DALLAS, TX – OCTOBER 10: Armanti Foreman #3 of the Texas Longhorns celebrates with the Golden Hat trophy after a 24-17 win against the Oklahoma Sooners during the 2015 AT&T Red River Showdown at Cotton Bowl on October 10, 2015 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

Big 12 expansion talk is back! After nearly folding when it lost Texas A&M, Missouri, Nebraska, and Colorado at the turn of the decade, the Big 12 has been in limbo as the only power conference with 10 teams.

Since then, the Big 12 has gone in every direction possible. Oklahoma president David Boren said that the league is “psychologically disadvantaged” and needed to expand. Then the league did some fancy (fake) math and decided it needed to expand. They announced 17 candidates and kicked them off Bachelor-style, then held a press conference adding no one.

Was that the end of it? Of course not! The Big 12 still has no idea what it wants to do, and Texas athletic director Mike Perrin got the expansion bus rolling again in an interview with the Austin American-Statesman.

Perrin also said he “wouldn’t be surprised to see something happen” with future Big 12 expansion …

What does that mean? Who knows! The Big 12 is absolutely not going to expand, because the conference can never decide what it wants to do. It’s falling behind its fellow conferences financially, and there aren’t any expansion candidates that can really help that, so the league will continue to be unsatisfied.

But it seems that it’s necessary that every few months we get the hopes of UConn and BYU up as they search for that elusive invitation. The ritual can never end.

[Austin American-Statesman]

About Kevin Trahan

Kevin mostly covers college football and college basketball, with an emphasis on NCAA issues and other legal issues in sports. He is also an incoming law student. He's written for SB Nation, USA Today, VICE Sports, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He is a graduate of Northwestern University.