Dan Wetzel's advocacy for TCU stands alongside his irrational hatred of the BCS as knocks against him as a sports writer. I get that writers benefit from taking forceful controversial positions in public, but I would wager that TCU is so far from being on the table as an expansion candidate that they are effectively irrelevant.
Even ignoring that reality, do they make sense in a vacuum? They are a borderline candidate at best. They are a small private school that happens to have had a good run in football. They don't fit the profile of an SEC school. Their stadium has only 50,000 seats after a significant expansion. Only Vanderbilt has a smaller football stadium in the SEC. Every SEC school has a larger student body than TCU, and most of them are more than twice as large. Most of their football success is recent. Between 1960 and 1998 they only went to 3 bowl games.
West Virginia, on the other hand, is a public flagship university with great tradition in football and basketball, but they may already be out of the picture. If that's the case, and if no ACC schools are willing to leave their conference, the SEC has limited choices for its 14th member and the chances of an interim era with 13 members increases.
As the article suggests, Missouri is still out there, but their departure might prevent a deal to save the Big 12. Would they pull the trigger on that? They certainly appear to covet SEC membership as a golden ticket to future relevance, and as an opportunity that they may not ever see again, but if they leave the Big 12 and all hell breaks loose, they will take some of the blame.
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