Carriage fees and bundles are becoming less monolithic and cable providers like Spectrum have successfully pushed back on ESPN recently. The primary revenue has always been ad buys and carriage fees. Now carriage fees are facing downward pressure that money has to be made up. That is done by maximizing your ratings which is done by either better brand matchups or pushing more overlapping ranked matchups into the non-Saturday afternoon/prime time slots so they don’t compete head-to-head on the masthead networks. If you can push ranked Big 12 matchups to late Saturday nights or week nights they don’t cannibalize your SEC B1G games and you increase ratings in the aforementioned windows. That is why conferences have gone national as opposed to regional.