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It seems that Missouri's comment last December that it would listen to offers from other conferences has set off a firestorm of activity and speculation. A lot of sports writers are drooling at the thought of a massive reorganization of the major conferences which would lead to "joy of joys" a football playoff.
It doesn't take much knowledge of the history of college sports to understand that conferences that don't at least have all-play-all over, say, a four year period tend to fall apart with the wealthy schools ditching the poorer. The Big 6 (Iowa St, Kansas, Kansas St, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma) forerunner of the Big XII was created when the old Missouri Valley Conference got too big and diverse. The old Southern Conference had it happen twice, first with the SEC teams leaving, then with the charter members of the ACC. Most recently the 16-team WAC lost all its remaining charter members to the Mountain West. The current gigantic MAC has been holding together, but it has been leaking teams almost as fast as new ones join. The idea of Missouri joining a 16-team conference of mostly heavy-weights frankly scares me. They could easily be a team left behind when things started to fall apart. The long term survival of a 16-20 team major conference just doesn't seem likely. Talk of allowing a third team from a single conference to play in the BCS, presumably with one or two new BCS contests added, is just talk for now. So adding lots of strong teams to existing conferences hardly makes sense. In terms of shared TV pay-outs adding teams from smaller states or teams with small existing fan bases doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense. Unlike some seem to think its not the total amount of money the conference earns, its the shares each school gets that matter.
On the other hand its tough to judge what the Big Ten members might really be thinking.
I've had a number of ideas why the Big Ten might at least threaten to expand to 16 teams, and most of them have to do with bullying Notre Dame into joining. Basically the idea is to take enough teams from the Big East that keeping ND 's scheduling first rate for all sports save football becomes an unholy nightmare. But that only works if it's a believable threat, and it's the threat that matters not the execution. If they actually went through with it, it would leave the Big X with a bunch of teams with relatively small stadiums (and hence small fan bases) demanding equal shares with everyone else. So if they can bully Notre Dame into joining as a twelfth team, then they'd have no reason to actually add any of the other teams from the Big East. Some folks including me have toyed with the idea of a preemptive strike by the Big East to save its integrity. Namely the conference would kick out Notre Dame and refuse to schedule them in anything save football, on the grounds that their refusal to join the conference in playing football was making the conference unworkable. Unless ND would like to join the MAC that would very likely force them to join the Big Ten, and again once the B10 had ND they wouldn't need or want any one else. Of course in the real world such things are the stuff of messy lawsuits which ND could probably afford more than the rest of the Big East put together.
The criteria the Big 10 are supposedly using in their consideration of expansion are both economic and academic. Let's look at some of them.
Academic - Academic standing is about 20% reality, 40% chutzpah, and 40% BS. You can judge all sorts of things as part of academics; the number and value of the grants professors have received to do research, or the total number of publications (neither of which tell you whether the professors are even competent lecturers/teachers), the number and quality of volumes in the library, which I like as a standard (which doesn't tell you if anyone there actually reads them), the success of the graduates (which often is about the economic conditions in the area the college draws most of its students). From my own experience the quality of education one receives depends heavily on personal drive and luck no matter where you go to college. I've met graduates from big name schools here and abroad who were brilliantly educated in every sense of the word, and some graduates from the same places who were below average in every sense. Back in my day, Missouri could not begin to compare with Ohio State in opportunities for grad students, but I would never dream of advising a kid to attend OSU as an undergraduate in those days. It was much, much easier to get into Missouri when I entered than it is now, but it was down right picky compared to Ohio State in those days. Our Little Bit is proof that OSU wasn't a total loss for undergraduates, but all the things OSU did to keep crappy students in school and paying fees, surely hurt the better students who could have learned more without the losers around. OSU certainly wasn't the only Big Ten school in those days that was more interested in quantity than quality when it came to undergraduates. I don't think any of the schools mentioned as candidates need be too concerned about their academic standing compared to the Big 10 schools, nor need get too puffy about joining them, if and when.
TV revenue potential - This seems to be the most important factor the Big 10 is actually considering. Barry Alvarez the AD of Wisconsin has said bluntly he wants any added school to 'buy its way in.' That could, in fact, mean a number of things. But most certainly it means adding schools purely to gain potential revenue isn't going to be enough. There is going to have to be some obvious immediate return on the Big 10's investment or there is going to be resistance to expansion. I don't know if any of the candidates can pull its own weight completely, right away. Nebraska fans are under the delusion that filling their stadium and 'traveling well' is a critical factor like it was 15 years ago when the Big 12 was formed. It will help, of course. But Ohio St, Michigan and Penn St. don't need Nebraska fans to help fill their stadiums. Nebraska has the smallest population of the states with a team supposedly in the running, so in terms of potential TV revenue they don't come out near the top. This is also Syracuse's weakness. Most of their fan base is western and northern New York, and most of the TV potential revenue in state the lies in the southeast at the mouth of the Hudson.
