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Originally Posted by sabotai
Don't know if this has been explained in the thread before, and I don't read too much on college sports, but I'm wondering if anyone really knows why a conference would care about academics so much. I've heard several people online and on ESPN mention how much the Big Ten cares about academics. What benefit does the Big Ten get from having teams with high academics? Is it mainly for PR and recruiting?
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The Big Ten is actually an academic group that coincides with the athletic conference, unlike some of the other sports conferences that are sports only. So the fits then have more to do with just sports, but about making sure the schools priorities are the same. So it's important to have schools participating in the league that have those same sorts of academic values.
I mean, they're not the Ivy League or anything...but it works similarly. It's about having a shared set of core values and if a school comes in that doesn't have that, it's very hard to communicate in a common way.
In other words, it has everything to do with institutional politics and little to nothing to do with sports.