By Jacob Shoor
SouthernPigskin.com

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Even with all of the recent movement in college athletics, rumors continue to circulate about conference realignment.

Even with fall camps begun, considerable internet chatter continues to obsess with the notion that ultimately only four conferences can retain Major status, and thus the final realignments are imminent. Conference expansion/realignment talk is almost as addictive and maddening as mild hallucinogens. It is rather like Dazed and Confused’s pothead Slater talking about aliens: it’s funny, but only for a little while. And when the time line is crossed, you start praying for an intervention that leads to a treatment facility.

Two things leap out at me about the most recent talk. One is that while WVU fans remain the most obsessed with the subject, the conference that now seems to have the most fans rushing to catch up with the Mountaineer fans in obnoxiousness is the Big Ten. My guess is that is due to the fact that no matter how much TV money the Big Ten rakes in, its fans smart ceaselessly from the obvious football inferiority of their league compared to the SEC. Another round of expansion, these Big Ten fans assume, would mean that their league would not end by adding schools like Maryland and Rutgers, but rather that the Big Ten could add Texas and Notre Dame, or at least UNC and UVA, which would infuriate the SEC to no end.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that the dolts who assume that the end of history requires four, no more and no fewer, Major conferences no longer assume the ACC must be reduced to reach the magic number. Perhaps they have realized the value of Notre Dame even as a five-eights member in football. Perhaps some have realized what Big Ten blogger Frank the Tank knows: that UNC alone wields power in college sports far beyond what the football factory mindset can fathom, which means that the triumvirate of UNC, UVA, and Duke is indeed at last the equal of, say, Texas. And all a conference requires to maintain Major status is the power – not the football history or football average attendance – that Texas holds.

That means that we now see a horde of Big Ten fans assuming that the Big 12 is dead man walking with Texas headed to the Big Ten.

No doubt about it: it makes perfect sense, at least to those as stoned and/or monomaniacal as Slater, that the Longhorns would be drawn irresistibly to a frozen states conference whose three most recent additions are Nebraska, which blamed Texas for making the Big 12 less than ideal for Nebraska to control; Maryland, probably the least fiscally competent athletics department in the nation, topped by a football team that averaged fewer fans per game in 2012 than did little BC with a 2-10 record; and Rutgers, perhaps historically the most hapless athletics department in the country.

Texas is not joining the Big Ten. Not now, not next year, not the year after, not when the Big 12 GOR expires.

RELATED:Winners and Losers in Conference Expansion

Texas is quite happy being nearly as much the sole proprietor of the Big 12 as William Faulkner was of Yoknapatawpha County. Every Big 12 member is at the mercy of Texas. Even Oklahoma, with more football wins since World War 2 than any school, could not get admitted to the Pac without Texas also joining. The Texas arrogance is not going to shuffle under the leadership of Ohio State and Michigan, which historically as a pair have controlled the Big Ten as thoroughly as Texas controlled the SWC and now controls the Big 12. That would be true even if the Big Ten were not in the Rust Belt and played decent baseball.

But I’ll play along and assume that there is a college football Procrustes about to declare that Texas must leave the Big 12, because it is to be reduced so we have 4 major conferences. What would Texas do under such a death sentence for the conference it single handedly controls?

I think the top option for Texas would be to try to persuade the ACC to grant it the same deal that Notre Dame has: full membership in all sports sponsored by the ACC save football, with five-eights membership in football. Texas would prefer that arrangement for two reasons.

The first is that pulling it off would mean Texas has proven that it is fully the equal of Notre Dame. If you don’t know that the Big Tex ego would dearly love to toss that in the faces of all and sundry, then you don’t know Texas. But it is not just about ego-puffing. As DeLoss Dodds has acknowledged, if Texas were to leave the Big 12, it would prefer to go eastward, for traveling reasons. More important than traveling reasons is the University of Texas desires to be made a peer of a large group of highly ranked universities. Stanford, Cal, SoCal, UCLA, and Washington are academically attractive, but they are not as academically and culturally attractive as Notre Dame, UVA, UNC, Duke, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Miami, and BC.

The second reason is that perhaps the only way the Longhorn Network can succeed is if it can show at least three or four Texas football games per year. And the only way that can happen is if Texas is no more than a partial member of a conference in football and not part of the league’s TV deals for football.

RELATED:Notre Dame to the ACC is Inevitable

Would the ACC make such a deal? Of course, because the league’s full football members would gain a good deal in both national TV interest and ability to recruit, especially in the Lone Star State, by playing Texas five games per season.

I think number two on the Texas list of what to do if the Big 12 were to be ordered to stand down is virtually a tie, between joining the Pac with Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Texas Tech and joining the SEC with either Oklahoma or Texas Tech. Moving westward is very bad for travel and fans (a 7:30 kickoff in CA is 9:30 in Austin). More important, Texas being in the Left Coast while A&M is in the virile SEC will be worse for Texas football long term than Texas remaining in the Big 12.

Texas would be as natural a geographic addition to the SEC as A&M, and it would fit among the other Southern flagship universities. Longhorn football and baseball would thrive. But Texas humbling itself and following A&M anywhere is almost unthinkable. Worse is following A&M into the SEC that Texas has long seen as far beneath itself in everything but football and baseball.

The final option, the last resort, would be to join the Big Ten.

Here is what matters: The Big 12 will be a Major conference as long as Texas wants it to be, and there is no sign Texas does not want it to be.