[KChiefs1]

Originally Posted by KcMizzou

The Big 10 will not be late to the party.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports...tory?track=rss

Big Ten officials all but acknowledged Sunday that they intend to follow a turbocharged timetable for expansion.

With expansion candidates Nebraska and Missouri facing an ultimatum from the Big 12, the Big Ten clearly is ready to stop dawdling and get down to business.

A longer way of saying that came from Michigan State President Lou Anna K. Simon: "Our announcement in December has caused institutions and conferences to consider their futures, and that has had an impact on our deliberations."

Big Ten presidents and chancellors met Sunday in Park Ridge for more than four hours, and the majority of that time was spent discussing expansion.

Simon, who chairs the Big Ten Council of Presidents/Chancellors, said that no expansion votes were taken Sunday but that the conference's 11 CEOs will not have to be present for a supermajority (8 of 11) to approve inviting schools to apply for membership.

"My understanding of Big Ten bylaws," she said, "is that action can be done electronically, telephonically or in person."

Then she turned to Commissioner Jim Delany, seated to her left, and added: "My lawyer has concurred."

It would surprise no one if Big Ten expansion is resolved in a matter of weeks, though Delany and Simon declined to discuss the specifics of the timing and which schools could be involved.

These are some key remaining questions:

• Is Notre Dame still in the picture, and if the Irish (finally) say yes to the Big Ten, would that preclude adding schools such as Nebraska, Missouri and Rutgers?

• What will Nebraska do? There's a strong belief that if Nebraska remains in the Big 12, Texas also will stay. If the Cornhuskers join the Big Ten, Texas is more likely to head to the Pac-10 with five more schools (Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Colorado or Baylor) in its pickup truck.

• If there's validity to the Austin American-Statesman report that Nebraska and Missouri have been given a deadline of June 11 to June 15 to pledge their allegiance to the Big 12, will the Big Ten cooperate by extending application offers by then?

Delany said that he could not comment on the Big 12 deadline report because he doesn't "have any knowledge" of it and that he had not spoken recently to Big 12 Commissioner Dan Beebe.

While maintaining it's possible the Big Ten will not expand, Delany said if the conference targets schools, the final steps will be "pretty serious — and pretty quick."

Here are a few other tidbits:

• Delany mentioned the seemingly odd possibility that the conference "could act and act again." Meaning if one school is ready to commit now but another needs more time, the Big Ten could expand in phases.

• On the heels of the Columbus Dispatch's publishing e-mail correspondences between Delany and Ohio State President Gordon Gee, Delany was asked whether he's cognizant of the contents of his electronic correspondences. "I am now," he replied. So look for Delany to gather votes by telephone.

• The $22 million figure bandied about to quantify the Big Ten's annual revenue distribution to each school is too high, conference officials said. A more accurate number is $20 million.

The Southeastern Conference on Friday announced revenue distribution of $17.3 million per school, but that does not include local media packages. ( Florida reportedly makes an extra $10 million from its local deal with Sun Sports.)

The Omaha World-Herald reported that Big 12 revenue figures from the 2006-07 fiscal year ranged from $7.1 million (Baylor) to $10.2 million (Texas).

• Simon insists the media have under-emphasized the importance of academics in the Big Ten's deliberations. "I have facetiously said that at the start of this process, if we had given fifth-graders the criteria, the list of institutions would be essentially the list that has been bandied about … by you all," she said. "With much more sophisticated analysis of the sense of 'fit,' but academics has not been much of the conversation. This is more than teams playing teams."

So what is the Big Ten's analysis based on — Association of American Universities membership? Academic Progress Rate numbers? US News & World Report rankings?

"Most of the people in the room were provosts before they were presidents," Simon said, "so it's a group that is perfectly capable of making very sophisticated judgments on academics. If anything, we obsess about that."

• Delany gladly acknowledged that he reads a packet of daily clips from newspapers and blogs obsessed with Big Ten expansion. "It's a story du jour with lots of twists and turns," he said.

He added that in the final analysis, the decisions by the Big Ten and expansion candidates will be "about fit, about destiny."

tgreenstein@tribune.com