oklahoma-stoops.jpg

Oklahoma head football coach Bob Stoops addresses attendees at Big 12 Conference Football Media Days, on July 21, 2015, in Dallas.

(AP/Tony Gutierrez)

The Big 12 apparently is stuck in neutral on the foundational topic of expansion. Its flagship school Texas is digging in its heels.

Nothing but 4s and 5s are left in the small hours in a dive bar full of motley candidates. And a super-majority of eight schools is necessary to take anyone home.

And anyway, what would Cincinnati or Houston look like in the light of day?

This is the plight of the nation's shakiest college football conference. We could be standing on the precipice of an imminent Power Four, something that's been predicted for years but would require a first boulder to fall to create the avalanche that would finally destroy the Big 12.

The Big 12's grant of broadcast rights deal that supposedly binds the league's 10 schools until 2025 is just another contract that can be broken unless the major networks begin reducing payouts to the Big 12 based on defections. That hasn't happened yet and the conference has already been raided twice in the last six years.

In such an atmosphere, with the nation's most lucrative and powerful conference standing next door, can we expect anything less than another rearrangement involving it?

The Big Ten has been eyeing Texas for years but it's hard to imagine the powerbrokers and politicians of the Lone Star State to acquiesce and allow Longhorn nation to be a part of a Northern blue-state conference. Doesn't make sense. Regardless, UT has the elite academic and financial wherewithal to do whatever it pleases.

No, if the Big 12 implodes around it, I think Texas is destined to be a member of either one of two other tribes. There's the SEC, where one of its own (Texas A&M) already resides and where neighbors live (Arkansas, Louisiana State) but where it would have to hold its nose near academic inferiors. More likely is an academic fit in the Pac-12 where it has more studious cousins and at least a distant Southern-tier geographic congruity.

Either way, UT would no longer be a big fish in a small pond but it will be the Western-most outpost in the nation's premiere football conference or the Eastern-most in a league with academic brethren. That'll have to do.

The Big Ten, then, must have its eyes on the Sooner State. That's where the money is. It's also where the most disgruntled Big 12 members appear to lie. OU president and former governor David Boren, in particular, has had to retreat on his outspoken advocacy for expansion in the last few weeks.

Oklahoma and Oklahoma State are each healthy athletic programs with big-time football donors who could add a component to the B1G that it lacks - Southern exposure.

Cowboy football cleared $24 million in profit in fiscal 2014-15 on gross revenues of $44 million. That's about the median for the Big Ten, similar to Wisconsin or Iowa. And Okie State's billionaire sugar daddy T. Boone Pickens rivals any donor in the Big Ten.

Meanwhile, OU football is a giant of Nebraska/Penn State proportions. It generated a $48 million profit over the same period on a whopping $79 million in revenue.

You would think these two are a package deal. State politics likely demands it.

One snag is academic accreditation. Neither school is a member of the prestigious 62-member Association of American Universities. All of the other 14 Big Ten schools are.

Except Nebraska. Its AAU membership was revoked soon after the 2010 announcement of its invitation to the Big Ten. So, it would not be unprecedented for a non-AAU school to be a B1G member, no matter how distasteful it may be to the conference's more academic-conscious presidents and chancellors.

The attraction for the Oklahomas? Financial stability. The Big Ten is in negotiations with Fox on half of its broadcast rights deal that, when added to a new Disney component, could double the payout to each full B1G member. They receive $32 million each annually now. Imagine $60 or $70 million in the near future compared with Big 12 schools that currently receive $23 million.

And from a B1G viewpoint, Oklahoma State and Oklahoma would certainly even out the Big Ten's lopsided divisions with Purdue shifting to the East and the West gaining an infusion of money and talent.

Another route might be a compromise. What if Kansas was brought aboard with Oklahoma? Could Oklahoma State could somehow be cut out of a joint deal? Then, you'd preserve the Big Ten's contiguous footprint, which means something to the membership. You'd add an old neighbor for Nebraska and an AAU-member university in KU.

Then again, Kansas is another Indiana, a football program that produces no revenue or interest overwhelmed by its men's basketball program in both past tradition and current buzz. Football rules the fiscal world of college athletics. Kansas' numbers look almost identical to Indiana's -- in the mid-20Ms in gross revenue. To the more corporate personalities of the Big Ten, Kansas would be a very tough sell.

And separating the political Siamese twins in Norman and Stillwater might be next to impossible, anyway. The state legislature has made them a mandatory package deal in the past as a possible Pac-12 addition.

Either way, it's hard to imagine the Big Ten and Jim Delany standing pat when the landscape appears about to shift. That's never happened before. Why would it now?