I said it on Tuesday, and it's worth repeating: The first rule in conference realignment is, Nothing is a done deal until it's a done deal. I should have stopped there.
Because while everyone from the New York Times to the West Virginia dailies in West Virginia was literally proclaiming the Mountaineers' pending defection from the Big East to the Big 12 "a done deal" — local outlets even went ahead with the obligatory "Meet the new rivals" stories — the actual deal was about run into a big, L-shaped wall: