I'd like to believe that, but I don't. Too many think TCU is the "small, church school that can't fill their stadium." Maybe some re-education will be required to counterbalance that viewpoint to the PAC decision-makers.
I'm not 100% confident that if the PAC "takes' four from the "leftovers" that we beat out all the others and make the cut. Yea it'd be a sad day if the PAC took TT, OkSt, Baylor and KSU/KU or ISU.
The people who are actually involved in these decisions -- university presidents, conference commissioners, and TV execs -- know that TCU is not a "small, church school that can't fill their stadium." That's an uninformed fans' perspective.
That being said, TCU could be left out in the cold again for reasons entirely different from what you have described. This whole mess may be a push to bifurcate college football into around a 32 team league, with the rest just playing for "fun."
This whole episode will likely destroy college football (as if it hasn't already). I'm honestly more disheartened by that than what it does to TCU, even though they go hand-in-hand. Destroying college football by making it a small, exclusive, blue-blood only group not only destroys TCU, it tears apart 100+ years of tradition, and quite frankly, a unique piece of our American culture. No other country has a university-based sports league like ours.
If anything, the best we can hope for is for the leaders at places like Indiana, Illinois, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Pittsburgh, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland, Missouri, Purdue, Rutgers, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, Syracuse, NC State, Louisville, etc. to realize that when this all shakes out,
some of them may be sitting on the outside, too. I leave out places like Oregon State/Washington State/Cal because, quite frankly, I don't think they care. It will most definitely have an effect on the other privates like Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Northwestern, Boston College, Baylor, but they have very little influence over this.