Geography - It may seem in terms of instant revenue that the correct choice for the Big 10 would be Texas. Geography makes that next to impossible. Ohio State *lost* money on a recent regular season football trip to the state of California, something that would have been unheard of not long ago. Admittedly OSU was a bit lavish in spending on that trip, but put simply, travel and lodging expenses aren't trivial the way they were back when I was in school. Iowa might send its football team to Lincoln or Columbia by bus as it probably does to Ames when they play Iowa State. But that wouldn't work on a trip to Austin or College Station. Missouri might have to cut back on its bus travel if it joined the Big Ten, but Columbia is still closer to Columbus than it is to Austin or Boulder.
In another sense geography is important. The obvious dividing line between possible future divisions of the Big 10 is the Indiana-Illinois border extended north through Lake Michigan. Currently there are five schools west of the line and six to the east. Adding one more school to the east would cause problems. I can't imagine Michigan tolerating being separated from Michigan State, which would leave separating Purdue from Indiana, which I doubt would go over well either. Adding one school to the west instead creates no such problems. Basically the path of least resistance in terms of existing Big Ten rivalries says that teams should be added in the west in odd numbers and then once there is an odd number of new schools in the west, even numbers of schools could be added easily in the east.
Bottom line
I'm not sure the Big Ten will expand at all. Some short term sacrifice in revenue would have to be made by someone. I doubt any current Big XII school would accept substantially reduced payments for an ease-in period. Big East schools would each have a 5 Million dollar debt payable to their old conference if they should join the Big Ten. So how much of a temporary payment reduction they would accept is debatable. None of this is a problem if the Big Ten schools are generous and the conference only wants to add one team. It could be a big problem if the commissioner pushes for adding more.
Assuming Notre Dame remains a wan hope and the problem of breaking up Indiana and Purdue can be smoothed over, at the moment I think the most likely candidate for Big Ten is Rutgers. They have a number of problems there. Even after a recent major addition, the stadium is small. The fan base is such that the ACC didn't want them. They are certainly not the magic doorway into the New York City market as some are claiming. But short of NYU suddenly resuming playing big time football, a huge volume of NYC viewers for a specific team. just isn't going to happen anyway. I think the potential is definitely there at Rutgers for the most growth in fan base of any of the candidates currently mentioned.
Assuming the rivalry headaches are too great to add a team in the east, Missouri is probably the most likely choice if the Big Ten expands by one team. Effectively kicking the Big XII out of St. Louis and entering the KC market would be attractive for them. But, just like the officials at Mizzou keep saying, most of us Missouri fans aren't sure whether the result would be great for Missouri or not.
It doesn't take much knowledge of the history of college sports to understand that conferences that don't at least have all-play-all over, say, a four year period tend to fall apart with the wealthy schools ditching the poorer. The Big 6 (Iowa St, Kansas, Kansas St, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma) forerunner of the Big XII was created when the old Missouri Valley Conference got too big and diverse. The old Southern Conference had it happen twice, first with the SEC teams leaving, then with the charter members of the ACC. Most recently the 16-team WAC lost all its remaining charter members to the Mountain West. The current gigantic MAC has been holding together, but it has been leaking teams almost as fast as new ones join. The idea of Missouri joining a 16-team conference of mostly heavy-weights frankly scares me. They could easily be a team left behind when things started to fall apart. The long term survival of a 16-20 team major conference just doesn't seem likely. Talk of allowing a third team from a single conference to play in the BCS, presumably with one or two new BCS contests added, is just talk for now. So adding lots of strong teams to existing conferences hardly makes sense. In terms of shared TV pay-outs adding teams from smaller states or teams with small existing fan bases doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense. Unlike some seem to think its not the total amount of money the conference earns, its the shares each school gets that matter.
On the other hand its tough to judge what the Big Ten members might really be thinking.
I've had a number of ideas why the Big Ten might at least threaten to expand to 16 teams, and most of them have to do with bullying Notre Dame into joining. Basically the idea is to take enough teams from the Big East that keeping ND 's scheduling first rate for all sports save football becomes an unholy nightmare. But that only works if it's a believable threat, and it's the threat that matters not the execution. If they actually went through with it, it would leave the Big X with a bunch of teams with relatively small stadiums (and hence small fan bases) demanding equal shares with everyone else. So if they can bully Notre Dame into joining as a twelfth team, then they'd have no reason to actually add any of the other teams from the Big East. Some folks including me have toyed with the idea of a preemptive strike by the Big East to save its integrity. Namely the conference would kick out Notre Dame and refuse to schedule them in anything save football, on the grounds that their refusal to join the conference in playing football was making the conference unworkable. Unless ND would like to join the MAC that would very likely force them to join the Big Ten, and again once the B10 had ND they wouldn't need or want any one else. Of course in the real world such things are the stuff of messy lawsuits which ND could probably afford more than the rest of the Big East put together.
The criteria the Big 10 are supposedly using in their consideration of expansion are both economic and academic. Let's look at some of them.
