It figures that a conference that has lost 5 all-sports members, 8 non-football schools and 3 schools that accept invites to join but then backed out before playing a down of football within the past 18 months would ultimately end up losing its own name. Both Brett McMurphy of ESPN.com and Mark Blaudschun are reporting that the Big East presidents are expected to approve a plan to allow for the “Catholic 7” defectors from the conference (Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Providence, DePaul and Marquette) to keep the Big East name and leave the league for the 2013-14 season. Pete Thamel of SI.com notes that Fox is pushing for the early exit and is expected to announce a contract with the Catholic 7/Big East when it unveils its plans for its new pair of sports networks of Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2. He also reports that the Catholic 7’s keeping of the Big East name and early exit are effectively being paid for by leaving the exit fees and NCAA Tournament credits of the other Big East schools that have defected or will be defecting (West Virginia, Syracuse, Pitt, Louisville, Rutgers and Notre Dame). Meanwhile, a consensus has formed that Xavier and Butler will be added immediately to the new league with the old name for next season with a chance that a 10th, such as Creighton, comes in at that time. The Catholic 7/Big East would then likely move up to 12 with St. Louis and Dayton (or possibly Richmond) in 2014-15.
The fight over the Big East was interesting since it’s a brand name that has been dragged through the mud lately yet still had a lot of value to both the Catholic 7 and Conference Formerly Known as the Big East football schools for different reasons. From my vantage point, the Big East name is more valuable with the Catholic 7, but was more valuable to the football schools. That is, the Catholic 7 are more able to fully realize the value of the Big East name since it had the bulk of the remaining historical members that weren’t in other power conferences and there wouldn’t be a cognitive dissonance if they held their conference tournament at Madison Square Garden. On the other hand, the football schools have little association with each other besides being new members of the league that was known as the Big East specifically. The Catholic 7 could have more easily re-branded themselves under a different name since the average sports fan could already largely recognize that group as a cohesive unit, while the football members will need to sell a new untested name on top of educating the public about who is in their conference. As a result, I’m a little surprised that the football schools didn’t pull out a rant like Marlo did on The Wire about how “My name is my name!”
Of course, the exit fees and NCAA Tournament credits of the other Big East defectors that the Catholic 7 are leaving behind aren’t small amounts. Some back-of-the-napkin calculations would put that at least on the order of $20 million just for the NCAA credits. (Edit: Jeremy Fowler of CBSSports.com reported earlier this month that the Big East actually has a “Realignment Reserve Fund” that is projected to be worth $68.8 million by 2020.) Significantly, it’s likely that none of that is going to the incoming members of the league as part of their entrance agreements since it is standard operating procedure that new schools do not receive any of the revenue earned before they joined. This means that UConn, Cincinnati and USF, which are currently the only all-sports members in the Big East with voting rights (Temple still isn’t a full member yet), are probably ending up with all of that money that the Catholic 7 are leaving behind, which would certainly make it more palatable for them to let go of the Big East name in return. It’s at least some financial consideration for literally the only three schools in all of FBS that will end up earning less conference-level money outright in the new college football playoff system that starts in 2014 than they are in the current BCS regime.
Maybe it is all for the best for the football schools that thought that they were going to be in a conference called the Big East. Andersen Consulting had to go through an acrimonious split with its parent Arthur Andersen back in the late-1990s, including losing an arbitration proceeding where it was forced to give up any reference to the then-extremely valuable Andersen name*. The new name “Accenture” was chosen and literally hundreds of millions of dollars needed to be spent on re-branding efforts. What seemed like a huge branding blow in 2000 ended up becoming one of the most fortuitous name changes in history just a year later when the Enron scandal hit and took Andersen down entirely as an accounting firm. Sometimes, a fresh name with a new start can end up being better in the long run even if the benefits aren’t obvious today.
(* I was a finance major at the University of Illinois in the late-1990s and, without question, the most prestigious of the then-Big Five accounting firms was Arthur Andersen. The sad irony of Andersen getting taken down in the Enron scandal partly for enabling poor audit decisions in order to preserve other types of tax services fees was that its main reputation, at least in Chicago, was that it was actually the least sales-oriented and most client-focused of the large accounting firms.)
As I’ve stated previously, this all jives with what I believe the Big Ten wants to do with expansion. The demographic shift to the South (both in terms of sheer population and football recruiting) has been a concern of the Big Ten for quite awhile – recall the results of the conference’s expansion study back in 2010 before they added Nebraska. UVA in particular would give the Big Ten flags on both sides of the Washington, DC metro area, which might end up being the second most important market for the conference after Chicago when all is said and done. (New York City is obviously the great white whale for college sports, but penetrating that market is going to be a long-term process for the Big Ten. DC, on the other hand, can be turned into a legit “Big Ten town” immediately with the right combo.)
UNC, as one of the most prominent brand names in college sports that can deliver its entire home state all on its own, is at or near the top of the list of both the Big Ten and SEC, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if Delany had offered his alma mater an invite years ago. However, I’ll reiterate that the Tar Heels are going to be one of the toughest nuts to crack in conference realignment (if they’re even crackable at all) since TV money alone isn’t going to sway them. The ACC culture is strong at that school and, even if there are other defections from that league, UNC alone could keep the rest of the conference together just as the presence of Texas kept the Big 12 together.
Georgia Tech is a name that is brought up in Big Ten expansion discussions fairly regularly. In a vacuum, there’s a lot to like about Georgia Tech – a great academic school in a top TV market and football recruiting area that is one of the largest destinations for Big Ten grads outside of the Midwest. The problem, though, is that the SEC rules (and likely always will rule) Atlanta. If there is a broader Southern expansion for the Big Ten (e.g. UVA, UNC, Georgia Tech and Florida State are all added to create an 18-school Big Ten), then there probably is enough of a critical mass of fans in the Atlanta market where it’s worth it to be the #2 conference there (as it’s such a strong college football market overall). I’m not a fan of it being a lone geographic outlier in the South, though, which is close to what it would be if only UVA were to be added with the Yellow Jackets.
At the same time, as someone that implored people to “think like a university president and not like a fan” when it came to conference realignment back in 2009, I’ve now come full circle in badly wanting to make sure that the Big Ten ends up with at least one more legit football power if it is going to continue expanding. Unless Notre Dame suddenly gets conference religion, the only realistic option on that front is Florida State and, by several accounts, the Seminoles are there for the taking. As I’ve stated before, Florida State hits virtually every metric that the Big Ten is looking for long-term: football power, growing population and massive TV markets. I understand better than most people about the importance of TV markets and academics to the Big Ten, yet this expansion gravy train is still ultimately fueled by football games that sports fans actually want to sit down and watch. Let’s hope that if the Big Ten actually is able to further raid the ACC (and I’ll be a skeptic of that occurring until the day that there’s an actual announcement) that Jim Delany (who I’m sure is more than open to the prospect of adding FSU) is able to remind the university presidents that there still needs to be football branding on top of collecting large metro areas and research institutions.
Brett McMurphy and Andy Katz of ESPN.com have reported that NBC has verbally offered the remnants of the Big East between $20 million and $23 million per year for six years for the conference’s TV rights for all sports (including both football and basketball). That would be approximately $2 million per year for each school in the league. By way of comparison, each individual school in the Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12 and Big 12 (and depending upon who you talk to, soon the ACC) will make about as much TV money on its own annually than the entire Big East conference. This is the latest news in the stunning decimation of the Big East since the league rejected an offer from ESPN two years ago worth an average of $130 million per year. During that time frame, the Big East has lost 5 football members that have actually played in the league (Pittsburgh, Syracuse, West Virginia, Rutgers and Louisville), 8 non-football members (Notre Dame, Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Providence, DePaul and Marquette) and 2 3 schools that defected before they even played a down of Big East football (TCU, Boise State and San Diego State). In the middle of that process, the conference also lost its place in the college football postseason structure, where it failed to secure a “Contract Bowl” slot (with its former BCS AQ counterparts Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC) and is now part of the “Gang of Five” non-power conference group (with the MAC, Conference USA, Mountain West Conference and Sun Belt as new counterparts). The Big East made a huge gamble in taking its sports rights to the open market when it turned down that lucrative ESPN offer and even the largest conference naysayers couldn’t have predicted how badly that decision would backfire.
