If anyone ever asks me why I became a sports blogger, I'll be sure to point to a column in today's Washington Post by Tracee Hamilton. "Big Ten expansion: Big Dollars, little sense," may not be the most ridiculous column that's ever appeared in the WaPo's Sports section, but there's more than a few spots that make you just shake your head in disbelief.
Apparently, Hamilton is a fan of the Big 8 Conference, and she can't help but wax nostalgic for the good old days of college football where regional rivals where within a long night's drive of one another. As a casual college football fan who remembers what New Year's Day used to mean to the sport, I can sympathize, but those days are dead and buried when it comes to the new realities of college football, where your program is expected to not only pay its own bills, but line the pockets of plenty of other folks who never get onto the football field.
Let's get started, shall we?
[T]he babe the Big 10-Eleven really wants to take to prom is Notre Dame. Not for the talent or the tradition or even the geography -- the heart of Big 10-Eleven country. No, the Big 10-Eleven wants Notre Dame's television market. (Apparently, having your own profitable TV network isn't enough.) The Irish appeal is not local or regional; it's national, and it's loyal, no matter how badly the team stinks. The Big 10-Eleven's message seems to be: Join us or perish. Cheery.
This is what college football has become: mergers and acquisitions. Just like Wall Street. And we know how that worked out.
Say what you want about Notre Dame, (I'm sure their financial people are crunching the numbers right now, and if it makes sense they're in) what I can't quite believe are the last two lines of that passage. The crazy thing is, Hamilton doesn't need to use a metaphor to tell us how the mergers and acquisitions in college football have worked out. After all, the formula we've seen from coast to coast goes something like this:
Expand. Split conference into two divisions. Add championship game to conference schedule and use its existence to jack up television rights fee.
I don't know about you, but I'm having a hard time finding fault with this formula. It's worked for the ACC, the SEC and Big 12 among the giant conferences. And who can fault the Big 10 for wanting in too?
So while Hamilton might not like the idea of expansion and may be turned off by the pursuit of money, comparing it to the current ruin of our financial system doesn't make much sense.
Rutgers is the biggest puzzle among the quartet, but Delany apparently believes it would give him the New York television market. Which seems absurd.
Does it? Not to me it doesn't. If anything, it seems to me like an incredible deal for Rutgers, a school that should be rushing to the Big 10's altar in order to get there before Notre Dame. Think of it from the point of view of the Scarlet Knights. If you leave the Big East for the Big 10, every other year you'll get a home game with Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Iowa or Wisconsin. And when those teams come calling, you can bet your bottom dollar that Rutgers won't be playing those home games at 52,000 seat Rutgers Stadium, but will more than likely be moving those games to the 82,500 seat New Meadowlands. And they will all sell out in minutes and become huge events in New York, our largest media market, and one that doesn't have a logical affiliation with a major college football program.
Ca-ching!
On the basketball side, Rutgers serves as a less competitive version of Seton Hall in the Big East, playing a schedule that's not all that different. But plop them in the Big 10, and all of a sudden their schedule gets a whole lot more attractive to the locals, and those games against conference opponents like Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Purdue and Michigan State will get moved to the 18,500 seat Prudential Center in Newark instead of the 8,000 seat Louis Brown Athletic Center.
Ca-ching!
With just one move, Rutgers will become the most important college basketball program in metropolitan New York, leaving St. John's in the dust. Can you imagine just what sort of recruiting advantage Rutgers will have over schools in the area if it can let local recruits play more or less at home against the best teams in the Big 10 instead of the Big East?
Altogether, will this help the Big 10 crack the NYC television market? You bet it will, and anyone who thinks otherwise just isn't thinking straight.
If old rivalries are no longer important, if regional play is no longer important, if the only thing that matters is television revenue, then let's just admit that and move on.
The best old rivalries are the ones that draw the biggest crowds, and hence come with the highest price tags, so there's no danger they'll be snuffed out. As for coming to terms with the relative importance of television revenue, I'm afraid Hamilton is the only one who hasn't moved on yet. Feel free to join the rest of us anytime you like.
