Chait's take on Expansion
UM alum Jon Chait comments on "The Madness of Big Ten Expansion" in New York Magazine:
http://nymag.com/daily/sports/2012/11/madness-of-big-ten-expansion.html
November 20th, 2012 at 8:20 PM ^
November 20th, 2012 at 8:26 PM ^
If geography is your explanation Rutgers is closer than Nebraska who no one really had a problem with claiming we could become rivals and Minnesota is not much closer. Additionally, of the rivalries you listed I'd say mosit of them are driven more by team quality than geography. As much as people like to claim it, the OSU-UM rivalry was not driven by an 1800s border dispute, it was driven by both teams being very good and fighting for championships for a long period of time.
November 20th, 2012 at 8:45 PM ^
November 20th, 2012 at 8:28 PM ^
In other words, rivalries are predominately geographic because football scheduling was geographic, so national rivalries really weren't even given a chance(USC-ND as an exception)
November 20th, 2012 at 8:29 PM ^
Does a school really need more than 2~3 rivals? We have MSU and Ohio. Minnesota has Wisky and Iowa. Illinois has NW. Ohio has us and maybe Penn State.
IF we go to a pod based system, where each school plays 2~3 border rivals every year, and the rest every two years, would that be ok? We'd play MSU and Ohio every year, and play Minny and Iowa every other year.
And if Rutgers or Maryland retain a fraction of their in state talent, being consistant top 18~30 teams doesn't seem out of reach and might be fun games with tons of alumni at away games.
November 20th, 2012 at 8:41 PM ^
November 20th, 2012 at 9:57 PM ^
"But the biggest concern I have is that a lot of the best rivalry games in college football are geographic rivalries"
Yes ... historically. But I'm not sure it holds into the future.
Nostalgia and history seem no longer to be quite so cherished as they once were. I wish it weren't true ... I wish such things still mattered ... but my wishing it true does not make it so.
We live in a different world with different values. Sadly.
November 21st, 2012 at 10:10 AM ^
I remember nostalgia fondly, too.
November 20th, 2012 at 9:02 PM ^
Hasn't Harvard, Yale and Princeton been playing a few games the past few years?
Hasn't Grambling and Southern been chilaxing together once and while?
Oh tradition, who needs it generation. You people are making me want to move to Belgium. If it ain't broke don't fix it!
Man, seriously, change is inevitable, but when it's boneheaded, be honest and just admit it. Progress in our conference would have been adjusting and renaming the divisions. Let things shake out for a couple of years and see how the conference is doing, then maybe reassess. Overreaction!!
November 20th, 2012 at 8:27 PM ^
We want our beloved alma mater to stay solvent, be successful in every athletic and academic endeavor as well as be apart of a like minded collegium of universities that share resources. That's what we had.
Maryland and Rutgers have weakened everything that we covet, cherish and endear ourselves to as alumni.
The question should really be, why didt we flip out about nebraska? obvious!! why did we go for such small fish for a marginal outcome? Why not wait it out for the big fish to come a swimming? I will bet my house the dominos would have fallen right into our lap with better universities and athletic programs. This is totally an overreaction. Misstep by Delaney and U presidents.
If you can't even admit that, and see how horrible this is, you need to check your fandom or potential alumni status.
Further more, if you think we have a serious attendance issue brewing with students and now ticket holders, hold on! Who wants to make a noon kickoff for Rutgers or Maryland, when that could have been Wisconsin or PSU? Can you even answer that question? Just because they are BIG games? The students come from NYC/NJ or DC metro and all o sudden want to see these teams? Well. I witnessed first hand NW and Iowa, and the student section was vehemently blasted by me and everyone around me. Growing resentment...
You can't have it both ways. It won't work. Chait is dead on with is example of big 12.
November 20th, 2012 at 9:01 PM ^
November 20th, 2012 at 9:02 PM ^
November 20th, 2012 at 9:05 PM ^
Sorry. Double post.
November 20th, 2012 at 9:09 PM ^
I usually really like Chait, but I think he is wrong about this. I think expansion is good, and positions the conference to be one of the four magic super-conferences that will rule the game within five years. Also, if there aren't enough tomato cans, it's hard for anyone to get ranked. I'm fine with two more tomato cans joining the conference.
Besides, the two additions that take the Big Ten to sixteen teams are going to be a lot tougher than Maryland and Rutgers.
November 20th, 2012 at 10:02 PM ^
"... and positions the conference to be one of the four magic super-conferences that will rule the game within five years."
Yeah, what he said.