The argument that ESPN systemically devalued the Big East to the point where it was effectively destroyed is taken as gospel by many Big East partisans. It started back in October 2011 with a quote from the then-AD at Boston College stating that ESPN “told [the ACC] what to do” in the wake of Pitt and Syracuse defecting to the ACC. This line of thinking then continued on as the Big East lost more access in the new college football playoff system than any other conference (in fact, they’re likely going to be the only league that will end up making less money in the new format than it does in the current BCS system) and then suffered a literal avalanche of defections in the past 5 months.
However, it wasn’t the Bristol-based network that effectively killed off the Big East as we once knew it. Instead, Fox, in its pursuit of becoming the main competitor to ESPN in US sports television, ended up pulling the trigger. Consider two critical moves:
(1) Big Ten expands with Maryland and Rutgers – When the Big Ten added Maryland from the ACC and Rutgers from the Big East, Jim Delany wasn’t looking to aid its first tier national TV slate that’s being shown on the Disney networks of ABC and ESPN (unlike the addition of Nebraska in 2010). Instead, the main beneficiary from this expansion was Fox, which is 51% owner of the Big Ten Network (BTN), since it now has an argument that the network should be carried on basic cable in the New York City and Washington, DC markets. If anything, this move was terrible for ESPN since it makes Fox/BTN much stronger on the East Coast and took away schools from the two main conferences – the ACC and Big East – in which the Worldwide Leader owns all tiers of conference multimedia rights. Without Fox and the BTN, the Big Ten doesn’t take Rutgers directly from the Big East or indirectly causing Louisville to defect (since the ACC replaced Maryland with the Cardinals). The Big East still had the ability to survive as a viable football conference with Louisville and Rutgers in the fold, but once they were gone, Boise State (and subsequently San Diego State) didn’t believe that they would receive enough TV money to justify being complete western geographic outliers.
(2) Catholic 7 leave the Big East… because Fox convinced them to do so – A few weeks after the Rutgers and Louisville defections, the 7 remaining Catholic non-football schools (DePaul, Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Providence and Marquette) decided to split off from the Big East’s football members in order to form a new league (hereinafter called the “Catholic 7”). Multiple reports from both ESPN (including the McMurphy/Katz report linked above) and Sports Illustrated have stated that Fox is the leading suitor for the rights to the new Catholic 7 league with offers of between $30 million and $40 million per year depending upon whether it has 10 or 12 schools. That represents the Catholic 7 making around $3 million per year for basketball rights, which is more than the NBC offer to the Big East of $2 million per year for both basketball and football.
Do you see what occurred here if this is true? Fox approached the Catholic 7 before they split off, which means it’s not so crazy to believe that Fox wanted them to split off. So, if you believe that Fox is overpaying for the Catholic 7, then you might be right. However, the point is that Fox needed to overpay the Catholic 7 in order to serve as a catalyst for them to split off. If Fox just merely offered “fair market value” to the Catholic 7, then they likely would have stayed in the hybrid. (Anyone that thought that the Catholic 7 would have split off without the knowledge that they’d be getting paid more compared to staying in the hybrid Big East isn’t thinking straight.) There needed to be an extraordinary financial windfall from Fox in order for the Catholic 7 to take the extraordinary step of splitting off from the Big East football schools. As a result, it’s almost pointless to try to compare the on-the-court basketball quality of the Catholic 7 versus the New Big East. The amounts that are being offered by Fox to the Catholic 7 reflect a “blood money” premium offer that they couldn’t refuse, whereas the Big East isn’t going to garner any premium at all and will be subject to the “normal” market forces in play.
That leads to a corresponding question: why would Fox do this? Why would it want to pay this much for the Catholic 7 instead of, say, simply bidding for the entire hybrid Big East? Well, let’s take a step back and examine what Fox actually needs in terms of sports content. The reality is that Fox (and when I say “Fox”, I really mean its new cable networks Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2 as opposed to over-the-air Fox) already has a fairly full sports slate in the fall with Major League Baseball, NASCAR, Pac-12 football and Big 12 football rights. As a result, they don’t have much of a need for other college football games. The biggest programming gap that Fox has right now is during the winter, where its cable networks are pretty much wide open outside of some Pac-12 basketball rights.
I’ll put on my own tinfoil hat here, where my semi-educated guess is that Fox: (a) no longer had much interest in the New Big East football product after Rutgers and Louisville left, (b) still had interest in the Big East’s basketball product in order to provide winter programming and (c) didn’t want to get into a bidding war with NBC and/or ESPN to buy a Big East package for both basketball and football when all it really wanted was basketball. As a result, Fox went straight to the Catholic 7 (who represented most of the schools that they wanted to showcase for basketball, anyway) and offered up enough money that would simultaneously be a financial boon to those schools while allowing the cable network operation to save money compared to a competitive bidding situation for the all-sports hybrid Big East rights. It’s the very essence of a “win-win” for both the Catholic 7 and Fox here.
Meanwhile, the Big East has been left with only one legit suitor with NBC since Fox obviously has no interest (seeing that it made an offer to the Catholic 7 to split up the league), CBS has little funding for its fledgling CBS Sports Network and ESPN has had lukewarm feelings toward the league. Without a bidding war, the already thrifty Comcast/NBC organization zero incentive to drive up the price of the Big East on its own, so this very low offer reflects that reality. Either NBC takes the Big East rights or ESPN comes in to match it with its right of first of refusal (which the McMurphy/Katz article notes that the Worldwide Leader has), but there’s no other potential fountain of cash out there.
Sometimes, it’s not quite as simple as saying “UConn is a much better basketball program than DePaul, therefore, UConn should get paid more than DePaul”. Timing matters in conference realignment and TV contracts, so in this case, Fox had a specific need in a situation where the Catholic 7 was in the right place at the right time. Granted, that’s no consolation for the fans of schools that are left in the Big East and who may need to start hanging up pictures of Rupert Murdoch on their dartboards instead of Mickey Mouse.
It’s been a wacky week in sports: a power outage at the Super Bowl, moms stealing national letters of intent, a previously listless Illinois team taking down #1 Indiana (I-L-L!) and the Big Ten’s next expansion target appears to be… Johns Hopkins University. Let’s get to some conference realignment talk:
(1) Big Ten Expansion and Johns Hopkins – In a somewhat surprising bit of news, the Big Ten is apparently targeting Johns Hopkins as an associate member for lacrosse. Adding Johns Hopkins on top of Rutgers and Maryland would give the Big Ten the minimum number of teams for both men’s and women’s lacrosse (6) to garner an automatic NCAA Tournament bid. This has brought up the question as to whether the Big Ten would consider other associate members, such as adding Notre Dame or Boston University for hockey or all of the Big West to improve baseball. I don’t see that happening, though. From my vantage point, Johns Hopkins is about as unique of a situation as it gets since (a) as noted, its addition is the difference between the Big Ten having an NCAA auto-bid lacrosse league versus having none at all, (b) men’s and women’s lacrosse are the only sports that Johns Hopkins plays at the Division I level (all of its other sports are in Division III), so they would technically be an “all-sports” member for the Big Ten since it is providing “all” of the sports in which the conference sponsors a league (unlike Notre Dame or BU that obviously play at the Division I level in other sports), (c) Johns Hopkins happens to be an elite lacrosse power, so their combination with Maryland would instantly make the Big Ten into a top notch league in that sport and (d) in terms of academics and research funding power, Johns Hopkins is about as top notch as you can get outside of the Ivy League, which means that they can provide further gravitas to the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which is the academic research consortium of the Big Ten and the University of Chicago. All of those factors make Johns Hopkins into a unique expansion target for the Big Ten that I don’t believe would apply to other potential associate members.*
(* Note that the College Crosse blog has a fairly skeptical view of the Johns Hopkins/Big Ten marriage occurring because it believes that Johns Hopkins holds the leverage here. That’s a pretty fascinating lacrosse-centric viewpoint where there is actually a bizarro world where Jim Delany could be considered to be completely powerless while much of the rest of the conference realignment universe believes that he can bring the likes of North Carolina and Florida State to their knees. All I know is this: whatever ESPNU might be paying Johns Hopkins for lacrosse games probably wouldn’t cover a day’s catering bill at the Big Ten Network. If Johns Hopkins turns down a Big Ten offer, it certainly won’t be because of TV money or exposure. The College Crosse analysis is focused upon the on-the-field element and concludes that the Big Ten supposedly doesn’t offer Johns Hopkins anything worthwhile, but it’s unlikely that the school is examining this conference option for any competitive reason. Instead, it’s about an possible offer to be part of the most powerful conference and brand in college athletics on the basis of a single sport that isn’t football or basketball along with being the only school that the league has ever granted an associate membership to. That’s an invitation that the vast majority of university presidents and athletic directors in this country would kill for. We’ll see how Johns Hopkins approaches this going forward.)
