MORGANTOWN - There was a great episode of "Hoarders" on Wednesday. It was the Big 12's spring meetings.
This gathering of the league's chief administrators was supposed to at least provide direction about whether the league will expand. No one was expecting the Big 12 to extend invitations to two or four schools, but it's beyond reasonable to say everyone was hoping for more than what the commissioner confessed after the first round of talks.
"I don't consider there to be a list of expansion candidates," Bob Bowlsby told reporters. "We haven't made any decisions to add anybody and we haven't made any decisions at all. Any of that would be premature."
Expansion was only discussed for about 90 minutes on the first day. Bowlsby wants the presidents to go back to campus and talk to their athletic directors, and ideally the Big 12 has a decision by the end of the summer. But a month ago, West Virginia Athletic Director Shane Lyons was in Phoenix for similar meetings and he said he'd talk to his president, Gordon Gee, when he got back to campus.
This inactivity is hard to explain, impossible to accept and wholly dangerous, but it also explains how and why the Big 12 loiters behind the SEC and Big Ten and is quite possibly in peril if poachers from those two leagues or the ACC or Pac-12 pounce.
But it also makes Bowlsby look punchless, which is not fair. His resume is not to be questioned, but to anyone who witnessed swift and authoritative maneuvers by the other leagues and their leaders before, he seems subordinate, and therein lies the problem.
These Big 12 schools want and want and want but only when it is to their individual benefits. It's not limited to expansion, which we'll get to in a minute, but it's best viewed through that lens.
How is Bowlsby supposed to coordinate all of this when 10 schools are supposed to vote for what's best for the league but have a legitimate, understandable and perhaps superior interest to pursue what's best for themselves? He's left in the middle, tracking the volleys like this is the French Open and not the future of his brand.
On Wednesday, Mike Perrin, the Texas athletic director, left the idea of expansion in pieces. He said he believes the Big 12 should stick with 10 members. He said Texas has no interest in shuttering its Longhorn Network so ESPN can have the resources to start a Big 12 network. He raised two obstacles to expansion, and if the mighty Texas manner he displayed doesn't intimidate prospective members, then his belief that expanding now limits the Big 12's choices in the next round of realignment ought to.
But on Friday, this could all change. CBSSports.com reported Thursday the Big 12 will be told that adding four members will be worth an extra $1 billion during the final eight years of its television contract. Two schools would be worth half-a-billion bucks, but what do you think is going to tilt heads the most? And the better question, why?
The issue powering expansion is not that the Big 12 was left out of the College Football Playoff once or that it's at a psychological disadvantage, whatever that means. It's that the Big 12 schools make far less in annual payouts than SEC and Big Ten schools, a relegation that will never settle with blue bloods.
There's a major problem with all of that billion-dollar dreaming, though. The realistic additions are limited to second-cut football programs instead of powerhouses, and that inevitability is what made Perrin say, "I'm not for expansion for just expansion's sake."
But Oklahoma, the Texas arch rival in the conference, has a different take. It's president, David Boren, wants to expand, and surely he knows what type of teams the Big 12 can acquire. But he also believes expansion builds a conference network, which is a boon for the Sooners as well as a blow to the Longhorns and their digital kingdom.
This gluttony has to stop if the Big 12 wants to move forward, but every appearance indicates the people won't get out of their own way.
On Wednesday, we learned Baylor, which is in dire need of good public relations, isn't letting players out of their letters of intent. The Bears are in the middle of dealing with unspeakable errors, and they're managing to make it worse, all because they believe recruits are their property based on a signature.
The Big 12 also had a chance to change a rule that would help walk-ons. Instead, a 5-5 vote maintained a dumb policy that insists walk-ons lose a year of eligibility if they transfer to another Big 12 school. The explanation was just as goofy: Schools are afraid walk-ons will be courted by Big 12 foes promising a scholarship, which is either another admission schools treat players like commodity or a laughable belief conference titles are won one walk-on at a time.
This would have passed 10-0 if not for the player whose fame prompted the proposed change: Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield, who left Texas Tech as a walk-on after his true freshman season in 2013, sat out the 2014 season and led the Sooners to the Big 12 championship and the CFP last season.
The vote made Mayfield a senior for 2016 and, remarkably, free to graduate and transfer to any other Big 12 school in 2017 and play in a league far more harmonious than this one. The Sooners were steamed and the split in the foundation couldn't be ignored.
On Thursday, the league voted 7-3 to approve an amended version of the rule that softened the walk-on transfer stance and gave Mayfield two more seasons and the Big 12 a chance to save itself.