Landscape with 4 mega-conferences looms

If Big Ten expansion triggers a domino effect in college football, and 64 Bowl Championship Series football schools ultimately group together in four mega-conferences, where does that leave everybody else?

What happens to the NCAA? Do the BCS schools leave the NCAA, start a competing basketball tournament and stage their own football tournament?

All those questions are in play, and many schools could be affected without having much power to resist.

"I'm an outsider looking at that,'' said St. John's athletic director Chris Monasch, whose Big East school doesn't play football. "Does it mean they only play among themselves? How does a 64-team tournament work in basketball? If you're 40th now , you're successful. If you're 40th out of 64, you're below average.''

Under the current system, revenue generated by the NCAA Tournament is divided among many schools according to a formula based on number of sports played, grants-in-aid offered and academic enhancements. For instance, Stony Brook, which plays football in the non-BCS Big South and all other sports in the America East, receives about $500,000, which is about 5 percent of the athletic budget.

"There absolutely will be a domino effect,'' Stony Brook athletic director Jim Fiore said. "Stony Brook is part of the AAU , and we aspire to be with those institutions going forward. One of the reasons we upgraded football is not dissimilar to why UConn did it. It's about conference affiliation. Football is driving everything. The Big Ten and the SEC have raised the bar for everybody. They're very creative and very entrepreneurial.''

Monasch and Fiore are among a large group that believes an attempt by the football power schools to form mega-conferences, break from the NCAA or challenge the NCAA basketball tournament to hog far more revenue at the expense of smaller schools inevitably would draw government attention. The tax-exempt status colleges enjoy under the umbrella of higher education might come into question.

Recalling government involvement in the BCS decision to offer a way for a seventh conference to receive automatic qualifying status, Monasch said, "Imagine what would happen if there were four superconferences.''