Now, what does the prospect of adding Johns Hopkins mean for Big Ten expansion overall? One school of thought is that adding Johns Hopkins and a Big Ten lacrosse league would make it more palatable for Virginia and North Carolina to consider the Big Ten (as they have powerhouse lacrosse programs that have greater influence on campus than their revenue might indicate). The other viewpoint is the flip side, where the Big Ten wouldn’t be considering the addition of Johns Hopkins at all as an associate member if it believed a larger expansion that included UVA and/or UNC was imminent. I tend to favor the latter point of view. As much as I see the benefits listed above with adding JHU for lacrosse, I highly doubt it would be happening if the Big Ten thought that more full members with their own lacrosse members would be joining at any point in the near future. That doesn’t mean that UVA or UNC won’t ever join the Big Ten, but the talk about Johns Hopkins is a bit of a canary in the coal mine on the overall status of conference realignment as of now.
(2) Potential Catholic 7 Fallout – We’ve spent most of our time here lately focused on the large potential realignment earthquakes with the power football conferences along with analyzing who might the 7 Catholic schools splitting from the Big East (AKA the “Catholic 7” or “C7”) might add to their new basketball-centric league. However, we haven’t really examined the potential fallout from the formation of the new C7 league, which may very well affect every single Division I basketball conference that doesn’t sponsor FBS football. While I’m an ACC Armageddon skeptic, there should be little question that the basketball conference landscape is going to get smashed as soon as the C7 announces who they’re adding (and that could happen any day at this point).
The C7 still appears to have Xavier and Butler as locks to be additions with some combination of 3 of Creighton, Dayton, St. Louis and VCU. (My semi-educated guess is that VCU will end up being left out as a result of being a lack of an institutional fit.) In any scenario, the Atlantic 10 is going to end up losing a crippling chunk of top programs, while the Missouri Valley Conference is at risk of losing its top breadwinner, as well. Will the A-10 end up attempting to raid the MVC or vice versa? Could both the A-10 and MVC start fighting over programs from the Horizon League (e.g. Loyola and/or my parents’ alma mater of UIC in the Chicago market)? Will the Colonial Athletic Association get poached by the A-10 again (e.g. George Mason and/or Northeastern)? Who would the Horizon and CAA end up raiding for replacements? Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) just announced today that it is leaving the relatively geographically friendly Summit League for the spread out WAC that has been life support, which makes no sense on paper… unless they believe that the Summit will get picked apart after the C7 makes their move. The number of permutations is endless, so it’s tough to even wrap my mind around how all of these conferences are going to react to the C7’s final decision. It’s particularly curious that there really isn’t any indication whatsoever as to who the Atlantic 10 would be interested in when they inevitably need to backfill their membership (assuming that they even want to stay as a 14-school conference), so it’s difficult to reasonably predict who will be moving despite the fact that there will likely be dozens of schools shifting leagues. I’m going to give this some more thought, but I’d be interested to see what you (as the readers of this blog) believe will happen since (a) it’s uncharted territory and (b) much more imminent compared to FBS power conference moves as of now.
(3) My Vote for the Name of the C7 League: “The Classic East” – Assuming that the C7 won’t be able to keep the Big East brand name for their new league (which is still an item that’s up for negotiation), there have been a number of religiously-related names suggested out there, such as “The Vatican League” or “The Big Priest”. However, I came across a suggestion from a discussion on VUhoops that I believe is brilliant: “The Classic East”. It’s a name that gives the C7 league a new and separate identity yet still evokes the tradition and history of what the old Big East used to be. Think of how the Coca-Cola Company backtracked on its “New Coke” disaster and brought back its original cola formula as “Coca-Cola Classic”. Anyway, that’s my vote if the Big East name stays with the football schools.
Enjoy the weekend and let’s hope the Illini can keep building upon tonight’s massive win!
Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby came out of a meeting with his conference’s athletic directors on Monday with some standard general non-news about any possible expansion plans. However, he reinforced some reports that the Big 12 was evaluating alliances with different conferences, including the ACC. Why would the Big 12 openly suggest an alliance with a conference that many believe would be the primary target for a raid?
People that relish in ACC Armageddon rumors point out that proposed alliances have led to raids in the past, such as the old Big 8 and Southwest Conference discussing that scenario (and the Big 8 subsequently taking Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor from the SWC) and the Big East and ACC exploring the same (leading to the ACC in a decade-long bludgeoning of the Big East). The ACC Armageddonistas surmise that the Big 12 is following the same playbook of luring Jim Swofford to hand over sensitive conference information in “alliance talks” and then stab them in the back in a few months with a raid. Of course, that assumes that ACC schools want to join the Big 12.
Certainly, there’s a chance that the leadership of the Big 12 is leveraging the prospect of an alliance publicly while engaging on a reconnaissance mission behind closed doors to poach the likes of Florida State or Clemson. More likely, though, is that the Big 12 can’t expand with anyone that they deem worth having (according to Bowlsby, schools that would be worth in excess of $26.2 million per year each in additional revenue) on their own. The Big 12 is in a position where it can’t be “proactive” – a school such as Florida State isn’t going to be open to the Big 12’s overtures without the Big Ten and SEC first (a) confirming that neither wants to invite the Seminoles themselves and (b) raiding other ACC members to the point where staying in the league would be unpalatable.
As a result, the Big 12 can’t be the first mover here no matter how much their fans may want them to be. That’s why the news out of that conference over the past month has been about alliances with the ACC and finding ways to change NCAA rules so that they can hold a conference championship game with only 10 teams. The University of Texas might have leverage with other conferences as an individual school, but the Big 12 as an overall entity has much less leverage than what many conference realignment observers seem to believe.
The dilemma is that the ACC schools that the Big Ten and SEC most likely want in expansion happen to be the ones that are least likely to move. I’m often accused of having Big Ten bias as an Illinois alum (by the way, the least 3 weeks of the basketball season have been excruciating), but I’ve been pretty consistent over the past couple of years in stating that Jim Delany doesn’t have complete poaching power over everyone in the ACC. Virginia and North Carolina are the real potential prizes for the Big Ten and it’s probably the same for the SEC. (Football-focused fans often see Virginia Tech and North Carolina State as the most likely targets for the SEC out of the current ACC membership, but make no mistake that UNC and UVA are ultimately the most valuable additions as old money academically elite flagship institutions.) The problem is that neither UNC nor UVA really fit well in either the Big Ten or SEC – they are too Southern to be really desire being in the Northern-based Big Ten and too wine-and-cheese to enjoy being in the SEC. There is also a large split between the academically-minded leaders of these institutions that would prefer the Big Ten while T-shirt fans would want the SEC. The ACC provides the balance of being Southern and the perception of having an academically-oriented league (never mind the fake grades for athletes in Chapel Hill) that schools can’t find anywhere else, which will make it very hard for either UNC or UVA to leave. (Count Georgia Tech and even Florida State in that equation, too.) In essence, UNC and UVA are to the ACC what Texas and Oklahoma are to the Big 12: the league lives as long as both of those are schools are still there (and those schools know it).
