You need financial revenues to compete that is for sure. With Campbell as ISU's head coach it gives ISU hope for competing on a national level.
In the long run for fans its an interesting question.
Is it better for fan satisfaction to be a part of the 40-48 and operate at big disadvantages due to existing brands and probably a lot more losses each year.
Or is competing in a rebuilt B12 at about 50-60% of B1G/SEC revenue and having a lot easier chance of competing in football provide better fan satisfaction.
I doubt anyone turns the money down, but some fans may look back later and be glad their schools didn't make the cut if its about trying to win 9-10 games a year and still have some playoff access.
This could be true in a different angle. Right now ISU has seen that there will be a seismic shift coming. JP will prepare. Last I knew ISU had 66MM in debt and borrowed 20MM due to Covid. Payments of 6-8MM per year. JP will position to make sure ISU is sitting fine.
If this become a contest, the SEC will absolutely crush the Big ten in the athletic side, and I don't think the big ten Pres's will be happy to push academic money to athletics. The other conferences are seeing that something is happening and I could see them saying, hey lets put out a good team at the highest level, but not go for king maker level. The big ten schools could try to push, led by Mich and OSU, to compete with the SEC. While their budgets will handle it the others in the big ten probably couldn't. Unsure of others but use Iowa's since their stuff is easier to mind. They had 199MM of debt and added 50MM for Covid. They are sitting on a quarter of a billion in debt and had payments of 22-23MM before the Covid debt. They are about double their annual revenue in debt whereas ISU is one full years. When Covid hit, Iowa had 2.5X the debt required than ISU and ISU only had 12k fans at home games and cost was like 350/season ticket, so a little over 4MM from football attendance than Iowa's none.
If a war broke out between the Big ten and the SEC, some of those teams could get trampled and crushed. It may be better in 20 years for those other teams to not be in that mess. There are a lot of things that could happen, so who knows what is right and what is wrong?