I lacked the imagination.
In the Expansion Wars of college football, which began over a decade ago at this point, I had always been fairly skeptical about the potentiality of anything close to superconferences. Too many historical/cultural ties to surmount, too many logistical issues to sort out, and maybe just a lack of desire among conferences to blow up a system that had been stable for generations.
That proved incorrect! In large part because I failed to recognize that money is a thing and that even when a conference (like the Big Ten) has a lot of it, said conference would also like more of it, and is willing to do pretty much whatever it can to get it.