So, that’s where I see the threats of the ACC becoming completely coming apart end up failing. UNC, in particular, has Texas-esque influence (even if it’s more perceived than real) in the ACC, and the actions of Deloss Dodds and the Longhorns have shown that power and big dog status can be even more important as making the most TV money from a conference. (Notre Dame feels the same way.) As a result, the thought that UNC and UVA are going to bolt because they are scared that the ACC will collapse doesn’t hold water with me. Those 2 schools can keep the ACC together alone and they have enough powerful alums with massive pocketbooks and politicians backing them where getting more TV revenue isn’t going to carry the same weight with them as it did with Maryland.
Now, once again, I can never say never in conference realignment. Maybe Jim Delany’s projected revenue figures for a Big 16 or Big 18 are so outrageous that he can put the smackdown on the ACC more than I’m giving the Big Ten credit for. Maybe Mike Slive is freaked out enough about the thought of either the Big Ten or Big 12 getting into the state of Florida by adding Florida State that the SEC would take the Noles in an act of self-defense. In either event, it’s really up to the Big Ten or SEC to make a move. The Big 12 would then have to hope that some other valuable pieces would fall their way. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but the speculation will continue.
Chip Brown from Orangebloods.com has some new nuggets indicating that the Big 12 athletic directors want to talk about expansion (with Texas seemingly being reluctant) and that Florida State could be a target. There’s really not too much new other than there will be an actual forum for Big 12 officials to discuss conference realignment issues next week (so we may get some concrete news at that point) and that the conference has moved on from its infatuation with Notre Dame. It seems obvious that the Big 12 would want Florida State. That’s in the “No s**t, Sherlock” category of revelations to me. What’s still unclear is whether Florida State wants anything to do with the Big 12. One of Brown’s Big 12 sources said himself, “If it doesn’t make sense to Florida State, then this is all a moot point.” As I said in my last post, ACC schools like their conference as a whole in terms of geography, academics, institutional fit and demographics, but don’t really like their TV contract. The Big 12 is the flip side, where those schools (other than Texas) don’t really like their conference (as evidenced by the fact that every school other than Texas that had the ability to leave for another conference on its own chose to do so), yet are happy with their new TV contract. Maryland had a tough time leaving the ACC for the Big Ten even though it was an exponentially easier decision in terms of financial gain, geography, academics and institutional fit than any potential ACC-to-Big 12 move.
That being said, I’ve learned well enough to never say never in conference realignment. Florida State might indeed be looking around and that more than qualifies as a potential major movement. What I’d like to see, though, is for the reporters covering conference realignment that are going to follow up on this Chip Brown story to ask their sources from the Big Ten, SEC, ACC and/or Big 12 some questions that seemed to get glossed over as a result of preexisting assumptions that may or may not be true:
(1) Are the reported rules that new Big Ten schools must be AAU members and new SEC schools must be in a state outside of the current conference footprint truly hard-and-fast rules? – We often hear that the Big Ten wants to only consider expansion candidates that are members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), which is a group of top level research institutions. However, we know that the Big Ten is clearly willing to make an exception for non-AAU member Notre Dame. We also know that while Nebraska was an AAU member when it was added by the Big Ten in 2010, that school was removed from that organization less than a year later. The Big Ten members knew full well at the time of conference expansion in 2010 that Nebraska was at risk of losing its AAU status and, in fact, Michigan and Wisconsin ended up voting to remove NU from the AAU (and those 2 votes swinging the other way would have kept them in the group).
While I believe that the Big Ten would want an AAU member in 99% of the circumstances, Notre Dame is in that 1% (and Nebraska was added with the knowledge of a strong possibility of them ending up in that tiny minority, too). As a result, the question needs to be asked as to whether a school such as Florida State would be in that 1%, as well. There is one word that Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany has said more than any other during the past 3 years of conference realignment discussions: demographics. Well, there are demographics for normal expansion candidates, and then there are DEMOGRAPHICS… and a school that can deliver the entire state of Florida provides the latter. The Big Ten may very well not want anything to do with Florida State (which would be a grave mistake, in my humble opinion), but I hope that reporters on the ground don’t just assume that the lack of AAU status for that school automatically nixes their candidacy.
Likewise, a number of people have advanced the argument that the SEC has a “gentleman’s agreement” among its members that it will not add a school in the same state as a current SEC member without such affected member’s approval. That is, the SEC won’t add Florida State unless Florida consents to it. However, that’s much easier to say in a vacuum when there’s nationwide conference stability. It’s a bit different if a conference that has the flagship school of Texas wants to combine it with a marquee school directly in your top football recruiting territory (right after you’ve established your own conference as the elite football league with beachheads in both Florida and Texas) or, even worse, a league with the financial, television and academic power of the Big Ten decides that it has a desire to follow its Midwestern snowbird alums into Florida. The SEC has been willing to coexist with the ACC in the state of Florida and several other Southern areas for many years, but I’m not sure if they’d be that willing to let the Big Ten or the University of Texas combine their respective powers with Florida State.
Big Ten people such as Barry Alvarez have gone on the record that the conference adding Maryland and Rutgers was more of a defensive move than a proactive one. They saw that the ACC was moving to lock up the entire Eastern seaboard and could possibly position itself to be attractive to Penn State in the near future, so Jim Delany went and split the heart of the ACC up by convincing Maryland to jump (with Rutgers willing to do anything to get off of the Big East dumpster fire) before the ACC regained its strength in the conference pecking order. (I’ve long said that if all of the conferences could negotiate their TV deals at the same time today, the ACC would be #3 behind the SEC and Big Ten. The ACC is behind the Pac-12 and Big 12 in terms of TV money solely because of timing, where the ACC signed its deal before the current sports TV rights boom while the Pac-12 and Big 12 simply lucked into getting to go to the open market at a later date.) Similarly, the SEC wouldn’t be keen on a Big Ten footprint that stretches from the New York City area down to Florida (if the Big Ten were to add schools in between like UVA, UNC and Georgia Tech) or a Big 12 that neutralizes the Texas/Florida combo advantage that the SEC gained when it added Texas A&M. The SEC might need to play defense just like the Big Ten did and bring in Florida State (which isn’t exactly being forced to take in a football leper) to keep stronger invaders out.
Bottom line for conference realignment reporters out there reading: don’t assume that the Big Ten and SEC are just going to sit on the sidelines regarding Florida State and let the Big 12 walk off with them.
(2) If numerous ACC schools want to leave and are awaiting the outcome of the conference’s lawsuit against Maryland, why did they join in that lawsuit in the first place? – Another common argument that we are seeing is that ACC schools are waiting to see whether the conference’s $50 million exit fee imposed against Maryland will be upheld in court. If that exit fee gets struck down or reduced significantly, then it would supposedly be open season by the Big Ten, SEC and Big 12 in terms of raiding the ACC. This begs a simple question: if so many ACC schools truly want to get out yet are concerned about the exit fee, why are they spending craploads in legal expenses defending that exit fee?
It’s one thing if the projected conference realignment scenario resulted in a single school joining a lawsuit and then bolting shortly thereafter. That’s what Virginia Tech did in joining the Big East’s original lawsuit against the ACC in 2003 and then fleeing to the ACC itself when the Virginia legislature forced UVA to give the Hokies a lifeline. However, the line of thinking regarding the ACC seems to be more of an “opening of the floodgates” variety where multiple schools would start bailing. Having several schools going through the motions advancing a lawsuit that they privately want to fail isn’t exactly the best use of limited time, resources and money on their part.
