Conference realignment talk not going away.
The B12 needed one of Rice, SMU, TCU or Baylor in the conference. Having a private institution exempts the conference from having to open up their books like they do if all the colleges are public (government funded) institutions. For the most part, they're loss leaders, and don't do much except provide wins to the big boys and keep the conference from having to open their books. Northwestern is the one for the B1G, Vanderbilt for the SEC, Baylor for B12, USC and Stanford for PAC, and the ACC has several private schools. Course, not all of them are just patsies, but there's a reason the discussion was over keeping Baylor or TCU, and Houston didn't enter into the mix.
As to Arkansas, financially they might be better off in the SEC, but they lost all their old recruiting grounds and picked up precious little in the SEC. There were rumors that the reason Arky jumped was because they heard they'd be left out of the B8-SWC merger, but who knows?