Folks often float BYU as a potential new member and now there's talk that the Big XII should poach some Pac 12 schools. But geography makes expanding to the west a challenge.

WVU is a geographic outlier, to be sure. The geographic center of the Big XII is more or less in Oklahoma. If you check out distances and flight times, travel from Oklahoma City to either Morgantown, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Phoenix or Tucson are pretty near the same. But the top west coast schools like USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington would be even more distant.

When Texas chose not to lead a group of Big XII schools into the old Pac 10 a decade ago, the Longhorn Network was not the only reason. They did not want to deal with so much travel to the west. WVU gets some travel concessions in Big XII scheduling (like playing at least a couple of road basketball games before the second semester begins) because the conference has figured out that traveling from east to west and then home again is much more difficult than the reverse. Kids play night games and then, in part because of the different time zones, get home in the early morning hours if they charter, or have to spend an extra day away from home if they fly commercial.

It is as easy or easier to travel from Morgantown than from a third of the Big XII - think Iowa State, K State and Oklahoma State. So if the Big XII ever chose to grab some Pac 12 members (or for that matter, BYU), the problem would not just be occasional travel between Morgantown and Los Angeles; it would be a travel problem for a bunch of schools.