(3) If UVA, UNC and Georgia Tech spurned overtures from the Big Ten (as Chip Brown reported), why would at least one of them (Georgia Tech) supposedly be interested in the Big 12? – According to the Chip Brown story, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia Tech all did not have interest in the Big Ten “for now”. However, in Brown’s words, for the Big 12 to have a realistic chance with Florida State, the conference would need to add “as many regional partners as possible”. At the very least, it would seem that Georgia Tech would have to be one of those regional partners. So, are we to believe that Georgia Tech would actually prefer not joining UVA and UNC in the Big Ten and move over to the Big 12 instead with, say, Florida State, Clemson and 1 or more other random ACC schools? I guess stranger things have happened, but that doesn’t pass the smell test with me.
(4) If the Big 12 can’t add any ACC schools, who else would they be willing to add (if anyone at all)? – Going back to my comment in the opening paragraph to this post, it’s pointless to ask a Big 12 source about whether his/her conference would be interested in adding Florida State. Of course they would! What’s more instructive is what the Big 12 willing to do in the event (and I would characterize it as the likely event) that Florida State and other ACC schools don’t want to join. Is some combination of Cincinnati, UConn and/or BYU worth it for the Big 12 to expand for? Are there less obvious options (e.g. Boise State, UNLV, San Diego State) that could be on the table? Alternatively, would the Big 12 simply shut down all expansion talk completely if it can’t poach from the ACC? It’s an easy question to ask whether a conference is willing to expand for a sexy name – that’s not news. What’s tougher to gauge is what the expansion plans would be (if any) when those sexy names aren’t coming.
What I hope is that the conversation is less about what the Big 12 wants (which we know) and more about why the Big 12 should be able to get what it wants beyond simply offering a larger amount of TV money (even when simply offering a larger amount of TV money hasn’t worked with the Big Ten and SEC in luring ACC targets). Maybe the Big 12 can pull off a stunner and pick off a prize like Florida State, but believe it or not, conference realignment at the power conference level is more complex than saying that everyone is trying to get into Conference A just because it’s making more money than Conference B.
As the college football season has come to an end with Alabama and the SEC triumphant once again and basketball season in full swing, let’s take stock of the conference realignment landscape:
(1) Is the Big Ten expanding to 16 or 18 (or more) and if so, when? – Teddy Greenstein of the Chicago Tribune recently noted that there are some within the Big Ten that believe that the conference won’t stop expanding until it gets to 18 schools. That being said, I’m not someone that believes that further Big Ten expansion is imminent. Sure, there are schools that the Big Ten seem to be more than willing to add to create a legit superconference (e.g. Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia Tech and, of course, Notre Dame), but I continue to believe that there isn’t going to be some type of impending exodus from the ACC. Look back at how much of a sales job the Big Ten needed to procure Maryland, which is a school in a state contiguous to the current Big Ten footprint, has relatively weak conference rivalries (Terps fans may care about Duke and UNC, but it’s not reciprocated), has turned into a Northern school from a cultural perspective and clearly needed more athletic department money. From my vantage point, the members of the ACC still like the league even if they’re wary about the TV contract (whereas the Big 12 is the opposite where everyone outside of Texas really isn’t a huge fan of the league per se but are happy about the latest TV deal). Are the Big Ten and SEC stronger than the ACC? Absolutely. However, that doesn’t automatically mean that the ACC is a sitting duck that’s about to get picked apart.
Let’s put it this way: if the Big Ten really thought that it could obtain all of the ACC schools that I’ve seen rumored that the conference wants to add in such a quick manner (e.g. within the next year), then I highly doubt that Jim Delany would have granted an invite to Rutgers. That’s not a knock on Rutgers and what it can bring to the table in the new Big Ten setup (the school makes sense as an addition for various reasons, not the least of which is a presence in the New York City metro area), but UVA, UNC, Georgia Tech and probably Duke (yes, Duke, and yes, I need to take a shower after saying that) would have all been ahead of the Scarlet Knights on the pecking order. Convincing Maryland to head to the Big Ten was tough enough and that’s nothing compared to persuading truly Southern schools such as UVA and UNC to come along (and by the same token, the SEC isn’t going to be as attractive to those same schools as it was to Texas A&M and Missouri).
As a Big Ten guy, I personally see a ton of benefits for the conference if it raids the ACC further. From an objective standpoint, though, I don’t see that happening soon. The threat of the Big Ten being on the prowl probably gives the conference more power than it does in terms of actually striking. I know this much: the Big Ten will wait for who it really wants at this point. They’re not going to force anything other than a 100% fit and to me, that would likely need to be some combo of UVA, UNC, Georgia Tech and/or Notre Dame (although I’d personally want to see Florida State become a prime target). That could take awhile to come to fruition, so I believe we can put the Superconference Armageddon scenarios away for the time being as realistic (even though they’re so much fun to talk about as hypotheticals).
(2) What are the Big Ten divisions going to look like? – Greenstein’s report also intimated that the Big Ten was looking at an East/West split for divisions with the possibility of putting Northwestern in the East due to its alumni contingents in the New York and Washington, DC regions. However, the word out of Northwestern is that they would prefer to stay in the West with its closer rivals such as Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin along with enjoying a massive influx of Nebraska fans buying up tickets in Evanston every other year.
From what I’ve seen, the divisional alignment that I had proposed a couple of weeks ago with Michigan State in the West and both Indiana and Purdue in the East and every school having a protected cross division rival won’t come to fruition. If Northwestern is in the West (and I’ll be honest as an Illinois fan that I’d personally be pretty pissed if Northwestern ends up in the East on top of Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State), then it would seem that Indiana would make more sense as the Hoosier State rep in the East (look at this Wall Street Journal article from a few years ago about how many East Coast students have been invading Bloomington lately) while Purdue would head to the West. That would mean the East would have Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers, Maryland, Michigan State and Indiana, while the West would have Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Northwestern, Illinois and Purdue. In that event, I would hope that the Big Ten assigns Indiana-Purdue as the only protected cross division rivalry while everyone else goes on a regular rotation. This would allow the West schools to continue playing Michigan and Ohio State more often, especially if the Big Ten increases its conference schedule to 9 games. The Pac-12 did the right thing by only making the games between the various California-based members into annual cross division games and not trying to force any unnatural pairings. Hopefully, the Big Ten has the good sense to do the same.
(3) What’s going on with the Big East/Mountain West skirmish? – As of now, the conference realignment action is really happening outside of the scope of the five power conferences (Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12, ACC and Big 12). The latest cog in the Gang of Five wheel is San Diego State, which is faced with a decision of whether to “go back” to the Mountain West Conference (which they are still a member of until July 1st) or “stay” with the Big East as football-only member (which they have committed to join on that date) and the Big West for basketball and Olympic sports. I don’t envy the decision that has to be made by the Aztecs since neither option is exactly optimal – it’s either being in the MWC, which has a new TV deal structure that will largely benefit Boise State, or the Big East whose membership is in flux and SDSU will almost certainly be the lone extreme geographic outlier.
Even though there’s a case to be made that San Diego State would make more football TV money in the Big East and actually reduce their Olympics sports travel costs in the Big West, I believe that the Aztecs will ultimately stick with the MWC. It comes down to a simple question: would San Diego State have chosen to join the Big East one year ago if it knew how the league would look today? In my opinion, it would be an emphatic “No”, as evidenced by schools in smaller markets such as UNLV and Fresno State having since rejected overtures from the Big East. It would have been one thing if the Big East still had AQ status (or the equivalent of it in the new postseason system) or could reasonably procure an outsized TV contract compared to the MWC (which is what Big East commissioner Mike Aresco has been trying to convince people will be coming down the pike even though no one outside of Big East partisans believes him), but being the sole West Coast team in a league that isn’t receiving favored treatment anymore and looks like it won’t be adding anyone else within 1500 miles of your school (which we’ll get to in a moment) is a rough thing for any university president or athletic director to sign up for.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the Big East is a bad choice for everyone. Houston and SMU, who have been rumored to be targets of the MWC, still make a lot more sense in the Big East. At worst, those schools will be in a better version of the Conference USA that they will be leaving, so the MWC doesn’t provide much upside comparatively. As much as some observers seem to want to watch conferences just pack it in and completely die off, the Big East (or whatever it will be called in the future, which is a separate issue) can still survive as an entity with the pieces that it still has left. Tulsa appears to be a Big East expansion target, which would be a solid addition for its Southwestern flank. UMass is also out there as a classic “university presidents might love it and fans will hate it” option – they have a nascent and struggling FBS program yet offer a public flagship university in the Northeast that plays football at that level (which otherwise don’t exist at all outside of the 5 power conferences plus UConn). Several other schools from Conference USA (e.g. Southern Mississippi) and the MAC (e.g. Northern Illinois) might also get a look, but my feeling is that Tulsa and UMass are the frontrunners to get the Big East up to 12 football members (assuming that San Diego State stays in the MWC) as soon as possible. The league would then do everything it can to keep Navy on board as an addition for 2015 and, if Mike Aresco is successful in doing so, would target one more school on top of that to get to 14 schools for that season.
