Why would any school want to leave the Big 12 Conference?

That was the question posed by the great Ted McLaughlin, writer of the excellent blog Jobsanger, after I wrote a couple of days ago that three universities, Colorado, Nebraska and Missouri, probably will bolt the conference prior to the 2011 football season.  I should have cited the reason -- which is money, pure and simple -- in the above referenced original post.

Colorado will be heading to the PAC 10 and Nebraska and Missouri will probably join the Big 10. It's all about television revenues. The Big 10 is the only conference in America with its own cable television channel, although the PAC 10 is about to start one. In the Big 12, television revenue is doled out to the member universities according to a weighted formula, with the more powerful schools receiving about $10 million a year and the bottom dwellers, like Baylor, getting about $7 million. Every university in the Big 10, on the other hand, receives $22 million a year from television revenues. That's more than twice as much as any school in the Big 12.

The question in my mind is why the Big 10 wants Nebraska. The three schools it wants to add are Rutgers, Missouri and Nebraska. Rutgers is obvious because of its appeal in the New York City metropolitan area market; that move alone could get the Big 10 Channel on Basic Cable in New York City and New Jersey franchises. Missouri can also attract the St. Louis market. But where is the big collection of TV viewers in Nebraska? From what I'm hearing, the Big 10 wants Nebraska because of its national cachet -- the university and especially its football team has a wide national following that I was not aware of.

I have also heard that Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel is not that wild about leaving the conference because he's afraid it would block his pipeline to Texas recruits (his roster last year included 32 players from Texas). But his superiors don't agree and are swayed far more by the Big 10's dollars. They are telling Pinkel to get ready to lay new pipelines.