Academic - Academic standing is about 20% reality, 40% chutzpah, and 40% BS. You can judge all sorts of things as part of academics; the number and value of the grants professors have received to do research, or the total number of publications (neither of which tell you whether the professors are even competent lecturers/teachers), the number and quality of volumes in the library, which I like as a standard (which doesn't tell you if anyone there actually reads them), the success of the graduates (which often is about the economic conditions in the area the college draws most of its students). From my own experience the quality of education one receives depends heavily on personal drive and luck no matter where you go to college. I've met graduates from big name schools here and abroad who were brilliantly educated in every sense of the word, and some graduates from the same places who were below average in every sense. Back in my day, Missouri could not begin to compare with Ohio State in opportunities for grad students, but I would never dream of advising a kid to attend OSU as an undergraduate in those days. It was much, much easier to get into Missouri when I entered than it is now, but it was down right picky compared to Ohio State in those days. Our Little Bit is proof that OSU wasn't a total loss for undergraduates, but all the things OSU did to keep crappy students in school and paying fees, surely hurt the better students who could have learned more without the losers around. OSU certainly wasn't the only Big Ten school in those days that was more interested in quantity than quality when it came to undergraduates. I don't think any of the schools mentioned as candidates need be too concerned about their academic standing compared to the Big 10 schools, nor need get too puffy about joining them, if and when.
TV revenue potential - This seems to be the most important factor the Big 10 is actually considering. Barry Alvarez the AD of Wisconsin has said bluntly he wants any added school to 'buy its way in.' That could, in fact, mean a number of things. But most certainly it means adding schools purely to gain potential revenue isn't going to be enough. There is going to have to be some obvious immediate return on the Big 10's investment or there is going to be resistance to expansion. I don't know if any of the candidates can pull its own weight completely, right away. Nebraska fans are under the delusion that filling their stadium and 'traveling well' is a critical factor like it was 15 years ago when the Big 12 was formed. It will help, of course. But Ohio St, Michigan and Penn St. don't need Nebraska fans to help fill their stadiums. Nebraska has the smallest population of the states with a team supposedly in the running, so in terms of potential TV revenue they don't come out near the top. This is also Syracuse's weakness. Most of their fan base is western and northern New York, and most of the TV potential revenue in state the lies in the southeast at the mouth of the Hudson.
Geography - It may seem in terms of instant revenue that the correct choice for the Big 10 would be Texas. Geography makes that next to impossible. Ohio State *lost* money on a recent regular season football trip to the state of California, something that would have been unheard of not long ago. Admittedly OSU was a bit lavish in spending on that trip, but put simply, travel and lodging expenses aren't trivial the way they were back when I was in school. Iowa might send its football team to Lincoln or Columbia by bus as it probably does to Ames when they play Iowa State. But that wouldn't work on a trip to Austin or College Station. Missouri might have to cut back on its bus travel if it joined the Big Ten, but Columbia is still closer to Columbus than it is to Austin or Boulder.
In another sense geography is important. The obvious dividing line between possible future divisions of the Big 10 is the Indiana-Illinois border extended north through Lake Michigan. Currently there are five schools west of the line and six to the east. Adding one more school to the east would cause problems. I can't imagine Michigan tolerating being separated from Michigan State, which would leave separating Purdue from Indiana, which I doubt would go over well either. Adding one school to the west instead creates no such problems. Basically the path of least resistance in terms of existing Big Ten rivalries says that teams should be added in the west in odd numbers and then once there is an odd number of new schools in the west, even numbers of schools could be added easily in the east.
Bottom line
I'm not sure the Big Ten will expand at all. Some short term sacrifice in revenue would have to be made by someone. I doubt any current Big XII school would accept substantially reduced payments for an ease-in period. Big East schools would each have a 5 Million dollar debt payable to their old conference if they should join the Big Ten. So how much of a temporary payment reduction they would accept is debatable. None of this is a problem if the Big Ten schools are generous and the conference only wants to add one team. It could be a big problem if the commissioner pushes for adding more.
Assuming Notre Dame remains a wan hope and the problem of breaking up Indiana and Purdue can be smoothed over, at the moment I think the most likely candidate for Big Ten is Rutgers. They have a number of problems there. Even after a recent major addition, the stadium is small. The fan base is such that the ACC didn't want them. They are certainly not the magic doorway into the New York City market as some are claiming. But short of NYU suddenly resuming playing big time football, a huge volume of NYC viewers for a specific team. just isn't going to happen anyway. I think the potential is definitely there at Rutgers for the most growth in fan base of any of the candidates currently mentioned.
Assuming the rivalry headaches are too great to add a team in the east, Missouri is probably the most likely choice if the Big Ten expands by one team. Effectively kicking the Big XII out of St. Louis and entering the KC market would be attractive for them. But, just like the officials at Mizzou keep saying, most of us Missouri fans aren't sure whether the result would be great for Missouri or not.