to have to change in Big XII country. At the very least, they'll have to get rid of the chance for co-champions with no tie-breaker. The other leagues can't really put up with that. You can't ask those leagues to let your teams into the playoff when leagues like the SEC or B1G have one champ for 14 teams, and the Big XII has 1 champ for every 5 teams. It's just a non-starter.