Inside SMU's pursuit of the Power Five — 'It's a couple hundred million dollars. I'm not losing sleep over it.'

If you want to feel really poor, this article is the perfect read.

In all seriousness, it's an interesting detailed narrative of how to get into a power conference (which took a little more effort than just ponying up $200M).

Of note:

At one point last fall, SMU officials were engrossed in serious conversations with all three conferences.

Referring to the ACC, Big XII, and PAC12 before the Texas schools in the Big XII stymied those efforts and the PAC12 imploded.

“It was, ‘OK, we know what we have to do,’” recalled Bill Armstrong. “It wasn’t, ‘Bill, are you good for a million a year?’ Nothing like that. It was, ‘Are you in?’ And everybody was like, ‘We’re in.’”

The combined net worth of the room was more than $15 billion.

And probably the most interesting tidbit was that SMU had hired Oliver Luck as a consultant, whom I consider basically the allegorical CFB czar given his crazy industry connections.