This person has worked in sports broadcasting for over a decade, and is pretty plugged in both locally and nationally.

His thoughts were the following: He expects Notre Dame to join the Big 10. Apparently, there is some unwillingness from the top administration in South Bend, wanting to keep the 'identity' and 'prestige' of the university by staying independent. And they don't want their football team to be a pseudo semi pro team, wanting it to still be about the academics... but that the money is just simply too much to say no to, so he expects ND to join that conference. That puts the B1G at 17 teams, and while they would prefer to bring in a big name ACC school, given the grant of rights constraints for the teams in that conference, he expects the B1G to take Oregon and go to 18 teams.

That leave the Pac with almost nothing going for it. He said he expects Washington and Arizona State to join the Big 12. The obstacles facing teams like Cal and CU is that they are 1 - very difficult to deal with in terms of politics and wouldn't 'fit in' in the Big 12 and 2 - that they don't bring enough TV money. The second problem is why, under this situation, the U also gets left out of the Big 12, not being a big enough national brand and already sharing the Salt Lake market with BYU. In his estimation this establishes the Big 12 as a cut below the SEC and B1G but is still a strong national conference with 14 teams once Texas and OU leave. My favorite part of this potential outcome, is Utah can finally rekindle its long lost rivalry with the Aggies lolol

So who knows, could happen, might not, but made sense to me, he wasn't "sure" of anything, but this was his expected value. That's just a brief summary of our chat,

Take it for what you will, which is probably not a whole lot.