Continuing The Realignment Discussion

After my post yesterday explaining why Missouri would join the SEC, T. Kyle King over at the SB Nation Georgia blog, Dawgsports.com rebuts my post by explaining why the SEC would not ask Missouri to join the conference. Kyle's argument against the SEC wanting Missouri seems to center on two main points: there is no guarantee that Missouri, a program that fights for media attention with the Royals, the Chiefs, Kansas Jayhawks, the Blues, the Cardinals, the Rams, and Illinois, can deliver the Kansas City and St. Louis media markets, and there is no way Mike Slive will consider taking a Missouri program that the Big Ten outright rejected last year during expansion talks.

I am not sure of the viability of the latter reason, so I'll let it go, because I don't think there is a way to prove or disprove that theory unless we interviewed Mike Slive himself about his feelings on Jim Delany, and were able to gauge his ego regarding the Big Ten's current Peon in Chief. I don't have the time or motivation to take on such a pointless exercise. As for Kyle's second point, I think there is some validity to the claim that Missouri may have too many competitors for viewers attention when it comes to sporting events in the Kansas City and St. Louis markets. However, I do believe that if Missouri became a member of the SEC, joining the best football conference in the nation, viewers in those markets would take notice and begin tuning in. There is some validity to the idea that taking a middling program and putting it in a stronger conference than it may deserve can cause it to step up its performance in athletics due to the increased recruiting cache such conference membership brings. The SEC isn't inviting a program to their conference out of charity, though, so Missouri's inability to deliver its television markets may be a death knell for any realignment hopes they may have. If their television ratings caused the Big Ten to choose Nebraska instead of their larger media markets, I have to question Missouri's ability to control their own destiny in realignment.

We are then left with the question of who else to add to the SEC as a 14th conference member, assuming A&M joins the Conference, and triggers the realignment race. This is a question I want to open up to any commenters on the blog here. I'd actually favor Virginia Tech, because I think they can deliver some of the Virginia/Washington D.C. television market, and I think their style of play and athletic profile would fit in with the other SEC programs. Va Tech just recently joined the ACC, though, with Virginia going through the political wrangling to get them in there, so I don't know if the Hokies would politically be able to leave the ACC. The other option for the SEC is Oklahoma, but they have a little brother problem when it comes to Oklahoma State. I don't know if the politicians in Oklahoma would let OU leave Oklahoma State behind, and I'm not sure OSU is attractive enough for the SEC to want them, especially since their addition would mean expanding to a sixteen-team super conference. Going back to the television discussion, Oklahoma can deliver the Oklahoma City and Tulsa television markets, and guarantee the vast majority of the televisions in the state will be on to watch their games; OSU cannot make anything close to that claim. If the SEC cannot add OU or Virginia Tech, who else should they consider as a fourteenth member to even out their divisions?