I don't understand people that say that it's just hindsight that we should have joined the Big 12. It was obvious then and it's obvious now. We should have seen the instability as an opportunity rather than a risk. Even if Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, and Texas all left for the PAC-16, the remnants would still have put us in the best conference that we'd ever been in. We wouldn't have had to go back to Indy. We could have re-created the Big 12 with the teams previously stated (and possibly cherry picking a couple of others):

BYU
BSU
Utah
TCU
Baylor
Kansas
Kansas State
Iowa State

It seems to me that the above conference would have represented our worst case scenario had we opted to join an unstable Big 12 (which is still better than independence). Best case scenario would be the current Big 12 with BYU instead of West Virginia (which is likely had we been able to get into the Big 12 in 2010).