Separating the truth from the roar over conference expansion in college sports has become headache inducing, a labyrinth of sources, opinions, bloviating and posturing, everyone trying to out-shout everyone else.

What is fact?

What is fiction?

Depends on your school of choice and whatever agenda suits its purpose.

But this much we know: The recent announcement about the new ACC Network became the catalyst for Big 12 officials to discuss expansion again last week.

The ACC Network will launch by August 2019, giving the ACC and ESPN a deal and rights extension through the 2035-36 academic year, thus making it economically self-destructive for any ACC school to leave. In the time of the deal, a school's media rights and revenue for all home games would remain with the ACC regardless of the school's league affiliation.

Hence, it became paramount for the Big 12, now the only Power 5 Conference without a network, to discuss expansion. More markets and more content would be necessary to launching a potential network.

The aforementioned is mere prologue proving what we already knew: It’s about the money. It’s always about the money. Wring your hands all you want. As the late columnist Bill Conlin once wrote: “money’s money and there’s only one Mother Teresa.”

And so the question becomes this: Which potential schools making goo-goo eyes at the Big 12 offer the pathway to the most money?

I believe the answer is the University of Connecticut.

Now why this isn’t more obvious than a roadside billboard has vexed UConn loyalists for the some time now. My guess is that the purveyors of the Big 12 expansion narrative — mostly Midwestern and southern media — view it beneath them to spend a Saturday afternoon in East Hartford at a football game.

But would the presidents of Big 12 schools view it differently?

They should. Especially when this appeared last week in the New York Times:

Neal Pilson, a sports media consultant and former president of CBS Sports, “advised the Big 12 to take a page from the Big Ten’s playbook. Much as the Big Ten, a traditionally Midwestern league, recently added Rutgers and Maryland to plant its flag near several East Coast population centers, the Big 12, whose members reside in Great Plains states and Texas (and West Virginia), ought to invite Connecticut to join.”

The Times quoted Pilson here: “Having Texas and Oklahoma and the other major Big 12 schools playing in the Northeast would create additional revenue opportunities and make it a more attractive conference in terms of new sponsors and a better linear television deal,” he said.

Boom.

Ballgame.

This isn’t some provincial putz from the prairie trying to preserve his or her territory. This is the former president of CBS Sports who knows a revenue stream when he sees one.

UConn’s footprint in New York City, while occasionally overstated a bit by its fans, is nonetheless significant. The Huskies have filled Madison Square Garden faithfully for the last 25 years. Their games are shown on New York-based SNY. Football played at Yankee Stadium. Hell, even a UConn alumni event at Citi Field this week sold out all its tickets.

Sinatra wasn’t wrong when he said it’s up to you, New York, New York. It’s the No. 1 media market in the world. And you know who gets the Big 12 there? Hint: It’s not Memphis.

I found it amusing last week that ESPN asked Big 12 football coaches their preferences for expansion. UConn wasn’t among them. Although I’m not sure why you’d ever ask a generally myopic football coach about anything beyond a bubble screen. But I bet if the Big 12 basketball coaches were asked — not that anyone cares about the billion dollar NCAA Tournament anymore — they’d have broken into Big Red’s U-C-O-N-N chant. Why? Because they can see their brand on display in the big, bad city.

What, you think Bill Self and Shaka Smart wouldn’t want to play UConn at the Garden?

This is about the money. It’s never about anything else. That’s why I’m guessing UConn will be extended an invitation sooner or later. Money. Clams. Cabbage. Scarole. Simoleons. UConn has the primary pathway to more of it.

So let’s get ready.

Hook ’Em Horns and Boomer Sooner.

You may now resume reading the regularly scheduled blathering.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.