re: Washington and Oregon to B1G per Brett McMurphy

Stanford can make independence work for football, if they decide to self-fund the athletics department (big if); might be tough sledding in terms of scheduling the first few years with all of the conference musical chairs but they'll get USC/Cal/Notre Dame annually and you can easily rotate two or three more major programs per year before plugging the gap with G5 schools.

I have no idea how Stanford would handle being a basketball independent, though. Chicago State "did" it last season, but their schedule was wild and it stands to reason that Stanford wants to play bigger programs than Hartford and a bunch of D3 knockarounds. Stanford has enough equity in Olympic sports to ride out that independence, and they love Olympic sports so that's nice, but it's not like you can just freely use your massive endowment to fund sports and the amount of cash you'd require (which Stanford could easily support with a fraction of returns) might be appalling to faculty and brass.