K St. and Texas Tech are the newest and proudest members of the American if that went down, yes.
64 - 14 (B1G) - 14 (SEC) - 14 (ACC) - 12 (Pac-16) leaves 10 slots remaining
Those ten slots don't all go to the Big 12... Two go to Notre Dame and BYU, leaving two out of the game of musical chairs.
He throws Iowa State a bone as a good geographical an academic fit with the Big Ten. That is nice. I could just as easily see them going for Kansas, though, given their academics and basketball program. They're not that much worse of geographic fit, either, for that matter.
TTU could be a package deal with UT.
I could easily see Kansas State and Iowa State being the two left out in the cold. Each are midwestern agricultural schools with small but dedicated fan bases but nothing to offer in terms of television or much of a tradition. They both have fell universities in the state that might not help them very much, either.
Iowa State isn't getting left out - the Pac 12 is our worst-case scenario. Everyone keeps acting like Iowa is this small population state with no TV sets - it's not. 3 million new TV sets is a lot more than most states between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean can offer, and excluding the existing states in the Pac 12 (California, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Utah - and, for the record, Iowa has more people than Utah and only 1 million less than Oregon), the states that have greater populations than that (only Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado) either won't be going to the Pac 12 (maybe Texas goes, but they sure as hell won't take TCU or BYU, and Tech only goes only if Texas goes to bat for them, and then the academics are so bad they may not want them anyway; OU and OSU probably go to the SEC; and Colorado is already there and CSU likely won't go). The only other two states that are even close in population are Nevada (no Nevada school will end up in the Pac 12) and Kansas (KU could be a "travel partner" with us, if they don't get picked up by the Big 10. K-State will likely never get taken to the Pac 12 for the same reasons as TT, except KU doesn't have nearly the same leverage as Texas).
The Pac 12 wants public universities and/or private, non-religious universities, both with high academic profiles. Once you get past Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, three schools that may not even be there for the Pac 12, who the hell else is there for the Pac 12 to take? ISU would be a damn good school for them, even if there's a 2000-mile gap between us and most of them.
