You hit ot on the head.. losing the LA market and your 2 most valuable brands hurts your visibility and ability to get advertising dollars... as for why they'd invite the others- there's some self preservation involved along with national prestige. UW/UO/UA are well know institutions and athletic programs, and Utah has self created its own market... it's why you don't here about OSU or WSU in the same conversations or why CAL/Stanford aren't getting invites... so loss of market (2 valuable assets) along = less $$, and expansion by strengthening conference with perceived national brands is why those schools get tires kicked, especially since their ADs are connected to the P5s
I get it, but look at some of the other conferences, and the locations of those teams. The Big 12 will be losing it's two biggest teams in Texas and Oklahoma, yet they still have a bigger dollar amount that the PAC 12 is getting. Plus, they really have only 1 sizeable market in the remaining schools, and that's from TCU. See below.
Big 12 teams
TCU (Fort Worth, 7.8 million people)
Kansas St. (Manhattan, KS, 55k people)
Texas Tech (Lubbock, 325k people)
Oklahoma State (Stillwater, OK, 50k people)
Baylor (Waco, TX, 240k people)
Kansas (Lawrence, KS, 120k people)
West Virginia (Morgantown, WV, 35k people)
Iowa State (Ames, Iowa, 70k people)
The incoming schools have some better markets, but the brands of those teams isn't close to TX or Oklahoma, which are departing.
Incoming:
BYU (Provo, UT, 700k people)
UCF (Orlando, 2.6 Million people)
Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 2.3 million people)
Houston (Houston, 8 million)
The PAC still has some very large markets, to be competitive in terms of TV's, as the big 12, so it must be based on other factors.
U of Arizona (Tucson, 1.1 million)
ASU (Phoenix, 5 million)
Washington (Seattle, 4 million)
California (in greater Bay Area, so huge population depending on how you specify it)
Utah (SLC, 1.3M)
Colorado (Denver, 3M)
There are some smaller markets in terms of population, including WSU, Oregon, Oregon St, but Oregon & Oregon State have some pretty good sports programs, especially Oregon.
Anyways, just wondering how these groups are valuing the different schools, and conferences, as it's clearly not all about the city size.