You arrive in Dallas and Parcells mocks you

Academics: The Big Ten has a high academic reputation (all schools rank 71st or higher in the most recent US News and World Report college rankings) and any potential 12th member must fit with the current members or not be that far below them 2. Competitive Athletics: The potential member must be able to fit within the conference athletically, particularly in football and men's basketball, but also in the non-revenue sports 3. Media Attention: The conference is looking to expand its footprint and/or bring significantly more attention and eyeballs to its members and games. That means that expansion attention is likely to fall on schools who carry a large following or are in an important media market, particularly markets currently on the fringes of Big Ten territory. Unfortunately, they are already pretty well off in the Big XII, a BCS conference with a conference title game of their own, where Missouri played twice over the last three seasons. That is a big obstacle for the Big Ten to overcome if they pursue Missouri. Although Missouri may earn a little more in shared revenue in the Big Ten, the Tigers don't have a prominence problem in their current conference as a reason to jump ship.

Rutgers Rutgers has also been a name thrown around in Big Ten expansion discussions and was a historically bad team up until about five years ago (they have now gone to five consecutive bowl games after only going to one ever before that, which was in 1978). They've now become a competitive football program thanks to Greg Schiano and look like an actual option for the Big Ten to expand out East. Rutgers fits the Big Ten very well academically and provide the opportunity to expand the footprint into the populous East Coast. Joining the Big Ten would be a windfall for them financially, despite steep monetary penalties for abandoning the Big East, which were put in place after the ACC raided them earlier this decade. Pittsburgh Pitt also has the academic standing to fit in the conference and geographically makes perfect sense. Like Rutgers, they would be easy to pull away from the Big East. Also, they have been competitive on the field and, as a bonus, have a dormant rivalry with Penn State. Syracuse Another name thrown around in expansion talks, Syracuse is very much the same as Pitt, although their football program has been horrid this decade. The one thing they have going for them is access to media markets further East, although the potential to bring in eyeballs in New York City is a stretch. Outcome Don't expect to hear anything from the conference or conference officials any time before the summer of 2010, at the earliest. And the official process may even extend into the following summer (2011) with the official timetable tabbed at 12 to 18 months. HANOI, Jan 8 (Reuters) - The sister of Vietnam's first confirmed bird flu patient of the year died with flu symptoms last week, and the director of the district hospital where she was treated said she probably also had avian flu. "We suspect that it was bird flu that caused her death, but we cannot be 100 percent sure because there was no sample for tests.

Ba Thuoc is about 150 km (94 miles) south of Hanoi in Thanh Hoa province. Earlier this week, authorities confirmed that the 13-year-old girl's younger sister was in hospital with an H5N1 virus infection. Both girls had eaten duck and chicken raised on her family's farm, Mau said. Five Vietnamese people died of bird flu in 2008 out of six reported H5N1 infections, all in the north of the country in the first quarter of the year, when cool temperatures allow the virus to thrive best. The H5N1 strain has killed 247 people globally among the 391 confirmed cases of infection since 2003, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Before the latest case in Vietnam, the WHO said Vietnam had had 106 human infections, the second highest number among 15 countries with known human cases after Indonesia.(Reporting by Nguyen Nhat Lam; Editing by John Ruwitch and Alex Richardson).

You are Tony Romo, one of college football's greatest quarterbacks and one of its least famous.You only receive scholarship offers from some damned Division II school named Mankato State and from D1-AA Eastern Illinois University.Being a historian of the game, you know Mike Shanahan is an EIU alum and you like the Communications program and the girls are pretty and, well, what the hell, EIU it is then.What the hell is EIU anyway, Rocky Is that a new strand of flu...ha ha ha...yuk,yuk,yuk...You become the starter as a freshman and you rewrite those Eastern Illinois University and Ohio Valley Conference record books and a few years later you win the Walter Payton Award, Division 1-AA's equivalent of the Heisman Trophy and you are pretty damned sure no one notices or cares.But you know one day you'll show them. Yeah you'll show 'em all right.One day this whole damned country will know who you are! They'll know who Antonio "Tony" Ramiro Romo is.Meanwhile in Dallas and unbeknownst to you, a young Cowboys assistant named Sean Payton, once an Eastern Illinois QB himself, is singing your praises to Bill Parcells He's emphatic about it. Payton is pounding the tables with his fists and jumping up and down and demanding that Parcells take a second look at you.C'mon Sean! Tony Romo You must be kidding me, Sean...ha ha ha...Leave me alone Dennis the Menace...ha ha haPayton finally convinces Parcells to give you and second look and your whole world is about to change forever.You arrive in Dallas and Parcells mocks you.You're nothing but a ball in high grass kid...yuk, yuk, yuk...But Parcells notices those books about Lombardi and Unitas in your locker and he knows you are a student of the game and he knows Payton was right there's something different about you. Something special about you.You bide your time for three years.Three damned years!Three years behind the likes of Carter and Wright and Stoerner and Leaf and Hutchinson.