SPILLING THE BEANS. Intercollegiate sport is for the experience. It has nothing to do with money. Tech Central Station's Alan W. Dowd didn't get the memo.

In short, as Sports Illustrated observes, this is "a period of high anxiety," especially for the Big East and Big Twelve, which border the Big Ten. When the Big Ten reaches across those borders, it will have a lot to do with money and market share.

Money? Market share? Somebody is going to be so crass as to suggest that college sports respond to market forces?

The New York Times reports that only 21 percent of top-division college athletic departments operate in the black. The other 89 percent of schools average deficits of $9.87 million.

That accounting might be dubious, but some conferences have better business models than others.

Big Ten athletic departments don't have to worry about big deficits, owing largely to the fact that the conference has two strong revenue streams: a healthy TV contract with ABC/ESPN (a billion-dollar deal covering 10 years) and its very own TV network (the Big Ten Network). The Chicago Tribune has done the math and concludes that each Big Ten member receives $9 million from the ABC/ESPN contract and some $8 million from the Big Ten Network. "Add revenue from bowl games, the NCAA basketball tournament and licensing, and you arrive at the estimated $22 million-a-year distribution figure." That's $22 million per member. And if the Big Ten expands, according to the Tribune, "Conference officials have seen estimates of television revenues doubling by 2015-16."

Moreover, adding a conference championship football game—an inevitability once the league expands to 12, 14 or 16—would add an estimated $15 million to league coffers.

That works out to just over a million dollars a team, not quite enough to cover the odd severance bonus. And those proliferating conference championship games will cannibalize revenue from regular season games. (It's annoying enough already that Minnesota-Wisconsin and Illinois-Northwestern often come in October and the so far sacrosanct Ohio State-Michigan has of recent years been meaningless).

Now, contrast the Big Ten's position—blessed by certain historic advantages and strengthened by forward-looking innovations like the Big Ten Network—with that of the Big East and Big Twelve.

According to the Providence Journal, the Big East generates just $4-6 million for its eight football schools. "The eight schools that don't play football in the conference...don't share a dime of football money. They pocket somewhere around $1.7 million a year from the conference." All told, the Big East earns only $33 million from television revenue.

The Dallas Morning News reports that "under the Big Twelve's distribution formula, teams receive $7 million to $12 million." ESPN adds that "schools like Texas and Oklahoma, which have the majority of their games on television, receive bigger television checks than schools like Baylor and Iowa State, which are rarely televised."

A more egalitarian distribution formula, on the other hand, is contrary to antitrust laws. Oklahoma and Notre Dame led the way in establishing that.

In other words, not all schools are created equal in the Big East and Big Twelve. That feeds the green-eyed monster. And that leads some to look for greener pastures.

The Big East is more a way of packing the basketball tournament with five and six seeds. The Big Ten, for its relative financial strength, doesn't get much respect in football and basketball, although it comprises the academically strongest cluster of land-grants anywhere in the country. But leave aside whether there are five more academically strong land-grants with geographic proximity to the Midwest (Penn State's administration, to its credit, noted that the academic profile of many Penn State departments didn't approach that of departments in the traditional ten) and focus on the economics.

The critics fail to recognize conference expansion—and in some cases, conference destruction—as the natural byproduct of the evolutionary free-market system. "It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in," Schumpeter coldly observed.

Conferences may be comprised of nonprofit institutions of higher learning, but conferences are in every way capitalist concerns. (See the dollar signs above.)

Even so, some of the strongest criticism of Big Ten expansion comes from the Big East, which recently hired former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue to help fend off the Big Ten hordes.

Tagliabue calls Big Ten expansion plans "very disruptive to everyone outside of the Big Ten." He predicts expansion is "going to have a terrible negative effect on everyone other than the schools in the Big Ten." He claims the Big Ten's desire to grow is triggering "depreciating value and a ton of negativity." He warns about "a big negative reaction out of Congress or someone else" and blames the Big Ten for forcing other conferences to drift "in artificial suspension" while the Big Ten weighs its next move.

The mind boggles at the possibility of a Big Ten expansion leading to a Congressional investigation (protecting competitors, not competition) followed by the Tea Party getting after Congress to mind its own business.