DAYTON (OH) — Daily updates on the future of the Big East Conference are no longer hour by hour, but minute by tweeted minute – and the more I read, the less impressed and more opinionated I become. While all the sports networks, social media outlets, broadcasters, color analysts, and weekend bloggers attempt to forecast the fate of the league and the football influence driving the changes, few of them are willing to step away from the omnipresent groupthink and call a spade a spade. The conference re-alignment mess isn’t about college. College is for students that open textbooks and take exams. It’s about money and the concubines lap-dancing toward the dirty old man with the Benjamin pile.

A john pimps for power and a prostitute tricks for cash. Open the Big East playbook and the football johns operate a harem of basketball dependents too entrusted to leave their abusive pimp and too addicted to the lifestyle of quick cash and quicker heroin jabs that anesthetize the real struggle within. It’s a cycle of entrapment and manipulation. Once inside the vortex, a working girl can’t fathom another way to live.

The lack of clarity inside the Big East is overwhelming for both sides and a model of this dysfunction. Sure, the league wants to maintain its BCS status. Beyond that however, the only rule is there are no rules. Football schools engage in conference calls without the basketball schools, while basketball schools meet in the coat closet to talk shop without the presence of big brother. Some football schools express interest in wanting out of the league altogether, while others attempt to talk them off the ledge. Additional meetings are called as a referendum of league commitment, but some schools abstain to protect their own interests.

Most recently, the Big East voted to raise the exit fee from $5M to 10M in a desperate move to dissuade members from checking out at the front desk. In football cash, the hush money jumped from a nickel to a dime and was nothing more than ornamental. The vote was unanimous from those schools that bothered to vote, including all eight basketball schools. The league is also in favor of holding the scabs to the 27-month exit transition – like a marriage dissolved by the courts but maintained in the bedroom. That includes Syracuse and Pittsburgh, but might include several other football schools before the smoke clears. UConn and Rutgers have already whispered interest to the ACC, while the Big-12 has its radar on Louisville, West Virginia, and Cincinnati should Missouri fold its tent and scamper to the SEC.

The Big East is despondent. A major east coast football conference doesn’t launch trial balloons featuring service academies, East Carolina, Houston, and SMU unless the ship is sinking like the Titanic. Traversing three time zones to pinch Boise State from the potato fields of Idaho is another move that screams of desperation. Invitations suggest some schools may be all in; others for football only. Notre Dame has taken a public bath over the last 15 years for keeping one toe outside the conference. All is forgiven (and forgotten) under the guise of desperation however. In a veiled attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, the Big East is breaking all the rules. Unlike the rest of the BCS alignment shuffle, the Big East must perform damage control by cherry-picking non-BCS leagues. This fact alone puts the conference on dangerous footing. Besides, what university President of sound mind would pay millions to exit an existing league in order to join a league others are more than happy to pay millions to leave behind? Teams are exiting the Big East faster than they are getting replaced. Is this the stability schools like ECU and Houston are desperate for?

The basketball schools consisting of Notre Dame, St. John’s, Villanova, Marquette, DePaul, Providence, Seton Hall, and Georgetown are an equal part of the fubar’d cocktail. Collectively they have little voice in nation-wide realignment, but they can voice their opposition to it. Spineless and content to sell their self-respect and self-determination for pigskin-lined dollar bills, the basketball institutions remain tramp-stamped and beholden to the hustlers. Complicity has a price and the price tag is a continued share in BCS football revenue. For eight private institutions also serving the cloth, there are no apparent vows of poverty.

Read the fan sites and message forums of Big East basketball schools and the desire to remain attached to BCS football is the favorable choice of many options on the table. A clean split from football guarantees something less than in-the-now: less exposure, less money, and less ESPN. Leaving the financial security of Big East football is like walking out of The Pine Club for Chuck E. Cheese. Schools like Dayton, Xavier, Richmond, Butler, and Creighton are nothing more than lesser children playing in the netted tub of plastic balls. Even DePaul, Seton Hall, and Providence think so – schools with a habit of finishing in the Big East cellar every year.

Setting aside the fact that Big East basketball schools engorge themselves in financial prostitution, perhaps they are coy enough to allow the league to self-implode and remain the last men standing. If true, a windfall profit of countless millions in exit fees awaits them, including the Big East name. Each school might have enough cash to write checks with enough trailing zeros to run their athletic departments at a BCS level for years to come. Once the money runs out, they assimilate with the rest of the Catholic/Jesuit brotherhood of other leagues and make lemonade out of lemons.

Don’t count on it just yet. The only play call colleges have demonstrated is the give-and-go: give me mine and go to hell. Promises are carefully crafted press releases meant to clarify nothing and leave every door ajar. For a school like Dayton, an ear to the ground is all that counts. The fallout could tumble downward to leagues like the A10 and CAA, but only after the major battles have been fought.

As the tweets and blogs continue to publish, so too the roller coaster of major conference realignment. For average students cramming for mid-terms or working the Omega Moo table at rush week, league affiliation won’t change their lives for better or worse. This isn’t about them, their professors, or the mission statement of the provost. What matters are NBA-like training rooms, seat licenses, ESPN exposure, market shares, television contracts, and NCAA payout points. The revenue won’t pay for new law libraries or student unions; it will pay for luxury boxes and Nike contracts.

Stare at the Big East long enough and it’s hard to feel sympathetic for any member. While the basketball schools are run by otherwise well-intentioned presidents and chancellors, they’ve been corrupted with unrealistic expectations of windfall profits inside the athletic department. Neither the pimps nor prostitutes are willing to hold their heads high and take to higher ground. It’s been a race to the bottom, and the bottom sinks lower with every passing tweet.