Leading up to the NFL Draft, you always have to be careful about any news you read or hear about different prospects. There are always teams try to leak things to the press to throw off other teams, possibly make a player fall, or the turn their fans against a coveted player that they can't trade up to get him.

That's what the state of conference realignment news feels like to me. Rumors about the Big 12 expanding at the ACC's expense simmered on the message board level for a while, but once the chair of FSU's board of trustees opened his mouth, suddenly everything seemed to become fair game. Ever since, I've seen a steady drip-drip-drip of information leaking out to all kinds of places.

I do not believe anything is a done deal. The picture of the present that rings most true was the one painted by the Tulsa World's Dave Sittler, who said last weekend that opinion on expansion is completely divided within the Big 12. Just because the Big 12 has emerged as more powerful than the ACC, it doesn't mean all of the dysfunction within the league has gone away. It just means that the Big 12 has a better lineup of football programs than the ACC does.

Texas PR condiut Orangebloods.com's Chip Brown did an information dump on his radio show based on a call he says he received this morning. It wasn't anything you haven't heard before or could have figured out on your own. Basically he says the Big 12 won't do anything until after the playoff details are set, though his source pegs Big 12 expansion at a 55-60% likelihood. He also said there hasn't been any formal contact between the Big 12 and any ACC schools, but "the football schools" of the ACC (which he named as FSU, Clemson, Virginia Tech, and Miami) are using "third party feelers" to see where they would stand with an expanding Big 12. [Update: add Georgia Tech to the list, as first reported by Ingram Smith on Sunday.] Finally, he thinks Texas is trying to pump the brakes on expansion until it knows where Notre Dame stands.

It all sounds reasonable enough, even the Notre Dame part given some of DeLoss Dodds' on-record statements in the past. I don't find it surprising that the source fed Brown information indicating that ACC schools are coming to the Big 12 and not the other way around. The Big 12 is not going to want a tampering lawsuit of some kind, and it's always best to avoid being seen as a conference raider. The only other point of interest was that Texas to the ACC had real legs last year, but the ACC turned down the Longhorns.

The next closest thing to a legit report came from ESPN's Chris Low on Paul Finebaum's radio show yesterday. He said he thinks conference realignment is not over and that the SEC has its eye on Virginia Tech. If the reports of an impending SEC Network are correct, then I think anything's possible there (though I don't think the SEC wants to expand again soon).

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THE STORY THAT NEVER ENDS: CONFERENCE REALIGNMENT

The SEC Network: The next step in the conference's conquest of the college football world
And good news for SEC basketball and baseball fans, too. (Probably as well as softball and volleyball, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here.) SportsBusiness Journal broke the story that we were all hoping for, with Sporting News kindly reprinting it.

There are several different paths the SEC could take on a channel. It could follow the Big Ten model, where the conference is a 49 percent owner of Big Ten Network with Fox and shares in its revenue. Or it could go the Pac-12 route, which owns all of its regional networks. Texas, on the other hand, sold its rights to ESPN for a fee and ESPN owns all of the Longhorn Network.

All of those models are believed to be in play for the SEC, but any channel couldn’t be launched until 2014 at the earliest, when ESPN gets back syndication rights it sublicensed to regional sports networks operated by Fox Sports and Comcast.

Of course, most of those rights likely have to do with football and men's basketball -- but it would be ridiculous to launch an SEC Network without either of those, so that's understandable. As are the reasons for CBS balking at paying too much more for SEC games.

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According to the Sports Business Journal, the SEC is planning on starting up its own TV network. The report itself is paywalled, but the Sporting News' Matt Hayes gave us the good stuff:

SN sister pub Sports Business Journal: #SEC near SEC Network deal, begin early as 2014. Also #CBS balking at major $ increase with Mizz/TAMU

— Matt Hayes(@Matt_HayesSN) May 21, 2012

UPDATE: The full article is now available for free at the Sporting News website.

Let's take these in reverse order.

CBS is a broadcast network, already reaching every home in America with a TV. Expanding the reach of the conference means nothing to it because it receives no subscription fees from viewers; everyone gets CBS for free regardless of its programming. Also, CBS only gets to broadcast one SEC game per week during the season plus one prime time game. Adding more schools to the conference doesn't give CBS any more "inventory" to televise; it will continue to only broadcast one game a week plus one prime time game.

