Expansion is in the best interest of TCU because it offers protection. Your right that it offers nothing from an athletics perspective but if your worried about protecting your revenue stream, there is strength in numbers.
This all comes down to how you feel about 2 questions?
1. If CFB goes through a re-org, do you think the “P5” increases in size or decreases?
2. If decreases, is TCU still a P5 school?
If you have to choose sharing existing revenue power with 4 more schools vs losing 40-60% of all your income because your going to be “relegated”....well expansion is a no brainer.
In an ideal world there would be no expansion at any P5 conference AND our place at the table would never be in question.
Here is my new idea, which makes a whole lot of sense IMO, but will never happen of course unless they decide to do away with the traditional conferences (I said it would never happen).
1) Create six new 11-school conferences made up the the current P5 programs plus one lucky school. Determine conferences strictly by location. G5s stay like they are.
2) Expand the regular season to 13 games and eliminate the CCGs. Every team plays a 10-team RR within their league, 5 home games, 5 road games, plus 3 OOC games.
3) 14-week season starts when it does now, 1 bye week for everyone.
4) 12-team playoff. League winners plus four at large from the 6 major divisions, plus two at large from the G5's.
5) Seeds #1-4 get bye for 1st round of playoffs.
6) Bowls for teams outside the top 12, starting when they do now.
If schools can decide this is worth ditching a whole bunch of tradition over, something like this could really work for everyone. Combination between NFL-like structure and the current college format.