After all that, the Big 12 has opted not expand. At least not at this time.

Big 12 presidents and chancellors, who met Sunday night and Monday in Dallas, unanimously decided not to add any members to the league. Conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby called the decision "a celebration of what we have."

"This was not a decision not to expand. This was an endorsement and a reinvestment in the strength of the 10 that we have," Bowlsby said.

"Bigger is not always better," he added.

That means the hopes of BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and other programs, all of which wanted to join the Big 12, were dashed.

According to CBS Sports' Dennis Dodd, the call from Bowlsby to one expansion candidate was, "very short, to the point [with] no explanation."

Asked about time and effort put in only to have the Big 12 decide not to expand, the source added: "It galvanized the university community. I think we were able to raise our profile. For our donors, our leadership, it opened their eyes to some things."

The process of deciding to stay at 10 members was also a long one, according to Oklahoma president David Boren, who claims the conference is now stronger than ever before.

"We decided, after very thorough discussion, that we would remain at 10 members," Boren said. "We committed ourselves to that proposition and each other along with that discussion and that decision to remain at 10 members at this time. Also, there were very, very strong series of commitments and comments made by every single member of the board, every single president representing our institutions of our very strong commitment to the Big 12, to the strength and stability of this conference. I have never heard, since I've been on the board, such strong commitments and such a unified strength of the board."

Boren added: "Once that decision was made, once we decided this issue was no longer on the agenda, we decided to move on. No individual schools were discussed or voted on."

In July, the Big 12 announced it was exploring the possibility of expansion after a report surfaced that the ACC and ESPN were closing in on a network deal. At the time, Bowlsby said the new ACC deal played a role in the Big 12's decision to re-evaluate its membership. The move was seen as a money play, and CBS Sports reported in June there was upwards of $1 billion on the table.

The Big 12 initially wanted to decide an outcome on the topic before the start of the 2016 season, but the decision-making process was eventually pushed back to October. The SportsBusiness Journal reported in August that ESPN and Fox were pushing back on expansion, noting the partners believed expansion would "water down the Big 12 and make it less valuable."

Boren confirmed as much Monday. "After a good bit of discussion on this matter and discussion with media partners and others, we found that the marketplace made a decision for us as something that's not going to move forward at this point in time," he said.

Unlike previous expansion and realignment possibilities, the Big 12's process played out in public with an ever-whittled list of candidates, mostly from the American Athletic Conference. The Big 12 also plans to reinstate its conference championship football game by 2017 and possibly split into two five-team divisions. An announcement on the later could come as early as this week.

"Interestingly enough, our 10 presidents came together in unity and came to the same conclusion and that was that we like the competition that we have," Bowlsby said. "We like playing a full round robin. We're glad we added a championship game. And we think we have, through an RFP [request for proposal] process, identified some great sites for the hosting of our championship."