Maybe you're right that the best way to bring them around is to leave them with no other option, but the best way for the Big12 to be good is to not invite schools that bring it down. And preemptively taking 4 schools just to MAKE some combination of UW, UO and Stanford available doesn't do anything to engender trust with the teams we actually DO want in our conference, and potentially brings multiple schools in that bind our hands from future opportunities, and bring the conference down monetarily, "culturally," or competitively.