The end game here is championship tournament, which is starting out 4 but will go to 8 for sure and then probably 16. Then the question is who has the cajones to determine who gets in and how many from a conference. Only by expansion and money can the Big 10 keep that discussion in the ballpark of being reasonably fair to the Big 10.
November 21st, 2012 at 3:30 AM ^
November 21st, 2012 at 6:49 AM ^
November 21st, 2012 at 8:46 AM ^
There's already a comp for cost -- cord-cutters can access NBA League Pass, MLB Extra Innings, and NHL Center Ice, including on Apple TV (so you don't have to be bound to a computer) for around $150-$180 each or $25-$30 per month when you figure in the length of the season. So ESPN, which broadcasts all year is probably worth, what, $300-$350? So around $27-$30 a month. Cord cutters can get Fox Soccer Channel streaming, and they charge about $20 a month.
November 21st, 2012 at 9:03 AM ^
Jon Chait objects, among other things, to conference realignment sacrificing traditional, geographic rivalries.
ND seemed to have little difficulty giving up one of its “traditional, geographic rivalries” to satisfy its new ACC football-opponent requirement. ND was apparently bent on retaining USC and Stanford, traditional but hardly geographic rivals—TV markets, maybe? And the ACC rolled over for ND keeping its relationship with NBC, just as the realigned Big 12 rolled over for Texas and its “network.”
When looking at this new ND-ACC arrangement, schools such as Maryland asked “What’s in this for us”? The answers it came up with made accepting the BIG's offer an apparent no-brainer, just like Nebraska when faced with a similar situation in the Big 12. Giving up traditional rivalries was very much a secondary consideration. MD might have a traditional opponent in Duke, but that seemed to pose little opposition to moving to the BIG. Any fan disappoinment about NE not playing OK every year was undoubtedly greater, but again was trumped by bigger payouts and a brighter future.
In both cases, when Delaney and company saw opportunities to add value (flagship schools, good academics, in NE’s case great football tradition) and extend the BIG’s TV footprint, he took them, and the invitee schools willingly accepted, traditional rivalries or no. Delany has a good product to sell, and he seems to know exactly to whom he wants to sell it.
If ND, and NE and to a lesser extent MD are willing to sacrifice traditional rivalries to secure their financial future in the BIG, who is some NY writer to say they're wrong? Time will tell, I guess.
November 21st, 2012 at 10:21 AM ^
Nebraska had already lost its yearly game with Oklahoma when the XII was formed, so there was no issue with giving up their traditions to join the B1G. But certainly Nebraska was attracted to the B1G for financial reasons and a better future.
At least in Nebraska's case many of the B1G teams were not complete strangers, we'd played over 150 games against B1G schools before joining.
November 21st, 2012 at 12:54 PM ^
Thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking back to Tommy Frazier and earlier, when Nebraska-Oklahoma was such a popular national rivalry. As you say, losing that game made Nebraska's move to the BIG all that much easier.
November 21st, 2012 at 9:53 AM ^
"Cable Television is going to die" strikes me as one of these "universal truths" that constantly gets bandied about without a lick of support. The largest source of internet in the nation is through cable companies - do we assume that cable companies will allow people to transition from cable TV to streaming internet without raising prices?
November 21st, 2012 at 10:30 AM ^
They will once the competition arrives and starts eating their lunch.
November 21st, 2012 at 10:51 AM ^
OK. What competition? Google Fiber is $120/month.
November 21st, 2012 at 11:07 AM ^
That's just the plan that includes cable TV channels for the people that aren't ready to completely drop cable TV yet, which is most people since video streaming doesn't completely replace it yet. Yet. The important ones are the $70 plan and the *free* plan.
The long plan for Google is YouTube. They are planning on an internet box (with YouTube highly integrated) to replace cable boxes such that you go home and watch YouTube videos and streaming video from other web sites instead of whatever cable channels happen to be showing right now. But the big obstacle to this is ubiquitous high speed internet, which a significant portion of the population still doesn't have, and is either not that high speed or bandwitdth-limited by the ISPs for a much larger portion of the population. And this is where Google Fiber figures in.
November 21st, 2012 at 10:28 AM ^
It's not that cable television is going to die; it's that they aren't going to be able to sell things no one wants for much longer. Like everybody else, I pay for literally hundreds of channels I never watch in order to receive eight or ten that I watch all the time. That model is doomed to failure and will end. (And, therefore, the Big Ten Network won't gather fees from the millions upon millions of people in NY and DC who have no interest in Big Ten sports.)
November 21st, 2012 at 10:29 AM ^
Nebraska in the Big Ten makes perfect competitive and aesthetic sense.