(4) What is the TV Contract and Expansion Status for the “Catholic 7”? – The Catholic 7 defectors from the Big East (DePaul, St. John’s, Marquette, Georgetown, Seton Hall, Villanova and Providence) have upended the “football means everything and basketball means nothing” axiom of conference realignment. According to Darren Rovell of ESPN. com, Fox has offered $500 million over 12 years for the Catholic 7, with the assumption that the group adds 5 more schools to get up to 12 members. That figure will likely be larger than what the football playing schools in the Big East will receive for both football and basketball. I’ve said many times on this blog that football in and of itself isn’t what’s valuable, but rather quality content. In this case, the Catholic 7 are offering quality content in their sphere of non-FBS basketball schools with traditional schools in large urban markets. The problem with so many conferences is that they’re trying to apply the way that the Big Ten and SEC make money via football when they don’t have the assets to do it properly. It would be akin to a mom-and-pop corner store trying to run a business like Wal-Mart or Target without the requisite supply chain. Not every conference can be all things to all people in the manner of the Big Ten and SEC, so the Catholic 7 was smart enough to realize (or at least make the right decision when backed into a corner) that they can exploit a lucrative niche. They became the Trader Joe’s of college conferences as opposed to Wal-Mart, if you will. Instead of being subject to the whims of raids from the 5 more powerful football conferences as members of the hybrid Big East, the Catholic 7 have positioned themselves as arguably the most powerful non-FBS sports conference out there. The non-FBS market might be much smaller than the FBS market as a whole, but there’s something to be said to being #1 in the former with complete control of your destiny as opposed to #6 (or even #7) in the latter without any buying power.
With the Fox offer apparently contingent upon the Catholic 7 adding 5 schools, that brings into question who would be the expansion candidates. Xavier and Butler have been continuously named by several separate outlets as locks, so that takes up the first two spots. The next 2 most likely targets appear to be Dayton (great fan base) and Creighton (ditto with a top notch on-the-court program right now on top of that). All 4 of those schools should feel fairly comfortable about getting into the new league with the Catholic 7 (which may very well still end up with the Big East brand name when all is said and done) with this news about Fox wanting a 12-team league. That leaves the last spot that appears to be a battle between St. Louis and Virginia Commonwealth.
If I were running the Catholic 7, I’d definitely recommend SLU as school #12. From my vantage point, this is an opportunity for this group of schools to create a conference with branding that goes beyond athletics with like-minded institutions. Essentially, the new league can be to urban undergraduate-focused private schools in the Midwest and East Coast what the Big Ten is to large research institutions in the same region. In that regard, SLU is a perfect institutional fit with the Catholic 7 and the 4 other schools mentioned. SLU also has excellent basketball facilities and a solid history in the sport, so it’s not as if though this would be a poor on-the-court move.
VCU, on the other hand, would purely be a basketball resume addition. Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach, as this new league is going to need top notch hoops teams on-the-court to gain the requisite NCAA Tournament credits to pay the bills. At the same time, VCU would be an Eastern-based addition to balance out all of the other probable expansion candidates that are located in the Midwest. However, I’m wary about VCU being an addition based on short-term results as opposed to long-term institutional fit. What surprises me is that there has been zero buzz about the Catholic 7 looking at Richmond, which has a solid basketball resume itself and is a better institutional fit as a private liberal arts school located in the same market as VCU.
It’s not an accident that SLU was added by the Atlantic 10 immediately after Conference USA stopped its hybrid model after the Big East raids of 2003, while VCU and Butler were only invited this year. SLU would be a long-term move in a solid TV market that’s a great institutional fit and makes geographic sense assuming that the Catholic 7 wants to add Creighton. I have all of the respect in the world for VCU as a basketball program, but SLU would be best for the new Catholic 7 league for the long run.
In my observations of conference realignment over the past several years, I’ve actually believed that the various oft-maligned leaders of the Big East have often received a bad rap. The frequent criticism that the basketball side ran the Big East rang hollow to me since having great basketball while improving football are not mutually exclusive, meaning that it made no sense to dilute what was legitimately an elite basketball conference just to add mediocre football bodies. At the same time, there was never going to be a “proactive” move that would have prevented any Big East member from accepting an invite from the ACC, Big 12 or Big Ten. Adding the likes of Houston, SMU, East Carolina, Memphis and Tulane earlier was never going to change the minds of Syracuse, Pitt, West Virginia, Notre Dame, Louisville and Rutgers when they got the opportunity to find different homes. No one can really blame any Big East leader for those schools leaving.
The last two defections (Rutgers to the Big Ten and Louisville to the ACC), though, should not have caused an exodus that has seen the non-football “Catholic 7” group (Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Providence, DePaul and Marquette) leave the league that several of them founded and Boise State decide to never even join as a football-only member (with San Diego State likely leaving right behind them). Just because UConn and Cincinnati are doing everything that they can to leave the Big East didn’t have to mean that this league needed to split apart entirely. Big East commissioner Mike Aresco, who came into the office this past summer with great fanfare and accolades from college sports industry veterans, has made a number of missteps that can’t be simply blamed on Rutgers and Louisville leaving.
Back in the heady days of October, the spin coming out of the Big East was that their new TV deal would be well in excess of $10 million per all-sports school and could even approach ACC-level figures. Aresco, being a long-time TV industry executive with CBS Sports and ESPN, seemed to have some street cred on the issue. However, the problem with all of the Big East valuations was that they were based on external broad-based market factors, such as new ESPN competitors (e.g. NBC Sports Network, Fox Sports One, etc.) needing the magic word of “inventory” and the overall rise in TV sports rights, as opposed to anything at all with the intrinsic value of the Big East itself. The Big East tricked themselves (and many of their fans) into believing that they could turn down whatever ESPN was offering during an exclusive negotiating window period that ended on October 31st simply because they were selling a new TV contract in a rising market. Even if Rutgers and Louisville had never left the Big East (as those defections occurred after the ESPN window expired), it was playing with fire. There was never a guarantee that notoriously cheap Comcast was going to step up with a large offer on behalf of NBC Sports Network while Fox seemed to be more focused on other college conferences. This isn’t just 20/20 hindsight from my viewpoint – the Big East got cocky about their TV valuation back in the fall and set themselves up to get burned on a number of levels irrespective of the actions of the Big Ten and ACC.
That cockiness about the potential TV deal led the Big East down a path where they mistakenly thought that they could convince BYU to join the league as a football-only member. As I’ve stated several times before, BYU’s decision to become an independent was much more about obtaining exposure in and of itself with its ESPN contract and the leveraging of BYUtv than TV money itself. However, reports out of the Big East repeatedly indicated that they wanted to keep going after BYU in a misguided belief that the conference could throw enough money to get the Cougars to bite. This waste of time with respect to BYU prevented the Big East from moving on to different football-only alternatives for its proposed western flank, such as concentrating more on Air Force or going after other Mountain West members. By the time that it was clear that the TV deal that the Big East was holding out for would never materialize, it was too late to get even Fresno State or UNLV (much less BYU). Without further western members willing to come to the Big East, that forced Boise State to reevaluate its own status and ultimately decide to remain in the Mountain West. Whether or not the Big East should have offered Boise State some favorable TV deal terms in the same vein as the Mountain West did (where Boise State’s home games will be sold as a separate TV deal with financial bonuses to schools for national TV appearances) is irrelevant here. It would never have come to this if the Big East hadn’t overvalued its TV prospects three months ago.
