Conference expansion would ruin SEC's gold mine

They didn't make a big deal about it, but some of the CEOs of SEC schools caught the expansion bug. South Carolina President Harris Pastides told reporters last week that he saw some merit to expanding into Texas "and maybe beyond there." A handful of others are of a like mind. Then the SEC handed out the checks. And Pastides said any expansion was "appealing to me as a backup plan."

"If we keep things the way they are, that's what I'd like to do," he said. Money talks. And it talks loud enough to drown out any serious expansion talk around the SEC, for the time being.

On Friday, SEC Commissioner Mike Slive announced that the league was distributing $209 million in revenue to its 12 members. That averages about $17.3 million per school. The thought of splitting up the pie with another two or four schools suddenly did not seem quite so appealing. While the 58 percent boost in revenue-sharing from the previous year was attributed in large part to the new TV deals with ESPN and CBS, member schools are still allowed to negotiate their own deals for things like coaches' shows and spring game broadcasts. At some schools, those generate considerable profit. With that kind of money being thrown around, the SEC has taken a wait-and-see approach to expansion. Slive said only that his approach remains "strategic and thoughtful" as this plays out.