Dave Brandon Interview with 11W

One Turd's endorsement:

That's a very good interview.  Well worth reading.

How quickly will Brian be on the phone with Gene Smith?

Dave Brandon "brought Michigan into the 21st century without trampling on traditions."  

Not to hear this fanbase whine about Uniformz, corporate sponsorship in the Big House, etc.

Very good read, thanks for sharing.

Wow, bold move by Brandon, but I commend him for it.

Whoa. Brandon's got some brass balls talking to an Ohio State blog, but they were both pretty civil. I also appreciated the slight retraction on the "Catfishing" thing.

Brandon sounded like a corporatist. If anyone thinks he's not 100% all about Business, read this interview.

I'm gonna go out of on a limb and say that Brandon DOES know what future expansion plans are.  Call it a hunch.

That was a good read.  I'm glad he was asked about the saturation point as it relates to ticket prices.  When you combine the PSD with the ticket prices, we have got to be right up there with the most expensive college football ticket in the country. 

and wonderful write-up + interview.  Thanks for posting.  Would not have seen it otherwise.  

Very good read...good find.  As someone else said, Brian should see about an interview with Gene Smith....and maybe even an interview with Brandon.

I thought Brandon was somewhat stand-off-ish toward what he deemed the blog community so to see him do this interview with an OSU blog is interesting.  I wonder if he or members of the AD would be willing to do one with MGoBlog. 

...enterprising Michigan blogger at this event in Toledo. Essentially, all of the Michigan papers and blogs were scooped by 11W. It does seem that whenever DAB appears at one of these events, his remarks are newsworthy.

Should of ended the interview with BEAT OHIO.

"You’re trying to build conference continuity and cohesion. We want to travel to their campuses, they want to travel to our campuses, and you’re going to put yourself in position where you aren’t going to be able to do that." - Dave Brandon, talking about the problem of 8 conference games with 14 teams

I found his answer to this question interesting - If you actually start drawing out combinations on paper, this sort of bears out and I understand what he is getting at. It seems like 14 teams is in a gray area between needing and not needing to go to something akin to the "pod" system, if you will. I just wrote out the numbers 1-14 and made 1-7 a "division", and assuming you play everyone in your division, you leave room for two interdivision games, which you could arrange so you played each team in the other division once every three years. I would agree that this doesn't seem to foster the cohesion that they might want or really need if realignment competition is going to get more fierce in the future and they want to ensure the Big Ten only gets bigger.

Great interview and thanks for sharing it, DenverBuckeye.

When a rival interest (not sure how else to categorize it) gets an interview like this... it usually turns out great in my opinion. Mostly because it becomes a very classy discussion, sometimes candid, and doesn't go out of bounds. I think the hard part would be an interview with this blog wouldn't re-hash but try to forge into the unknown... not sure how it would turn out. Good work by 11W, they are a better site than most, as long as you don't read the comments.

I wonder if  DB is positioning himself to become the next commissioner.

After reading the interview I believe we have different expansion scenarios planned out for any number of specific target schools to add, but those plans are on hold until they figure out our conference realignment, future scheduling, and play a little wait-and-see with what the other conferences are doing, what opportunities present themselves.

I think future conference expansion will cease when, as he said, we start playing fewer home games every year, sacrifice the ability to play marquee OOC matchups, and players lose the ability to play every team in the B1G during their college careers due to over-expansion.

I also believe his offhand statement about (paraphrase) "who said 16 was the ultimate goal, and not 18 or 20?" that he was simply refuting 16 teams being everybodies universally acknowleged goal, not that we're all actually headed to 18 or 20 team conferences, but instead saying that it's fluid, and nobody knows yet what the finished product will be.