I respect your opinion although I think you're wrong about Delany. I think the Big Ten culture has kept Delany in check more than he would like. It was even more traditional before him. He's a decent leader, but he's an east coast guy with big ideas that don't always need to happen, and if he gets his way to expand the Big Ten to 14 or 16 teams, it could be bad news. His arrogance at being spurned by the networks is what led to the formation of the BTN, which turned out to be a huge success. He tells the story about how the TV guys were in his office and he threw them out and told them he's start his own network and they'd be sorry. Then he sent them a bottle of wine years later thanking him for helping to launch the BTN. That same attitude might not work out so well next time though.
Even if Delany isn't perfect, if you can't see that his leadership of the Big Ten is way, WAY better than in the Big 12 conference, then you're just seriously misinformed about what the Big 12 conference was really like.
Imagine that instead of having the Big Ten Network, which is a cash cow for the whole conference and splits revenue evenly to each team, you had the Buckeye Network. The Buckeye Network has just signed multi-million dollar deal with ESPN, which will bring money to Ohio State alone, not the rest of the Big Ten. Then the Buckeye Network has decided it will televise a conference game, let's say Iowa. Now Iowa fans have to up their cable package and subscribe to the Buckeye Network if they want to see that game. On top of that, the Buckeye Network is going to televise high school games throughout Ohio, and maybe they'll even branch out and broadcast high school games from other states, which should be an enormous and illegal recruiting advantage for Ohio State.
Keep in mind that before any of this even happened, the conference championship game was moved from Indianapolis to Cleveland and the conference offices were moved from Illinois to Cleveland. Last season, your team (Iowa) had a player suspended for a hit that multiple players do every week, yet he was the only player ever suspended by the conference for such a hit. In several games, your team suffered through insanely bad calls, even obvious missed calls that would have been reviewed under any other circumstance but for some reason were not, and in one game the officials even told your head coach that they were going to job him.
Your favorite rivalry, which was at one time considered one of the best in the game, on the same level as Michigan vs. Ohio State, is no more - that rival decided upon conference formation they'd rather only play you twice every four years. All of the other schools in the conference have followed Ohio State on revenue sharing, on moving the conference offices and the championship game, and the've even changed the academic standards of the conference to the liking of Ohio State, much to your school's chagrin.
Now, even while all of this is going on, Ohio State is looking around for other conferences that they'd rather be in, and at any moment they could leave, take half the conference with them, and the Big Ten would dissolve entirely. Meanwhile, one of the teams you have a fair amount of history with (let's say Wisconsin, I suppose - for us it was Colorado) decided to slip quietly out the back door to join another conference.
That is what Nebraska has been through over the past 15 years, and its where the Big 12 leadership has taken that conference. That's why we left. Delany may not be perfect, but he didn't create that kind of mess. Even forming the new 12-team Big Ten, Delany clearly put a lot of effort into creating competitive balance, and into protecting as many rivalries as he could. He couldn't protect them all, but I guarantee you that the level of dissatisfaction with his perceived failures is NOTHING compared to what went on in the Big 12, and what continues to go on in that wreck of a conference.
