The age of record football content contracts is dying. With the beginning of the shift from cablecasting to online streaming video the formula for pay for content will change.
Cablecasting is based on subscribership and streaming video is based on advertising revenues (based around viewers, not subscribers). Both Facebook and Disney are reported to be looking at building a streaming platform.
The viewing of the majority of streaming sites is free, only netflix and a couple of other have subscribers. Amazon, YouTube, the major streamers are free. Facebook will probably be free, as advertising will pay for the services. The pricing (pay) for content will be much lower as (if 50k watch Illinois vs Rutgers football) pay will be based on viewership, not package deals. There will be a major reset and reduction of pay for content - as there is an over abundance of content available. Only the top tiers will be streamed. I envision gross pay per content to be 0.01 to 0.001 per view. It will become Quality over quantity.
Platforms will pick and choose what content they are willing to carry as there is a global glut of content both professional and amateur (soccer, baseball, Am football, rugby, basketball, amateur sports, track n field, wrestling, Am Ninga, reality based entertainment and "sports", golf, tennis, etc., etc.) - it will not be bundled as "the B1G package" or the "ACC package". No longer will the weak sisters of the poor in major conferences be bundled along with the premium schools.
The platform will set the standards/rules and only content deemed/evaluated to meet the minimal platform standard viewership levels will be picked up (unless you own the streaming platform - BEDN).
Lesser streaming platforms may carry packages in order to attempt to compete with the Big platform streamers, but with less viewership when carrying less desirable content (Nebr vs Rutgers, WF vs Clemson, etc.)
The subscriber-based, cable-based format will die like the horse and buggy. Streaming will be the new king (Model T, mass production, etc.).
Some of you, including XUDASH are framing the correct questions...
Would schools like that eventually exit on their own?
More to your point, do the less advantaged (grand irony - relatively better academic schools) with smaller stadiums and budgets succumb to budget pressures and competition gaps over time and throw in the towel? Probably not, so long as TV money under the existing media model feeds them sufficiently in order to keep their institutional subsidies manageable.
BUT that, that right there - the future of sports media and the monetizing of its content - is what must be watched and ultimately addressed, including by the Big East. It's as if some of these schools are still chasing the best horse drawn carriages out there, even though Henry Ford is beginning to establish the process through which he'll sell millions of Model T's.
BC and Wake Forest don't offer top 2 or 3 tier content (maybe baseball). Is Duke Basketball alone worth $20+ million a year? The short answer is no. Without bundling of conference packages none of the football five middling and bottom schools get a check from online streaming - Quality over quantity. The big check heyday is over. Duke may have 10 men's basketball, 4 baseball, 3 tennis, 5 LaCrosse, 1 football game. School a) may have 4 top football and 7 top basketball, 3 top baseball, and track & field play. School b) may have 4 ice hockey, 4 LaCrosse, 3 Tennis, 2 gymnastics, and 4 Baseball games. School c) may have 2 football, 6 basketball, 4 Volleyball, 10 women's basketball, and 2 women's soccer, Creighton might have 6 men's soccer, 4 volleyball, 3 women's soccer, 8 men's basketball, 2 baseball, 4 women's basketball and so on. Quality over quantity. A Wake Forest, BC, DePaul would have to seek lower level streamers even to enter the field as top level and mid level streamers still seek quality 1st (quality = viewership = advertising dollars). It will be a new day for sports media and the weak will no longer be carried by media platforms. Conference membership will not save the weak as it currently does.
Bundling of conference packagesand the media model as we now know them will die. If it survives at all, bundling will be vastly smaller quantities as again...we are talking quality over quantity. No more overvalued pricing on a glut of content, much of which is substandard. The streaming model will re-level the content dollar playing field.