Meanwhile, the Catholic 7 had been witnessing the league that many of them founded start turn completely into Conference USA 2.0 over the past several years. What kept them around up until last month was the prospect of a TV deal driven by the bubble in college football. However, what the Catholic 7 figured out (and something that every single college sports fan that follows conference realignment should take note of) is that football in and of itself is not valuable. Instead, what’s valuable is having the right football teams, and the Big East no longer had them. Thus, hitching their wagon to schools simply because they played football no longer provided extra value to the Catholic 7, which meant there also wasn’t any point to being in an unstable hybrid that was getting picked apart due to football-focused conference realignment. Receiving roughly the same TV money in a league that the Catholic 7 could control without worrying about football while also being an aggressor within its sphere of basketball-focused conference realignment (instead of being a victim) became much more appealing. Of course, that TV calculation by the Catholic 7 would have never happened if the Big East had taken the ESPN offer this past fall since the league would have locked in an amount for the basketball schools that wouldn’t have made it worth it to consider splitting off.
At this point, the Big East mainly has to ensure that schools such as Houston and SMU don’t end up heading over to the Mountain West along with Boise State and presumably San Diego State, as well. Now, I personally don’t believe that the Big East will lose anyone else to the MWC (the Big East still seems to be a better value proposition for the Texas-based schools), but perception of who is weak or strong can change pretty quickly in conference realignment. It’s one thing for the Big East to be losing head-to-head battles with the Big Ten and ACC, yet it’s an entirely different matter when the MWC seems to have more momentum.
Ultimately, the decisions of Boise State and the Catholic 7 indicate that the new Big East TV valuation wasn’t going to be much of an increase (if there was an increase at all) over the Mountain West’s current fairly pedestrian deal and what the Catholic schools could receive in basketball TV money on their own. All of that shows that Aresco turning down ESPN’s offer that would have surely been enough to keep Boise State and the Catholic 7 in the fold was a monumental error. The Big East wanted to believe that it could still be in the power conference conversation or even argue that it was a stronger football league than the ACC. However, they got put back into place quickly by the conference realignment gods with a major assist from the hubris of the Big East leadership.
I have been meaning to post my responses to the Big Ten Network’s conference expansion survey, but so much realignment news (such as the 7 Catholic schools in the Big East deciding to split off) has intervened that I’m only getting a chance to fill it out now. Here are my thoughts:
1. My favorite school is _____.
The University of Illinois, the ultimate drinking school with a football problem.
2. My favorite school is in the _______ Division.
The Leaders Division… I think. Let me Google this.
3. As the conference expands beyond 12 teams, should the new teams be added to an existing division or should new divisions be drawn from scratch?
These need to be blown up like the 2 versions of the Death Star.
4. What do you think of “Legends” and “Leaders” as division names? (Strongly Like to Strongly Dislike.)
Please see the answer to Question #3.
5. Should the B1G change or keep the current division names?
Please see the answer to Question #3.
6. If you think the division names should be changed, what should they be changed to?
Assuming that logic prevails and the Big Ten has something close to a geographical alignment (a very large assumption when dealing with university presidents and athletic directors that have managed to turn what ought to be a simple exercise into a massive internal political debate), it should be East-West or North-South. If an obsessive Big Ten sports fan like me still needs to stop and think about which school is in which division after two years, then the conference made a mistake. The theme, as I argued over and over again back when the Big Ten added Nebraska, should be K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple Stupid.
7. If divisions were to be changed, what criteria should be used to determine them? (Rank by importance Competitive balance, geography, protect traditional rivalries.)
The #1 consideration by far should be to protect traditional rivalries, as those are at the heart of what makes college sports great. Close behind that should be geography, as that is a factor that will never change, whether it’s one year from now or two decades down the road. Competitive balance is honestly a minor factor for me. All programs inevitable go up and down on-the-field over time, so attempting to gerrymander divisions based on historical records virtually always ends up backfiring (see the Leaders Division this past season and numerous occasions with the ACC divisions). The Big Ten made a massive mistake in overweighting what it believed to be competitive balance in constructing the current divisions and I hope that they see the light this time around.
8. How important is it for IN-STATE rivals to be in the same division? (Very important to not important.)
It’s important, but there can be exceptions provided that those rivals are still playing each other annually.
9. How important is it for TRADITIONAL rivals to be in the same division? (Very important to not important.)
As with the answer to Question #8, it’s important, yet workarounds can be accommodated as long as the rivals continue to play each other on an annual basis. The main problem with the way that the Big Ten constructed the Leaders and Legends Divisions is that most of the Big Ten schools have multiple traditional rivals, which means that many of them inherently need to be in the same division in order for the maintenance of those rivalries to work. Wisconsin is getting completely screwed by not getting to play traditional rival Iowa and the Badgers are a natural school to help further integrate Nebraska into the conference. In my opinion, the Wisconsin/Iowa/Minnesota trifecta should have never been split up and Nebraska fits in there as the fourth wheel of that western flank perfectly.
10. Currently, the number of conference games the B1G plays is 8. Should this increase?
Yes, the number of conference games absolutely needs to increase to 9. This is even more important if the Big Ten continues to designate cross-division annual rivalries, where schools would only play their counterparts in the opposite division (excluding designated cross-division rivals) only 2 times in a 12 year period without a 9th conference game. That extra conference game at least turns it into a more tolerable 2 times in a 6 year period cycle (which still isn’t exactly optimal). While every school in the conference wants to maximize home game revenue by playing more MACrifice games, the Big Ten isn’t like the SEC, which has a history of having conference members going very long periods of time without playing each other and doesn’t think much of it. That won’t (or at least shouldn’t) fly in the Big Ten. The fact that the Big Ten had agreed to go to 9 conference games in a 12 school alignment prior to the now-defunct Big Ten/Pac-12 alliance gives me optimism that they’ll do so when it’s even more critical.
11. What is your preference on a B1G Basketball Tourney? (Every team qualifies, or 12 of 14 teams qualify.)
I’m a very large believer that every conference should have all teams qualify for its basketball tournament. Unlike the football conference championship game that only involves 2 teams, the basketball tournament is the one major conference event where the teams, fans and alums from all of the schools can gather together as a shared experience. For those that say that the conference tournament should be about merit, I would reply that leagues should eliminate conferences tournaments all together if people want to be truly merit-based (as the performance over the course of 3 months of regular season games should trump what occurs in 3 days of a conference tournament). Basketball tournaments are purely money-making machines for the power conferences, so you might as well let everyone participate. Plus, there’s the romantic idea that every single school still has one last shot to make it into the NCAA Tournament, which is inherently a more interesting aspect of watching conference tournaments compared to how they’re really just seeding exercises for the teams that already know that they’re going to make it to the Dance.
12. Currently, the B1G has no divisions for basketball. Should this be changed?
I don’t believe that basketball divisions are necessary as long as each school has at least 2 or 3 locked-in annual rivals (e.g. Indiana-Purdue, Michigan-Ohio State, etc.).
13. If yes, why should there be divisions for basketball?
Please see answer to Question #12.
14. If no, why shouldn’t there be divisions for basketball?
Please see answer to Question #12.
15. When people reference “B1G”, do you recognize that to be the Big Ten Conference?
Yes, I do. At first, I wasn’t a large fan of the new Big Ten logo, but that has grown on me (unlike the division names). In the social media context, being able to refer to #B1G on Twitter and have people generally know what that means is extremely useful. That’s not a minor point in today’s world.
16. With 14 teams currently, should the B1G remain the “Big Ten”, or should its name be changed?
It should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be the Big Ten, even if it ends up with 16 schools or more. If the Big Ten didn’t change its name back when it added Penn State over two decades ago, it certainly shouldn’t do it now. There’s way too much name recognition and brand value with the conference name.
