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Message: [QUOTE="Sportsman5, post: 4455140, member: 1005"] I'll explain. Northwestern is currently making an equal share to what everyone in the BIG10 is making. This is not close to the actual value that the school provides. Given the University of Illinois already carries the state of Illinois in regards to cable boxes and Northwestern is terrible at sports, then Northwestern adds very little marginal value as a small private school that no one cares about athletically besides a small number of alumni and the students. The top schools in the BIG10 and the people paying for TV contracts do not want to pay Northwestern $75+ million per year (or whatever is an equal share of the BIG10 contract). So the logical conclusion is that in the future the TV networks will negotiate directly with individual schools instead of conferences. The tradition of negotiating with conferences will be broken because there is too much money at stake now for the highest value schools to have loyalty to other schools in the same conference. The historical norms have been completely thrown out the window recently (ex. USC and UCLA are now in the BIG10) It's reasonable for you to disagree with me, but there is definitely a possibility of what I'm saying coming true because there is an incentive by both the most powerful schools and the TV networks to cut out the oversized payments to schools that clearly provide less value than what they are currently receiving in payouts. [/QUOTE]