You may have heard that the Big East is trying to renegotiate their TV contract. As we've long thought and said, the interests of the basketball schools (mostly northern and now Midwestern Catholic schools) and the football schools (mostly state schools) are not the same. Here's an interesting take on that.
The ACC's contract currently works out to $12.9 million per school; ESPN's current high offer to the Big East works out to $8.1 per school. Clearly, they'll want to keep up with the other big conference.
Fox will complicate that and drive it up, but the bottom line is that football drives TV revenue, so don't be surprised if the Big East tries to pull off a coup somewhere, whether it's Maryland (the Terps would take a major media pay cut to do it, so that seems unlikely), Memphis, Marshall or someone else to make the conference more attractive. Certainly the field is narrowed. They can't realistically raid the Big Ten or Twelve, and TCU was a huge stretch. Still, they probably need to expand football or face further defections.
It occurs to us that Georgia Tech might be a target as well, should the Yellow Jackets be interested.
At any rate, it'll be interesting to see if they can continue to fly a bird with two different sorts of wings.