The question on CBS's rights fees in particular is this: did adding Texas A&M and Missouri materially increase the value of the best SEC game in any given week? The answer is probably not, because neither of those two is more valuable than the conference's existing bankable schools. That CBS is not sure it wants to pay a whole lot more is not surprising in that light. ESPN, on the other hand, will be ponying up plenty more thanks to two more schools' worth of games and the conference's expanded reach.

The creation of a real SEC Network is where the value in adding Texas A&M and Missouri was. The key to the conference network is to get it on expanded basic cable/satellite (not some exotic sports tier) for every subscriber in the league's footprint. Not only does maximizing the population mean a greater audience to sell to advertisers, but also more subscription fees.

Here's how expansion changes the game for the conference's population, using the July 1, 2011 estimate:

Adding Texas and Missouri increased the conference's population by 53%. Those two states will make up slightly more than a third of the new SEC's total population base. It's not just Texas pulling the weight here; at 6 million residents, Missouri will be the fifth-largest SEC state. It trails fourth place Tennessee by only a small margin of roughly 400,000.

Here's some more perspective. The Pac-12's population base is 62.8 million people, and its networks are projected to pay out $9 million per school per year. The Big Ten's population base is 69.5 million people, and its single network has delivered more than $7 million per school the past couple years. The new SEC's population base will be 91.3 million when Texas A&M and Missouri officially join in July. If Mike Slive can cut a deal to put his network into every cable and satellite subscriber's house within the league's footprint, it will probably out-earn both those other leagues' networks.

The logistical questions are still out there, of course. Will it be a joint venture with Fox, like the BTN, with ESPN, like the Longhorn Network, or wholly owned by the conference like the Pac-12 Networks? (Update: sounds like ESPN will be involved one way or another). Will it be up and running by 2014? Can Slive get wide carriage ahead of the official announcement like the Pac-12 did, or will it be a slog to get it out there like the Big Ten Network was and Longhorn Network still is?

We'll find all of that out later. The big news is that the SEC is not going to voluntarily leave money on the table by not running its own network. That's good news for all the athletic departments' budgets, and it's good news for any of you out there wishing you could watch replays of old football games through the long offseason drought.

Note: this post and the report it links to predate the revelation that the SEC plans to start its own network. Keep that in mind while reading it. -Y2

The USA Today got a company called Navigate Research, which has worked on valuations for college sports rights in the past, to go on record with predictions for how the landscape of TV rights will look soon. Here's a small excerpt:

The estimate, premised on the SEC continuing without a conference-owned network and again having 15-year deals, would give the SEC more guaranteed TV revenue than any college athletics conference: nearly $25 million a school per year over the full contract term ($5.2 billion total).

However, the Pac-12's full ownership of national and regional networks that have lined up substantial distribution before their scheduled launch in August, indicates that the conference is on track to generate at least $30 million a school per year over the 12-year term of agreements with ESPN and Fox that begin later this year ($4.3 billion total)...

"People expect the SEC to be on top," says Navigate president A.J. Maestas. "The Pac-12 is the real story here."

Before diving into this, it's important to remember that we're talking about average TV revenue here. All contracts (not counting those with in-house networks) start small and escalate over time. For instance the SEC's current contract guarantees an average of over $17 million per school per year, but as I pointed out last week, each member school received roughly $13.2 million from TV for the 2010-11 athletic year.

The important thing to remember when analyzing, and not hyping, these numbers is that not every conference is selling the same thing. The only apples-to-apples comparison that can be done between conferences is for Tier 1 and Tier 2 rights. Everything else changes from conference to conference.

Navigate Research projects the SEC to receive about $25 million per school per year from the top two tiers. The Pac-12 is set to get $20.8 million for them (which is higher than Navigate's projection from before the deal was signed), the Big 12 will get $20 million for them, and the ACC will get a little less than $17 million (its deal is for all three TV tiers, but Tier 3 rights aren't that valuable). The Big Ten hasn't negotiated its top tier deals recently, so it doesn't have a comparable figure. My guess is that it'll land above the Pac-12 and near the SEC when the league next negotiates its deals.

