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Maybe Jim Delany really is the smartest commisioner in all of sports (pro or college). The Big Ten actually has the base to expand itself to 14 or 16 and be just fine. If the other conferences follow along, they could succeed, but they could just as easily find themselves with too many mouths to feed and end up setting themselves back while the Big Ten continues to move forward.
The other interesting piece to this is that the Big Ten Network is, to the best of my knowledge, jointly owned by the eleven Big Ten schools (51%) and Fox (49%). Will the existing teams sell their shares to the new teams and, if so, for how much? I cannot imagine a scenario where they agree to split that 51% sixteen-ways, rather than eleven-ways without the new schools spending millions (tens or hundreds of millions?) to buy their way in.
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