Just a couple of items to keep you occupied while waiting for the US-Ghana WC match on Saturday:
- Congress is officially taking an interest in the recent goings on. Iowa senators Grassley and Harkin want the details on the Big 10 expansion. All of ’em. I’m not sure why they are interested in the price of the ticket so long after the train has left the station. Maybe they are concerned about all of those future trips to the wood shed that Nebraska will put on the Hawkeyes?
- BMOC and Pac-X commissioner Larry Scott, having expanded the conference enough to hold a football championship game, pontificates on the coming mega conferences. Sort of…
I’m not smart enough or experienced enough in the college world to know how long it’s going to take before the next wave of change,” Scott said, “but if an idea is good enough, it’s going to happen.”
That’s just great. Scott is not smart enough to to know when mega expansion will happen, but he’s dumb enough to try and precipitate it right now.
The realignment we’re seeing isn’t shocking…There may be more later. Congress only gets involved when important interested parties back home complain! My take is that this should have probably happened 5 or 6 years ago with Notre Dame leading the charge. It’s possible they could have reshaped the Big Ten into the Super Midwest…and brought Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma along and made it a 2 division Vonference with 7 teams and a playoff…VERY large dollars.
You know things are screwed up when the Big 10 has 12 schools and the Big 12 has 10 schools.
I think the end result could be the end of the NCAA as we know it. If you get 4 conferences with 16 or 20 schools each they will have a lot more power than they do now. Just as the importance of the AAU and the AIAW withered away and the NIT once was considered the national championship, the NCAA could be neutered by the major conferences or they could set up their own sanctioning organization.
What still amazes me about all this reorganization is how little respect basketball gets. The NCAA tournament brings in a ton of money but all these conferences care about is football. It boggles my mind to see Colorado wooed more than Kansas. Basketball has the tournament everyone says football needs yet I guess they see football as having more upside than basketball if they ever get a tournament.
But if the NCAA becomes too much trouble for the big conferences I could see the line from Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman coming true – Tate University – A large football stadium, with a college attached.
Everyone seems to think television is the driver in this reorganization..I have a different take. The Pac 10 (12????) can have a very tidy North vs South grouping. The Champion of each plays at the end of the year. The original Pac 8 was a rivalry based, fan attendance
Conference. The addition of Utah and Colorado will create tremendous interest in the Northwest and is a great move.
IF the elite media teams wanted a television “Champions League” they could have formed one…It would be a shame for college football to lose the traditional Texas and Southwest rivalries so the Big 10 (NOT 10) or SEC could benefit…
To answer your question: no, they are probably not worried about future trips to the woodshed. Review these numbers from 2000-2008, and note that Iowa finished #7 in the final AP poll in 2009 (Nebraska 14): http://bit.ly/buo3YS
They were more likely worried about the ugly stepsister that is Iowa State being booted off the gravy train.