Tv Markets - Help College Football Realignment Reach Its Natural End - Big 12 Should Allow Missouri To Join Sec - Andy Staples

Just get it over with, college presidents.

We know a lot of you want to reshape the conferences, so just do it already. Unleash your inner Charles Darwins, fire up the Conference Natural Selection Machine and go crazy. You're going to consolidate anyway, so why drag it out?

Tuesday, after a four-hour executive session, the assembled muckety-mucks at the University of Missouri emerged from their cocoon to tell the world that the school's board of curators had unanimously empowered chancellor Brady Deaton to take action regarding Missouri's athletic conference affiliation. In English, that means Missouri wants out of the Big 12, and Deaton's job is to send as many boxes of chocolates as it takes to the SEC office to get the Tigers the hell out of their current conference. The SEC wants Missouri for its two decent-sized TV markets (St. Louis and Kansas City) and because adding a 14th school would eliminate the potential nightmare of scheduling with 13. Also, Missouri is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, so it would academically class up a league that would only have three AAU members (Florida, Texas A&M and Vanderbilt) otherwise.

But the SEC isn't going to just sniff the roses Mizzou sent, blush and invite the Tigers to share in its overflowing honey pot. SEC presidents are as worried now about potential litigation from Big 12 leftovers as they were when they began their forbidden dance with Texas A&M this summer. This is not a done deal yet.

It should be. All this saber rattling is stupid and pointless. If a school wants to move, let it move. Let every school take the best conference deal it can get, sign some new media rights contracts and let the rest of us enjoy what's left of this football season before the world changes next year. If presidents really wanted, they could hammer this out by the end of next week. If a conference gets consumed or implodes, so be it. No matter how the presidents try to portray it so programs can keep their tax-exempt status, this is a multibillion-dollar business. Companies go belly-up or reposition themselves at a lower level all the time. Fans, coaches and misguided sports writers* need to quit being so sentimental about all this movement, because the university CEOs certainly aren't sentimental about it.