Seems pretty clear that money is what's standing in the way of BYU (or any other school) join the Big12 (or any other P5 Conference) so any suggestion that BYU will someday join a P5 conference needs to address the financial issue first and foremost.

The article in the DesNews stated some compelling stats that clearly indicate BYU would be a good fit on virtually every front but the most important one - Money!

There's not a member of a P5 conference that would be willing to give up a dime to get BYU in their conference. Reality hurts to type that.

Given this obvious fact, seems our best chance for inclusion in the P5 is through a scheduling agreement or some type of partial membership that gives access without an equal share of the money associated with membership. That would solve our scheduling/inclusion challenge and not hurt their economic position. We keep our ESPN deal and all associated revenues and they keep theirs. An affiliation with a P5 conference would likely give us leverage to improve the fees associated with our ESPN deal and help to close the revenue gap with full members of the conference.

The other incentive we have is BYU TV. I'm a big believer in "exploit your uniqueness - don't hide from it." Bronco does a great job of this in recruiting (and it's working) so why not apply the same approach to marketing our program to P5 conferences. There isn't another school in the country that has anything close to BYU TV. The closest thing is the Longhorn Network and that's just a subsidiary of ESPN and not something that Texas created and runs on their own.

To make up for the haircut in revenue share from any conference that we are fortunate enough to be able to affiliate with, we should offer to create a defacto conference network to air conference content through BYU TV (lots of complexities here, but you get the drift) I'll bet Kansas fans would love to see their team play on BYU TV a few times a year as would almost any other lower-level P5 program that's not getting much love from their conference TV partners. If we were airing sports content that allowed us to collect advertising dollars or earn a fee, we could bring in some dough to BYU help offset our "discounted membership" status. BYU TV becomes a benefit our new conference members can appreciate rather than criticize.

Once the conference members see that we're earning approximately a full-share of revenue (years away), we could amend the deal to roll all our "manufactured revenue activities" into a full-share membership and we're in. Think of it like an "earn-in" arrangement that allows us to show our value over a certain time period with the promise of the equitable split of membership revenue to follow. If we don't earn it, we don't get it, but at least we still are included in the CFP like the other P5 schools.

It's our only chance IMO unless the Big12 is forced to take on new members to get on equal terms with the other conferences that have a championship game. While that's a potential solution, it's going to take a few years of the Big 12 champ being a bridesmaid in the CFP before it would happen. That's a big if and even then, economics will be the key issue to resolve. Geography may be a liability for BYU, but economics are the deal breaker.