(B) Join the Big 10, not yet knowing whether or not Notre Dame will walk in the door behind you (A) Join the Pac 10 to form the new Pac 16 (3) If you were University of Texas President Bill Powers and you had to decide, here and now, between the following options for Texas, which would you choose, and why? If the Big 12 can't get its act together, and if the Big Ten or Pac-10 comes along and is offering an opportunity to double or triple your annual revenue, you'd be doing your school and all its athletes a disservice to stay put. (And by stone ages, I mean pre-Big Ten Network). But the reality is, the Big 12 is stuck in the stone ages TV-wise/revenue wise. There does seem to be a genuine effort going on between most of the schools to try and maintain the Big 12, because ultimately that's what's best for that part of the country as as a whole. Now I'm not saying that's absolutely how this will play out. You've got to protect your school's interests, even if it comes at the cost of negatively impacting longstanding partners. If you're a Big 12 school, the financial stakes are too high right now to sit back and hope everything works out for the best. There's no question everyone's out for themselves right now. That is perhaps a rational, understandable course of action, but do you think it possible that each alliance pursuing it's own best interests winds up harming the collective interest of all the universities? What is the proper balance of cooperation and competition in this particular marketplace? (2) Clearly, there's a good bit of jockeying for pole position among conferences right now. Instead, I can write 7 to 10 "mini-columns" that hopefully inform as many readers as possible. Today I will pick out some questions that, in theory, you could break out and write a 2,000 word column about, but might bore 90 percent of the audience if you did. My weekly Mailbag is also a good forum with which to address various little issues that many readers are curious about. However, yesterday, with so many moving pieces to discuss, and with the understanding that I'm writing to a general audience that does not sit at their computer all day following every little expansion development, I thought it best to write something more big-picture, explaining the state of the situation but hopefully without overwhelming people. See: Andy Staples' Baylor column last night. So with that in mind, we've tried to pick out certain key issues that merit examination in a stand-alone column. Admittedly, people following my Twitter feed would almost assuredly be more informed than were they to rely solely on traditional columns that come out, at most, once a day. Not just that it's complicated, but that it's moving so fast, with new tidbits leaking seemingly by the hour. Good question, as I've struggled with this very thing since the Pac-16 reports first broke. You're a book author, so there's that, but assuming you're not going to write a full treatise on a subject, how do you approach complex topics in a way that fits your parameters and serves the mission of your column? Alternatively, am I making a mountain out of a mole hill and you just seize the angle you find most interesting and present it as concisely as possible? I know I would struggle to do your job well. I'm curious how, if at all, the parameters of your sandbox ever affect you when confronted with something as big, messy, and complicated as this conference realignment issue? In my sandbox, for instance, I from time to time wind up writing gargantuan posts. (1) Most of your writing for SI.com is column-length opining. Stewart Mandel is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated.
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