That last one's a good question, indeed. Who DOES Troy State have to screw to get invited to change conferences? I mean, now that everyone else is doing it?

The Trojans are one of the four football independents left in Division I-A, and they wouldn't mind being courted the way Miami and Louisville and Cincinnati and Boston College and every other school just above South Dakota State have been shopping themselves around.

I mean, what next? Washington State in the Patriot League?

But Troy State, stuck in a wide spot in the road known for little more than being halfway between Montgomery and Dothan, Ala., wouldn't mind a little of that love that the bigger boys seem to get every week. Some schools get invites to change conferences the way a computer gets pop-up ads, while the schools who could use a little come-hither look get squat on wheat bread, hold the mayo.

Like Troy State.

The Trojans are listed in the standings every week with Notre Dame, Navy and Connecticut, none of whom will play them. They hustle up what they can, mostly games on the road, save for an occasional Louisiana-Monroe or SE Louisiana that rolls through town. Their four games against teams that have been ranked this year (Kansas State, Minnesota, Nebraska and Virginia) have resulted in an aggregate score of 12 points for, 143 against.

They're headed for the Sun Belt next year, but with all these schools playing musical conferences, the Trojans might want to upgrade too.

Troy State, of course, has played football as an independent while its basketball teams played in the Atlantic Sun, which sounds more like a casino than anything else. But worse than being a football independent is to not have a conference to call home in basketball. Try being Indiana University-Purdue University-Fort Wayne (a satellite campus of IUPUI, as they say around the eye-chart factory), or Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, or Texas-Pan American, or Savannah State. To have no conference to get in basketball ... why, it's downright humiliating, I tell you.

So why, with all these conferences forming, re-forming, folding, and fighting over the desiccated remains of Conference USA, can these poor deservings get nothing?

I mean, they're nice enough folk. They don't mean anyone any enduring harm. They pay their bills. Their books have words like everyone else's.

Well, IUPUFW, we can sort of understand. I mean, the team's nickname is Mastodons, supposedly because IUPU-Columbus' intramural teams had already beaten them to Fighting Iguanadons or something like that.

But you see the point. There are hundreds of post-teenaged children, going to bed each night without a home to call their own, no conference to go to, no automatic invite to the NCAA Tournament, not even any fancy letterhead. Just ... "Independent.''

This, it seems to us, is what Conference Roulette is all about.

How do you think, for example, the old Pioneer Conference ended up with San Diego, Jacksonville, Valparaiso and Austin Peay? They obviously took anyone with enough cheerleaders to form a human pyramid.

So the question to be asked here is a simple one: Now that the Southwest Conference is gone, now that Conference USA has been raided to within an office supply drawer of its lives, now that the ACC has more members than Liberians have had hot dinners, what about the little schools? Who's going to stand up and take them?

I think we know the answer here: "Let 'em eat lead paint,'' will be the response.

But it doesn't mean that they don't deserve a little look-see.

Now UConn and Notre Dame have the Big East in basketball, and Notre Dame has NBC in football, and Navy is about to welcome Army back to the fold of free-range service academies in two years.

But do you think the Big 12 is going to make Texas face its fraternal responsibilities by slipping Texas-Pan Am or A&M-Corpus Christi into the bulding for regular home-and-homes? You think the SEC is going to put the arm on Georgia to let Savannah State come play with them?

Of course not. This is shunning, in the frontier Mormon tradition.

What they ought to do, of course, is write down the name of every Division I-A football or basketball school on separate pieces of paper, 327 in all, and throw the slips into the air. Whatever lands on whatever else, you count to 10 and you get a conference. If that means that Stanford now plays with High Point, Butler, Delaware State, Purdue, Maryland-Baltimore County, Loyola Marymount, Drexel, Youngstown State and Oklahoma, well, that's how it goes.

Or they could go full European soccer, and just have full-blown relegation.You may get Arkansas with St. Peter's in five years, or Duke with UC Riverside, but everyone will have a home.

This elitist we-take-you-you-and-you-but-tell-your-friends-to-stay-away stuff is just wrong. Ask any animator of children's cartoons if you don't think so.

So never you mind what the Big East has done to Conference USA, or what the ACC did to the Big East, or what the Big 12 did to the Southwest Conference, or what the Pioneer Conference did to In Other Games Around The Country: We have deserving schools right here, willing, able, and eager to please anyone with an empty spot in its standings. We have alphabetical combinations that would make the enamel come off your teeth in huge flakes.

We have Troy State, at a friendly get-acquainted price. Just make them an offer.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com