After the recent announcement of USC and UCLA moving to the Big Ten, there's been talk of other Pac-12 teams eventually moving. But there's also a chorus of "if the Big Ten wanted them, they would have taken them already."
That got me thinking.
One thing we have noticed over the last couple of decades is that change can be slow and gradual. Look at the national championship process -- they didn't immediately go to a 12 team playoff. Instead, it was a series of steps over 30 years (Bowl Alliance to BCS to 4 team CFP to 12 teams).
I believe conference expansion and realignment is very similar in speed. It's a gradual process, where a conference is not going to add too many teams at once. Then I remembered that the Big 12 is adding four teams this year alone.
So I thought some more, and realized that there are two types of conferences in realignment.
First are the "power" conferences. They kick off the realignment process by expansion.
Then you have the "reactive" conferences. While they could end up with more members at the end of the process than the start, they usually do it from a position of reacting to a move from one of the "power" conferences.