17. Do you have any further thoughts on B1G expansion?
Well, I’ve provided my thoughts on Florida State here. Otherwise, I don’t have a preternatural desire to see the Big Ten expand further. The 14 schools that the conference will have going forward fit together well academically and institutionally with geographic continuity across the Northern half of the United States. If there’s a legit football power in a top market such as Florida State available, then I think the Big Ten ought to be aggressive. However, there isn’t an overall need for the conference to expand for the sake of expanding. I’d be perfectly happy with staying at 14 members.
As for how the divisions should actually look, as I’ve stated before, I favor the K.I.S.S. approach. Realistically, I believe that the Big Ten will need the following requirements in any divisional structure at a minimum:
(a) Ohio State and Michigan must play annually – This is pretty obvious.
(b) Ohio State and Penn State must play annually – This might be less obvious to people outside the Big Ten (or even with some fans within the Big Ten), but trust me, this is a non-negotiable game.
(c) Penn State, Rutgers and Maryland must be in the same division – The entire crux of the Big Ten expansion to 14 is to solidify the league’s presence on the East Coast, which effectively mandates that they have to be together.
What’s evident here is that Ohio State and Penn State are really the keys to the new Big Ten divisional alignment. For instance, these parameters mean that there is no way that Ohio State can be in a division opposite of both Michigan and Penn State – the Buckeyes have to be in a division with at least one of those schools. The East Coast bloc of Penn State/Rutgers/Maryland also limits the league’s options. We also have to consider whether the divisions need to split up the four traditional powers (Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and Nebraska) evenly or if 3 of them can be in one division. I personally believe that 3 of them can be in one division provided that the other side has more depth of non-bottom feeders top-to-bottom, but know that others (particularly athletic directors) may disagree with that.
Ultimately, I’m most in favor of going with an East/West split with Michigan going to the East and Michigan State in the West. It would look like the following (with cross-division rivals next to each other and rationale in parentheses):
EAST – WEST
Michigan – Michigan State (in-state rivalry)
Ohio State – Wisconsin (continuation of current Leaders divisional game)
Penn State – Nebraska (continuation of current cross-division king program game)
Indiana – Illinois (two schools in bordering states passing time until basketball season starts)
Purdue – Iowa (continuation of nonsensical cross-division game)
Rutgers – Northwestern (New York City vs. Chicago angle)
Maryland – Minnesota (they pulled the last two straws)
Even though three “King” programs are in the East, I believe that there is still a solid balance of schools with top notch fan bases in the West (Nebraska, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Iowa) to compensate for it. Most other ways of attempting to put two Kings in each division end up with wacky geography or one extremely strong division and the other being very weak. (Yes, I know that I’ve said that I don’t think that competitive balance should matter, but I’m realistic in believing that others believe it’s important.) Now, it’s understandable that the older members of the Big Ten West likely would not be happy only seeing Michigan and Ohio State 2 times every 6 years, so that could be a deal-killer.
The “Inner-Outer” setup that the BTN provided as a choice here is an interesting concept, as it groups the 4 western schools (Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota) with the 3 Eastern schools (Penn State, Rutgers, Maryland) in one division while the 7 other schools in the middle are in the opposite division. It’s terrible in terms of geography and the casual sports fan would look at it and say, “WTF?!”, but it does achieve the goal of preserving every single traditional rivalry as an intra-divisional game with the exception of Ohio State-Penn State. I’m not a fan of the Inner-Outer alignment personally (and most people that I know don’t like it either), yet I certainly wouldn’t put it past the Big Ten presidents and ADs to head down this road.
Classic Music Video of the Week – “12 Days of Christmas” by John Denver and The Muppets
The events of the past week really put back into focus what’s most important in life: friends and family. This video always brings back fond memories of my family popping in a VHS tape of the John Denver Christmas Special with The Muppets every year and my own kids now find The Muppets to be just as hilarious as I did. I hope that all of you and your loved ones have a wonderful holiday.
When I was attending DePaul for law school a decade ago (it makes me feel ancient to say that) and the Blue Demon athletic program was toiling away in Conference USA, the university looked at joining the Big East as an aspirational goal in the same way that Rutgers looked at the Big Ten or Utah looked at the old Pac-10 for many years. The Big East was the home of the schools that DePaul either saw as urban Catholic school peers (such as Vincentian counterpart St. John’s) or academic leaders (Notre Dame and Georgetown). When Conference Realignment circa 2003 reared its head and opened up spots in the Big East, DePaul couldn’t run to that league fast enough. While the non-Catholic Big East schools at the time such as Syracuse and Pitt were attractive partners in terms of pure athletics, it was the Catholic school base that was DePaul’s draw. The belief was that no matter what happened, DePaul would be linked to those major Catholic schools going forward.
Now DePaul is moving forward with Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Seton Hall, Providence and Marquette in breaking off from the Big East and forming a new basketball conference. There are some formalities that need to take place on figuring out the process of how this will actually occur, but it’s conceptually a done deal. I’m not someone that was ever a large believer in the inevitability of a split between the Catholic schools and football members of the Big East. Ever since the initial ACC raid of the Big East in 2003 of Miami, Virginia Tech and Syracuse, the hybrid model of the league was still a net positive for all of its members even if a lot of fans complained about it. The Catholic schools benefited from having a power conference image via the Big East’s AQ status in the BCS system despite not playing FBS football, while the all-sports members got direct basketball access to the major markets of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington. They were all worth more together than they were worth apart.
The equation changed with Notre Dame, Rutgers and Louisville leaving, though. The network effects of those brand names (well, at least with respect to Louisville and Notre Dame for basketball) coupled with the Catholic schools were eradicated. With the value of the Big East’s new potential TV deal plummeting in the marketplace due to defections, the Catholic schools believed that they weren’t receiving a clear financial benefit from the hybrid anymore. Maybe they would still a little bit more by sticking with the Big East, but it wouldn’t be enough to make it worth it to continue to be subject to the whims of football-driven realignment.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: stability can trump even money in conference realignment. The Big East Catholic schools finally got tired of getting dragged through the mud on account of a sport that they didn’t even play at the top level. Even an extra $1 million per year in TV money for staying in the hybrid is fairly small in the scheme of things if you have a choice between controlling your own league or other conferences poaching your league controlling you.
Ultimately, I believe the new basketball league using the Big East Catholic schools as a basis will be successful within the parameters of what can be reasonably expected out of non-football conference. If the new league moves forward with poaching Butler and Xavier from the Atlantic 10, who have apparently already agreed to join with St. Louis University, Dayton, Creighton and VCU under consideration for the 10th spot or possibly 3 spots to form a 12-team setup), then it’s an attractive proposition to the TV networks. ESPN, for example, can throw $20 million to $30 million per year at this conference (which would be less than what ESPN currently pays the Big East for basketball in a pitiful contract that was signed for a rock bottom amount in the mid-2000s) and that would constitute a pay raise for the Catholics on a per school basis. It’s not exactly a stretch to believe that ESPN would rather do that to get the bulk of the Big Monday games that they would have wanted, anyway, while completing avoiding the need to pay for Big East football games that the network doesn’t have any use for.
To be sure, the Catholic schools would not have bolted if the Big East had the composition that it had when this year’s college football season started. A split was always a very last resort and that moment came when Louisville got invited to the ACC. Staying in the hybrid for the sake of continuing to play UConn was no longer enough (even if new incoming members such as Memphis were strong in basketball).
The one good thing out of all of this is that the Big East Catholic schools will be going from a league with no institutional identity to a new conference with as strong of an institutional identity as any other out there. Institutional fit is a hallmark of the Big Ten, Pac-12 and other stable conferences and that will serve the new league well.
This Big East basketball season is going to take on the air of the last year of the Southwest Conference, where no one knows whether many of schools will ever play each other again. I’ll have more on this as the story continues to develop.
FRANK THE TANK'S SLANT 