I've just poured over ESPN.com, Sportingnews.com, SI.com, and Rivals.com, and not ONE report of expansion being anywhere close to a done deal. If it were anywhere close (like Mizzou being all but done), that news would be PLASTERED all over the place. Instead, nothing? Why don't we all calm down and wait until it's ACTUALLY reported.
IMO there is a plausible explanation that by its nature is not likely to be embraced by the sports media or the sports-oriented internet boards.
The simple truth is that these depend on sports fans for their existence, and what is of concern to sports fans inevitably becomes a matter that they have to address in order to hold a market share.
Of course this means anytime sports are directly affected by political, social, economic, scientific, etc developments it leads to sports "journalists" being unable to resist the temptation to write & talk about factors with which they have no expertise but lack the background even to understand.
This leads to such absurdities as the press, other media, internet sites interviewing Dan Gable about the impact and implications of Title IX..or asking coaches why female athletes seem more prone to ACL injuries...or sports writers authoring columns on how changes in admissions requirements will alter recruitment of student-athletes without first immersing themselves is the complicated details of admissions evaluation procedures, accreditation differences, core course requirements etc, etc.
The consequence of not being adequately informed is that they tend to substitute conjecture for factual reporting.
Add the further complication. While radio & TV from the earliest days lost the battle to give news priority over entertainment despite the best efforts of Ed Murrow & Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley & David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite & other media giants, the decline of print journalism has been a slow, torturous process.
But an inexorable one. As circulation has declined, advertising revenues dropped, the newspaper chains have dropped first news bureaus, then support staff, then reporters themselves. So now we have the commonplace phenomenon of fatuous, uninformed reporters like Hlas in the Cedar Rapids Gazette & Harty of the Iowa City Press Shitagain explicitly referencing internet wannabes as their sources for their "stories" about U of Iowa athletics.
In short, the unfounded, offbase. hopelessly erroneous conjectures that have been and will continue to be aired and printed about BT expansion are not just only the imagined notions of media who have no more contact with informed sources than their readers, but the necessities of downsizing and economizing have eliminated the "fact checkers" and the editors who in past eras of more responsible journalism served the invaluable, critical function of making sure that what was written was reasonably close to the truth.
Years ago I had occasion to be quoted at length over several days on the front page of USA Today. I was not astounded that I was quoted repeatedly by a reporter who had never talked to me; not even surprised that he was quoting remarks I had never made and which I knew to be false in virtually every detail; but I was distressed enough that it was a major personal embarassment that I phoned the USA editorial offices in Northern Virginia to tell them that their news accounts were highly inaccurate and I wished not to be identified with further fictional quotes. I learned that it was not an oversight that no fact checker had contacted me to confirm the validity of my alleged remarks; the nation's largest newspaper has no staff and no procedures for such routine efforts to make sure that what it prints is reasonably close to the truth. A few days later, I was again quoted by the same reporter and USA Today again printed it on the front page.
On a day to day basis, I long before had learned that the media make little or no effort to reach primary sources. I mention all this because when the BT was considering expansion to include Penn State I was a senior economist in the Office of Post Secondary Education in the US Dept of Education, and my duties and responsiblities required me to do oversight & liaison to the BT negotiations. Over the several years the expansion deliberations were taking place in Chicago, the only phone calls we got were background calls from the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicles of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Times, and background & update calls from the NY Times and Washington Post--never once a call from any Chicago media, or from any media in Big Ten locales.
The parallel to this is that the sports media covering BT athletics not only would never think of calling the government offices that might be reliable sources of information--not only that they wouldn't realize that they should be seeking information from the BT offices in Chicago, not Commissioner Delaney's office out in the suburbs, but the likelihood is that they don't even know the who & where of contacting the BT staff where the preparations for expansion are ongoing.
There is absolutely no evident reason to expect an even less-muscular media to make any stronger efforts to learn the facts now than then.
