Lost in all of this conference realignment/expansion/implosion talk is the effect that its all going to have on basketball. While everyone talks about how strange it would be to have a 16-team conference, they usually forget that the Big East was a 16-team basketball conference before being a 16-team conference was cool.
Now the conference will be 17 with the addition of TCU and that's not counting the possibility that more teams are coming. Let alone the fact that top-notch programs like Kansas could be among them. Of course the Big East could lose some schools as well, the whole thing is so dicey at this point.
Figuring out how the football will shake out is easy. It's how the basketball side will readjust that's the tricky part.
Andy Katz took a look at some of the scenarios in play and he spoke with a curmudgeony expert on such matters, Syracuse Orange head coach Jim Boeheim.
"The ideal conference has 10 teams in the same geographic area where you play everyone twice,'' Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said. "We're going as far away from that as we can. Why? To make money.''
At this point, Boeheim thinks the Big East might work best if it goes to 20 teams and splits into 2 conference (as many have drawn up). At least then you could maintain some semblance of rivalries and geographic balance. Otherwise, as Katz puts it, its less of a conference and more of a scheduling arrangement between teams.