I would like to see you produce any numbers to support any of your claims. East ST.(also known as Illinois) yes does carry big10. Just like west Stl (also know as MO) MU is by far the biggest carry. And KC is split amoung many teams, MU is not lowest on that pole though. KSU is. KU is tops in basketball only. For all sports its MU & NU and then KSU & KU. As for your claim that KU carries the rest of Missouri your crazy. You can not and will not be able to provide one ounce of proof for that crazy claim because it simply isnt true.
Your choice if you had one is KU that is fine, but making things up as you go will not make your choice look any better or make any more sense
Fro Daddy--
No, I did not say Kansas carries the rest of Missouri, I said "Plus, Kansas carries the rest of its state (FWIW)". Its is a possessive pronoun that implies Kansas' own state (which would be Kansas, last I recall).
Also, there are a lot more households in Missouri than you think that are already part of the Big 10 footprint. Frank the Tank has a breakdown of the net gain from pre-Big 10 expansion talk here:
Analysis
Article Page
Additionally, the U.S. Census Bureau has the number of Missouri households at 2,194,594 (in 2000) per their site
here. 2,194,594 minus the 1,542,000 (estimated) net household gain for the Big 10 picking Missouri leaves approx. 652,594 households, or roughly 1/3rd of the households in Missouri already in the Big 10 footprint.
While saying the Big 10 has half of Missouri in its footprint is incorrect, saying a third is still relevant, factual, and does not help Missouri's case. Granted, the number of Big 12 Missouri households is larger than the 1,037,891 households the entirety of Kansas would bring in, but bringing in Kansas would likely fracture part of the current non-Big 10 Missouri broadcasting footprint, and even just 20% of the Missouri households switching to the Big 10 broadcast would be enough to put a Kansas acquisition on par (+/- 100k households) with a Missouri acquisition.
Plus, the Big 10 has already set the precedent that national following trumps households--otherwise they would have never chose Nebraska and it's paltry 666,184 households
(Link). Kansas does have a national following in Basketball, and it would be this that sets them apart from Missouri (who, while currently doing well, does not have the history or pedigree Kansas does).
Remember the Big 10 is first selling a network and secondly expanding for academic/athletic gain. National brands will continue to trump local players unless we talk states like New Jersey/New York and a Rutgers or Syracuse acquisition (3,064,645 and 7,056,860 households, respectively).
As for ratings, I couldn't find the local STLlive articles that broke down Top 10 TV ratings for the St. Louis area last year, but on a national basis, Nebraska handily beat all of the (likely) competition,
including Notre Dame.
See chart here.
Of course, all of this is moot if Kansas up and joins the Big East per the recent scuttlebutt, and all we will have done here is inconvenience a group of electrons.