I tend to use Google trends pretty often to gauge the popularity of various things (movies, sports teams, etc.) If you compare the BYU football team to BSU football, you will notice that the trend is very similar (which is pretty good considering BYU hasn't had a product worth Googling compared to BSU for a while now). When you compare BYU and BSU to basically every other expansion candidate (Cincinnati, Memphis, CSU, Houston, SDSU, UCF, etc), I can't find a single other school that even comes close in the amount of Google searches. BYU and BSU are out-searched by about 10 times for all except cincinnati (which averages better than the others but was still outsearched by about 5x by BYU and BSU). I was actually shocked by the disparity

Now, I know that BYU and BSU each have their weaknesses (BYU is unique in some challenging ways for a conference, and BSU is in a small market and weak academically), but from a national interest, they are far and away the best candidates. Can someone explain to me, from a network standpoint why there is so much of a question? I get that WV wants a travel partner and that some teams want someone in Texas, but from a dollar standpoint is there much arguing that BYU and BSU have the most interest and likely the highest value from a TV network?

Apologies for the ramblings, but when I saw the disparity I was pretty surprised and had to share my depression that despite this you will likely see Eastern teams added instead.