MORGANTOWN - Shane Lyons was in Phoenix at the beginning of the week while another round of conference expansion obsession began. Soon, West Virginia's athletic director will be back on campus, and not long after that he'll be in front of university president Gordon Gee.
But where is he right now as it relates to whether the Big 12 should add teams, add a championship game to the football schedule and add a Big 12 network? He can't say, and not because he's bound to an oath of secrecy.
"I think where we are is in the information-finding stage," Lyons told the Gazette-Mail from the league's spring meetings. "Everyone is wanting to get as much information as possible so they can take it back to the presidents and share the information with them and say, 'This is the direction we as an institution and we as a conference should head.'
"I don't think that in the next 30 days there's going to be a knee-jerk reaction, like, 'Here's what we've got to do and we've got to do it by the end of the month.' "
The presidents, of course, are the ones who vote on all of this, and they'll gather in Dallas at the end of the month to at least discuss what's only the latest compulsion to add to its membership. But what we have now are strong indications the years-old topic has momentum and that the league will indeed grow. Two teams, four teams, six teams, who knows?
What we do know is the Big 12 has numbers to suggest its quality of life would improve if it adds at least two teams. Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said earlier this week an outside firm ran 40,000 simulations and found the league was 4 to 5 percent more likely to reach the College Football Playoff if it adds a title game.
That was far from alarming, and the math suggests the league could qualify maybe only two or three more teams across a 10-year span - and that's hard to predict or believe because the selection process is totally subjective and left up to a 13-member committee.
On Wednesday, the league's athletic directors, who first learned a little bit about these numbers in March, and the football coaches, who knew very little about them, were given a prolonged look at the research. What they learned was the league was between 10 and 15 percent more likely to get into the playoff if it adds two teams, cuts its conference schedule from nine games to eight and then plays a title game. Now you're looking at four and maybe six more CFP teams in 10 years.
That's a more impressive number, and let's assume the outside firm included all the likely expansion candidates in all its simulations, if for no other reason than it would be a waste of time to not plug their identities into the formula. Let's also assume the presidents know all of this already and have done their homework on Cincinnati and BYU, on Memphis and Colorado State, on UCF and USF.
Gee is on Big 12's expansion committee, with Oklahoma's David Boren and Baylor's Ken Starr, but he's maintained that he hired Lyons, who experienced two rounds of conference expansion when he worked for the ACC and one round when he was the deputy AD at Alabama, to allow him to make decisions in such matters.
Right now, Lyons doesn't believe "we've been given enough information to say, at this point, yes on the three things. Yes, we should add. Yes, we should add a championship game. Yes, we should add a network. All that information has to be completely vetted."
So much for the idea the Mountaineers are, were or will be for expansion, or against it, for that matter. WVU could be swayed by the research and the debate, and Lyons and Gee could talk people into staying on one side or crossing over to another.
But at the present, there are still things the school needs and wants to know. Who are the schools the Big 12 would invite and how will they be secured? How risky is a championship game and where is it played? How valuable is the round-robin schedule and how much does the Big 12 lose if it abandons that? How does the title game affect fan interest for that game and how does that game impact the appeal of bowl games?
On and on it goes.
"I want to do what's best for the conference, and that may not always be what's best for West Virginia," Lyons said.
What he means is WVU needs the Big 12 to prosper, so this isn't a decision about this year, next year or the year after that. This isn't even really about the conference schedule, a title game or the CFP. This is about the long term and about longevity.
The Big 12 is aware of the SEC's financial success with its television package and its network. The Big Ten has a lucrative network and television package and reportedly just signed a six-year, $250 million deal for half its football and basketball games with Fox, which is one of the Big 12's partners.
Bowlsby projects the SEC and the Big Ten could be paying out $20 million more per school by the end of the Big 12's television contract in 2025. There's no way his league can add the right schools to make up that difference in football and basketball revenue, and there remains doubts the league would be more competitive or respectable with additions, too.
But adding teams adds to the inventory available for a Big 12 network, and a network, if structured and produced properly, can write checks to make up the difference between Big 12 schools and schools in other leagues. It's a complicated and convoluted process that involves reconciling multimedia rights deals at every Big 12 school, but if it works it would go a long way toward keeping the conference intact and keep it from losing schools to other leagues.
Thus far, the league hasn't produced a lot of information or education on the topic, and it's something the decision-makers need to know about before they can move forward.
"We're going to have to eventually do something, one way or another," Lyons said. "Either we expand or we don't, but we can't just keep going on with study after study. We're going to have to say, 'OK, we're going to do this or we're not.' "