Did you ever notice old guys like big stuff? For some reason, they love to drive something like a Buick as long as it has a hood big enough to double as a replacement flight deck for an aircraft carrier, and we all know the biggest buffet in town will collect codgers like Paris Hilton collects penicillin-resistant organisms. Given that, it really should come as no surprise Penn State head coach Joe Paterno would, if he had his way, expand the Big Eleven Ten by three members to 14.

The thought, according to Paterno, would be to add two schools from the east and one from the west, although nobody including the venerable coach has any idea which schools the conference would like to add. There have been many rumors, spanning from Texas to Notre Dame to some sort of rape and pillage of the Big East. In the end, I don’t think it really matters to Paterno. For several years, Paterno has been touting the conference growing by at least one to 12 teams, enabling it under current NCAA rules to add the cash-magnet known as a championship game.

Well, gang, don’t look now, but it looks like part of this may happen very soon. Reports are circulating that as soon as tomorrow, Nebraska will bolt the Big 12 to join the Big Eleven Ten, thus causing a rip in the space-time-conference continuum by making the conference now known as the Big Eleven Ten to actually have a dozen members, while the actual Big 12 would drop to eleven. My skull wants to explode just trying to comprehend it.

In any event, this movement likely initiates a cascade effect of movement. If Nebraska were to bolt to the Big Eleven Ten, suddenly there’s a hull breach and suddenly some of the other members of the Big 12 are likely to stampede to the lifeboats.  Rumors are now also making the rounds on the interwebz that Texas Longhorns, as the “cash cows” of the conference, are set to lead an exodus across the desert to the promised land of the Pac-10. This could be the nudge needed to push one or more Big 12 North teams into the Big Eleven Ten as well, or TCU joins the Big 12. The WAC and Mountain West could have a general re-arrangement, maybe even filching a Conference USA team. In other words, once the Big 12 loses a team, the shit totally hits the fan.

And that would make Joe Paterno happy in a big way.