Suppose in an imaginary world UVa had a choice of being part of a conference that followed the traditional amateur athletics model and included schools like Duke, Notre Dame, Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Georgia Tech, maybe one or more of the service academies, maybe Syracuse and/or Boston College, maybe Tulane and/or Rice. Maybe one or two others of that ilk that do not immediately come to mind. Would UVa choose a future in an 8-12 school conference like that, accepting that its football program will never compete at the highest level if the alternative was the Big Ten? What if the alternative was the SEC?