Missouri I can understand, but not Syracuse.
Syracuse does not fit the Big 10 profile at all.

Haters gonna Hate

So pumped.

:shrug: RU has been to bowls 6 of their last 7 seasons and has averaged 8 wins a season in that span. I know there are better options, but I don't understand why a conference that has football powerhouses like Indiana, Purdue, Minnesota, Iowa, Northwestern, etc, would consider RU a joke. They bring in a new market which may get more money, and with a big conference and a nice investment, could increase their status. There are tons of RU alums out there that may be willing to open their purse strings a little with a big conference backing.

Anyway, I don't understand the hostility. I mean, the ACC grabbed PIT and Cuse, 2 teams that haven't been good in football for a little while and everyone can't stop jacking on that move (because of basketball). It's a good academic institution with a recent history of success and potential. Get over yourself.

OK, pick another. These two just see like a grab rather than a well thought out plan.

I think he's trying to say that Rutgers does fit the Big 10 profile. MUCH more than Syracuse or even Pitt would have.

Older posts on this subject dating back to 2010 are fun to read now.

One day I'm gonna find the post and bump it with a "I was right!" :)

I imagine there are a LOT of Michigan alumns who live in New York and will make the trip down to watch Michigan play Rutgers.

that's just mbbf being mbbf. as a cuse fan i say congrats rutgers.

this is the beginning of what everyone saw coming

I was just searching and found a bunch of them. haha...I just thought it was unseemly to bump them. ;)

Didn't see this until now, but Nate Silver is wondering as well why these schools were selected before Mizzou.

Expanding Eastward Could Dilute Big Ten Brand - NYTimes.com

dola

Clay Travis discusses the next moves for the Big Ten and SEC on their trek to 16 teams.......

The SEC and Big Ten Will Have 16 Members : Outkick The Coverage

Wait, I thought Nate Silver was 'smug'.

Actually he said Missouri is the most attractive of the group (by a small margin over Rutgers, and a larger margin over Maryland) based on Google searches for "college football" in the area.

Nevermind that there are two other schools he mentioned as non-Eastern ahead of Mizzou.

I think there's going to be huge fights between these networks and the satellite TV companies when the networks want to be paid the same way at 16 teams that they were paid at 12. Some of the comments in those articles hit upon the point I've been trying to make. The carriage fee system starts to make a lot less sense for DirecTV and Dish if you try to manipulate by it just spreading yourselves too thin across the country.

Yes, but any knowledgeable college fan who has been paying attention over the last couple of years knows that ND and Texas are planning to be the last ones on board, for better or worse. We're talking here about schools who were even considering moving. Texas will never end up in the Big Ten and ND realizes they always have an opening in that conference if they want it.

14 to 16 extra football games and 40 extra basketball games for the network make up for it.

Exactly. A Big Ten Network with a football tripleheader every fall Saturday is a hard network to not carry. Plus, they could charge much more for the ads during all of those games than they do during the rest of the lineup.

I'd be watching a bunch of it personally.

Not if they have to pay fees for every subscribing household in the entire NYC and D.C. metro areas at the same rate they pay for Nebraskans to carry Nebraska football. But, obviously they're hoping to at least reach some favorable negotiation point, and maybe it's worth it to them even if they can't convince DirectTV that Maryland to D.C. is the equivalent to Nebraska football to Nebraska.

So, south it is. Virginia and Geo Tech or UNC.
Sounds good to me.

And the conference wants the name to look like this: B1G. So I will play ball.
And Im not sure what the name of the division Iowa is in. I just know all the Ms and Ns are with Iowa.

lol..you really are having a hard time with all of this, aren't you?

Clearly something must've been in the offing if the Big Ten officials decided to convince themselves that this was a good move. Surely it's no worse than the venerable SEC adding Texas A&M and Mizzou or the Big 12 adding West Virginia and TCU.

Neither team has to set the world on fire for it to be a good move. They just have to show up.

The funny thing is MBBF questions Silver's best work and touts some of his worst. The college football analysis was roundly lambasted as being simplistic and based on faulty assumptions. (Namely the "market share" of the fan base off of internet surveys.)

Biggest case in point was his estimate that Atlanta generates something like 1.7 million Georgia Tech fans to Georgia's 1.1 million. Anyone who has set foot in Georgia knows that ratio is reversed and probably doubled. Indeed the Wall Street Journal culled election polling this year for random questions on participants favorite college football team. Georgia outpolled Georgia Tech among participants 45% to 14%. There were several examples that were similarly glaring.

Silver has just redone that work here.

I love reading Nate, but this isn't his best work. Far from it.

I am. It's an aggressive move for sure, and maybe they're just banking on DirectTV and Dish being too afraid to drop these networks and that they'll just cave.

Because yes, the numbers alone make no sense.

I agree though, the teams don't have to be any good for this to make sense for the Big 10. They just have to convince DirectTV and DISH that Rutgers and Maryland are as popular, as a % of viewers, in NYC and D.C. as the other Big 10 teams are, on average, in their existing markets, and that the same rates are thus appropriate. Or if they can't convince them of that, then they have to convince them that they're worth a rate that still makes Maryland and Rutgers worth it when you split things 14 ways instead of 12. (which means Maryland and Rutgers have to be worth more than an average Big 10 team).

