I give up. All anyone wants to talk about is potential expansion, so more potential expansion bits.

Inside info! Someone close to the Rutgers athletic department says that RU will push hard for Big Ten entrance. Not like that is surprising, but there you go.

No, just no. Sorry, Teddy Greenstein, but…

Don't discount this: the Big 14.
Seriously.

I am discounting it. It is now 100% off for a limited time only, and by "limited time only" I mean "forever." Just because some guy in the Big Ten office says "anything is possible" does not mean that we shouldn't be shocked if a conference that's attempted to expand three times in the last fifteen years only to come up empty all of a sudden adds three teams to become an unwieldy beast of a conference in which you only play about half the teams every year.

Fourteen is ridiculous. The WAC was sixteen for a while until it exploded because at that point you're not a conference but a Thomas Jefferson-style loose confederation. Where is the common sense? Where is it? Is it in Russia? No.

Lloyd != Bo. This is not exactly "to hell with Notre Dame":

"I'd love to see Notre Dame join the Big Ten," Carr said. "I think certainly it would be a great thing for the Big Ten, and I think it would be great for Notre Dame.

"But, of course, they're fighting a lot of tradition there (at Notre Dame)," which has resisted overtures from the Big Ten previously, Carr added.

This, of course, is not happening. Notre Dame people believe that the Big Ten's only desire when it comes to engulfing Notre Dame is to destroy the university and therefore the very soul of America itself, and in this they are correct.

Also no just no. Sporting News colleague Dan Shanoff is a nice man who has a bad habit of coming up with an off-the-wall idea and posting it without running it through even the most cursory sanity check. Witness his suggestion that Navy should be the 12th Big Ten team:

*Academic credentials are impeccable.
*Football program is solid.
*Triple-option is "3 Yards/Cloud" 2.0
*Can keep trad'l games w/ Army, AFA, ND.
*Better than Notre Dame.
*Nearly beat Ohio State this season.
*Non-competitive recruiting strategy.
*But expands B10 footprint in the East.
*Feds could use the BCS bowl revenue.
*It is entirely uncontroversial.

Wrong, debatable, irrelevant, irrelevant, wrong, tiny sample size, irrelevant, wrong, irrelevant, irrelevant. The Big Ten is not a charity. Navy is not an AAU member, does not have any national TV cachet, would not be a compelling reason for local cable operators to carry the Big Ten Network because no one in DC is going to have a riot as long as the Army game is on CBS.

Simply comparing Navy to Pitt and finding that Pitt was better in literally every way other than supporting the troops—why does the Big Ten hate America?—would have shot this down before it worked its way onto the internet and sat there being embarrassing, like if the GEICO money was made out of shots of you picking your nose when you were six.

Yes, yes, Terrance Cody's gravitational pull makes everything revolve around the SEC. Braves & Birds tends to see things through two lenses: World War II and SEC superiority. So in retrospect this was obvious:

I have no doubt that this move is motivated by a major case of SEC envy. Barry Alvarez was probably sitting on his couch for the first weekends of the past two Decembers, watching the #1 and #2 teams in the country play each other in the Georgia Dome and thinking to himself "man, we need something like that." However, what the Big Ten needs is not the game in early December; what it needs is teams of the quality of Florida and Alabama. …

And so, to come full circle, the Big Ten right now reminds me of the Third Reich in the summer of 1944. Germany was about to get hammered in the East by Operation Bagration and in the West by Operation Cobra. Faced with major issue, Hitler decided that the way to win the war was by firing a bevy of V-2 rockets at London. His decision was a classic case of praying for some sort of saving throw the the dice when faced with basic shortcomings.

Did Clay Travis steal B&B's login information? The Big Ten has looked at expansion every five years since Penn State joined; were those all motivated by jealousy of the SEC, too? Did the Big Ten come off championships in 1997 and 2002 only to think to itself "that god damned SEC" and look at expanding the following year? How many rhetorical questions can I stick in one paragraph? Five?

I blame Joe Paterno for this annoying meme floating around. Here's his quote from March:

We go into hiding for six weeks," Paterno said, referring to the hiatus between the end of the Big Ten regular season and the BCS bowls. The other major FBS conferences play into the first weekend of December.

"Everybody else is playing playoffs on television," Paterno said. "You never see a Big Ten team mentioned. So I think that's a handicap."

People forget that Paterno is an 81-year old man who has little say over his own football team, let alone the conference it is in. The Big Ten is pushing its schedule later in 2010. Which is next year. To get increased exposure late in the season, all the Big Ten has to do is play.

