The consensus, however, is the Big Ten’s lust may have been sated by adding the Los Angeles schools. The SEC, the bully on the block, has no interest in stretching itself so thin. The ACC might [be interested in Washington and Oregon], if only to keep Yormark from going coast-to-coast and encroaching upon its territory as the league with the third-largest media rights package overall.

If the Atlantic Coast Conference had a visionary commissioner like Brett Yormark instead of the passive, defensive Jim Phillips, he would have the Northwest jewels in his pocket, Arizona and Arizona State--and Berkeley and Stanford too! That would be six. A bi-coastal league has been a vision since the 1960's. The academic elites in the East, and Notre Dame in the Midwest, are a perfect match for Washington, Oregon, and especially for the two Bay Area Ivies, who would rather dissolve football than play the likes of Boise State, Texas Tech and West Virginia. An Alliance, if you'll pardon, would secure the Atlantic conference and preserve the remaining Pacific members as athletic-academic elites. It sure would have made even more sense with USC and UCLA--then you would have had a eight-team West branch--but Phillips didn't act. Between the coasts and north of Texas there just are no universities not locked down that are the near equal of the bi-coastal elites. 

Travel costs would be prohibitive for an all-sports Alliance but if we adopt disruptor Yormark's vision one can separate football from men's basketball, then those two sports can be separated from gymnastics and track-and-field and the rest of the so-called Olympic sports. That is already being done. Johns Hopkins is a member of the B1G. What do they play, lacrosse? Some teams in the ACC play hockey; they're in a different conference. 

This could be done, this would be done if Yormark were headquartered in Greensboro. The ACC should raid the Big XII--of its commissioner.