+1

And let me just back up a bit because I might be making an incorrect assumption.

The way I understand it, Dish and DirectTV pay the Big 10 an enhanced fee per subscriber in every location where the big 10 has a team. Make sense. So if Nebraska has X number of Dish households, and Nebraska has a team in the Big 10, then Dish pays them X households multiplied by X rate.

So the Big 10 goes and brings in Maryland and Rutgers, under the theory that Dish will now have to pay that enhanced fee for each of the TON of D.C. and NYC area households now that Rutgers and Maryland are in the conference. Even though Rutgers and Maryland have very few relative fans and viewers in those cities, compared to say Nebraska.

Do I have anything wrong or is it really this insane? If the Big 10 added a college in Shanghai, would Dish then have to fork over the same enhanced rate for each of Shanghai's 20 million viewers, even if none of them know what football is (extreme example to make my point)

I was under the impression that DirecTV and Dish had switched to a flat fee model.

Fox bought the f'ing YES Network. They are going to use that to force Big Ten Network, Fuel, Fox Soccer and whatever else they want on to everyone.

Well, if they're just paying for the whole Big 10 contract as a whole, then Maryland and Rutgers just have to have more value than the average Big 10 team to make it worth it, since you're splitting things 14 ways instead of 12. THAT, I could maybe see, because you don't need a huge following to reach average Big 10 level of following.

I think where you go wrong is that you assume they have to get the same enhanced fee they get in Nebraska for the new members to make the math work. They don't. We're talking about incrementalism and every additional dollar counts.

Syracuse doesn't make sense, but I thought Missouri did. Has a bit of a rivalry with Illinois and within travel distance for tournaments and championship games. Would have integrated in well with the conference.

Ya, if it's different rates per market based on a team's penetration of a market that makes perfect sense. I assumed differently based on stuff I've read about the "contract already being in place", and the emphasis on the big markets (where I think the actual numbers of Rutgers and Maryland viewers is more relevant - neither of which is a minuscule number at all, they're just small relative to the cities they're tasked to deliver.)

Are we still going to be paying for "cable" or "satellite" or whatever the hell you want to call it in five or ten years? How does the financial model work when we get all our live sports over the internet? Surely "they" are thinking about this?

There will surely be some other way for fat cats to get fatter and deliver content.

It's going to be interesting. I actually think the networks are at the biggest risk if we go a la carte. Only people buying B10 are alumni and diehards. Now they can sucker everyone into pitching in a buck or two a month toward their channel.

I have an idea for realignment! :)

http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/...ad.php?t=85730

Gary Barnett was on a local KC radio show this morning. He said he was standing next to an ACC athletic director when the Maryland/Rutgers announcement was made. He told Barnett that Louisville/Florida State to the Big 12 would be a done deal now that Maryland left.

http://www.omaha.com/article/2012112...et-for-big-ten


Sounds good to me since UNC and Kansas are the teams I'd like to see if the Big Ten goes to 16.

Would love to see Kansas join. And Uconn, so I could go see IU games...

I would be happy for KU to join the Big (16?), only because I think the Big XII is still the conference that gets picked apart when all is said and done so I'd like to have a seat at a table before they're all gone. That said, I worry for Iowa State and Kansas State. Texas Tech have Texas tethered to them, in a way, as does Oklahoma State and Oklahoma. Baylor and TCU could also be in trouble. West Virginia will be fine, I suspect as one of the east coast conferences would pick them up.

SI

From what I can see, there seems to be very little confidence in ACC territory that the future includes the ACC. Coach K has been saying as much.

A lot of jumpy UNC fans out there have reconciled themselves very quickly to the notion of joining the Big Ten. I'm totally unsure where this is headed but it's the most uncertainty I've perceived in this process so far from a UNC perspective.

I wonder what things will look like in 3 years. It looks like we're moving towards a division super-1 50ish teams that will be in further ahead of the other 1-A teams. I wonder if that split will ever be made official in some way. We've had all this controversy the last 10 years about "access" to the BCS, but if those lower 1-A teams are almost playing a different sport at a different division, it's hard to see that holding up forever.

Edit: I'd kind of like to see those big 50 teams go pseudo-pro, pay the players, etc, and everyone else drop down and be more amateurish.

You mean Vitale would only be able to talk about UNC vs. Duke most likely once a year?

No, Duke will bitch about UNC leaving them high and dry and refuse to play them. On the bright side, KU will be free from their UT overlords and will likely play Mizzou again soon after their move.

Maybe I'm not seeing something here, but couldn't this quick and fairly aggressive move by the BigTen simply be an attempt to force Texas and Notre Dame's hands?

"Look, only two spots left in the best conference that will make you a focal point and bring in millions of dollars to your systems!"


Notre Dame has always been holding out for the best offer, perhaps this is the BigTen's way of saying, take it or leave it, last call!

But even if it's crazy to think about, the conference would take those teams as #17 without hesitation. It might be a clusterfuck, but as long as the incremental revenues make it worth it, there's no reason not to (and with those two teams, the revenues will of course).

I don't think so. I think 16 teams is a pretty big tipping point. The next step after that is 20 teams in each conference and I'm not sure you could create four 20-team conferences with significant value. There's a rule of four (whether it's number of teams or conferences) that makes the most sense logistically.