This has nothing to do with the SEC except insofar as everything designed to get money is part of the arms race and the only conference that even competes with Big Ten is the SEC. They'll do it if they think it's a good idea; they won't if they don't. The big difference this time around is that Notre Dame seems permanently off the table and Pitt has built itself into an attractive basketball power with accompanying decent football program. B&B then goes off on the league's mediocre coaching as if expansion and hiring Danny Hope are in any way dependent. They are not linked.

Yes, expansion is an attempt to make the league better on and off the field. I can't fathom why this has anything to do with the SEC except insofar as everyone who lives in the South is legally obligated to assume everything is because of the SEC. Clay Travis is writing up a column right now about how the New York Times is holding up health care reform by wasting their time on recruiting hostesses.

Hey, at least it's not just us. This post at Pitt Blather starts off with this sentence…

I really, really, really don’t look forward to 18+ months of mindless speculation over Big 11 expansion.

…which I think we can all agree with. But then it appears that what Pitt Blather wants is speculation about Big East expansion that includes adding Villanova, a I-AA team, and Charlotte, a nonexistent team, instead of Memphis, a team with a billion dollars from FedEx guy.

Welcome. Now give us money. I don't actually know about this but I thought it was interesting. Smart Football's Chris Brown asks about a potential holdup with Team 12 (and team 13, and 14, and 52):

Someone sent me a question regarding whether a new Big 10 member could afford to join, and you seemed like the guy to mention it to.

The concern was whether any potential new Big 10 school could afford to "buy-in" to the BTN. Specifically, he said: "News Corp paid $66M to Big Ten for BTN in '07. Rough numbers put the value today at ~$400M. What school has ~$40M for buy-in?"

According to wikipedia, the member schools own 51% and Fox/News Corp owns 49%. The buy-in would not necessarily be 1/10 the value of the overall entity; it just needs to buy enough shares or units to have 1/12 of the 51%. I don't know how it is structured, but I bet the member schools jointly own an entity which itself owns 51% of the joint BTN venture with News Corp. That way a new school could just buy the units from the other schools, or they could issue new units, such that each school would then own 1/12 of the member schools' portion of the entity. Make sense? If you assume BTN really is worth $400m, that means that a new school would just have to buy 1/12 of the 51%, which comes out to around $17m.

But again, how do we know what the BTN is worth? Mandel threw some revenue figures together but those seem pretty darn loose. And in any event the biggest factor would be what kind of growth rate do you see from the Big 10 Network. I think we both agree the business model is fluctuating.

Finally, my friend made the point that he didn't think a school had that much money. I don't see why an athletic department couldn't borrow that money and then pay it down with future revenues; any school but Notre Dame would undoubtedly have their overall sports revenues increase.

Any thoughts on this? Specifically, whether buying into the BTN would be any kind of hurdle for a new member school? Also let me know if I'm looking at the structure wrong. I don't have any firm info and am just going off some stuff I saw online.

Chris

That would depend on how much the school in question brings to the table. If Notre Dame got really drunk and decided to sign up I doubt the Big Ten would push the issue much since adding them to the network would be a big win. Pitt or Rutgers or whoever might be asked to pay for their slice of the pie.

I don't think that would be a major hurdle since you're really cutting the school in on something with excellent growth potential; the school in question could justify buying in with a section of their general fund since it's an investment that should grow in value.

For the record. One man's list of the five most insane schools proposed for Big Ten expansion:

5. Iowa State. Yes, their athletic programs are that historically bad that a land-grant university in the geographic footprint makes this list.

LOOK AT THIS

END OF STORY

At this rate by the end of these 18 months I'm going to be guest-posting trash talk about Iowa State on BHGP.

4. Toronto. Only mentioned because it's in the AAU and Toronto is so starved for entertainment that they'll sell out MLS games. Problems: the pilot program for NCAA induction of a few Universities only applies to D-II and will get a few schools out West in within ten years, Toronto doesn't play American football, and Michigan State would have to forfeit all its games there because Canada wouldn't let them into the country.

3. Navy. Previously discussed.

2. Cornell. Cornell is an Ivy-league school without a I-A football program. And yet…

1. Rice. It's got all the downsides of Texas combined with all the downsides of Iowa State. Its only asset is that its band integrated e^x during the Rice-Michigan game a while back just so they could spell "sex" in front of 110,000 people.