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My friend, Adam Rittenberg, ESPN's more than able Big Ten blogger, has shown the reason why expansion is not likely to happen - the conference is gushing money without it.  What's a championship game worth - a couple of million dollars per school at most, right?  If you look at the numbers in Adam's post, you'll see that a couple of million won't mean too much to most of the schools on the list, except maybe Northwestern, Indiana and Illinois.   Even then, it's important to note that these figures are from the 2007-2008 season, before the Big Ten Network really got started throwing off a lot of cash.  While we don't have last season's numbers yet, I suspect that they are substantially higher even in the face of the Great Recession.  Expansion, why bother - it only dilutes the pie.  

Besides, that whole championship game thing is really pretty much of a joke anyway, a game totally created for TV which diminishes the season's accomplishments, often forces fans to choose between it and a bowl game and more often than not penalizes the conference if the goal is to win the BCS Championship (which I would contend should not be any school's goal anyway, but that's a whole other post).

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