The "real story" as I see it is that the SEC is clearly the most valuable conference. Its projected margin over the second place (for now) Pac-12 is as almost great as the Pac-12's margin over the ACC.

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If you feel like the SEC baseball regular season just started yesterday -- well, you're not alone. But the SEC baseball tournament really does start tomorrow, with a slate of four games stretching from the time McDonald's stops serving breakfast to one hour after Whataburger starts serving it in the Eastern time zone. (Um -- breakfast for dinner.)

One of the benefits of the crazy end to the SEC regular season means we have some solid teams and intriguing storylines running through the first day. A couple of teams are trying to keep a late-season boom going while former front-runner Kentucky is trying to steady the ship. LSU and South Carolina get to sit this round out after winning the top two seeds, but they get to mix it up with some of the winners, and we're about to start several days of great SEC baseball.

(9) Ole Miss vs. (4) Kentucky, 10:30 a.m. ET
Both teams come in having lost four straight games -- one to a decided non-SEC underdog and the last three to a hot team from the conference. They're also more evenly matched than you might think from having seen the Wildcats and the Rebel Black Bears' respective seasons play out. In SEC games, Kentucky trails Ole Miss in OPS by .001 and holds an advantage of .40 runs in ERA. The Wildcats also come in disappointed by falling completely out of the SEC and SEC East championship races, but they're still probably good enough to take care of Ole Miss in what could be a closer-than-expected game.

(7) Mississippi State vs. (6) Arkansas, 30 minutes after Ole Miss-Kentucky
The Razorbacks were actually doing pretty well until running into South Carolina and Auburn(!), but rallied to sweep Tennessee, which vied all year with Alabama for the title of the worst SEC team. Mississippi State, as we noted on Saturday, finished up a torrid streak over the last few weeks of the season by sweeping Kentucky. Neither of these teams tear up the ball on offense, but both pitch pretty well. Last I heard, the Western Division Bulldogs were not going to start Chris Stratton in this game -- which is probably the right strategy in a double-elimination tournament -- but I still think that the hot streak continues and gives us a small upset in the first round.

(10) Auburn vs. (3) Florida, 5:30 p.m. ET
Why does this game sound so familiar? Oh, yeah, maybe it's because Florida went to Auburn and took two of three from the Tigers this past weekend. The Gators won their two games in that series by a combined 15 runs; Auburn eked out a one-run win in the series finale. Auburn has a great offense, leading the conference in SEC play with a .770 OPS, but Florida's pitching staff is good enough to keep the Tigers' bats in check for another game.

(8) Georgia vs. (5) Vanderbilt, 30 minutes after Auburn-Florida
Here's another case of hot versus cold. Georgia won one its last five SEC series and ended the season by losing two straight against Alabama. Vanderbilt, meanwhile, has been on the kind of roll that makes them immensely dangerous in a tournament like this. (Though, ironically, the last time the Commodores lost an SEC series was against Alabama.) In that time, Vanderbilt won series against Kentucky and at LSU in addition to the sweep of Ole Miss to end the year. Georgia's a sliver better on offense and Vanderbilt holds a slight edge on pitching, but this game seems more about momentum, and the Commodores remain scorching.

If you've read anything on the web about college football in, say, the past 72 hours, you've almost certainly come across a slate of news articles, blog posts and columns about how the SEC-Big 12 bowl game announced last week will lead to THE INEVITABLE ONSET OF THE MEGACONFERENCE ERA MIKE SLIVE IS HOLDING THE PRESS CONFERENCE TOMORROW TO ANNOUNCE VIRGINIA TECH AND THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO ARE JOINING THE SEC.

The impetus for that talk, of course, is that this looks very much like laying the groundwork for two semifinals (the Rose Bowl and the Champions Bowl) that leads to a national championship game. And while I think -- somewhat sadly -- that a group of four 16-teams megaconferences are the future of college football, I think we're still a ways away from that.

The reason I think it's further off is that there are several things that have to happen before the Mega-Conference Era actually begins. And I don't know that any of these things are going to suddenly occur tomorrow. In fact, my guess is that we're at least five years away and probably more like a decade out from the last realignment wave sweeping college football in quite some time. Why?

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