Dave Brandon Interview with 11W

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.

Thanks for the link.  I wasn't thrilled by the first sentence, but other than that it was an interesting read.  It really doesn't sound like 10 home games will happen, and he was very open that seven home games were a requirement to make the economics work.

 

I wish there were somewhat tougher questions though, but you can't have everything.  11W is constrained by being an enemy site, and is thus required to be rather restrained to not seem partisan.

We added Nebraska and we were quite content. That was important to get to 12 games because we got the divisional structure and the championship game. But to go from 12 to 14 was more of an elective decision than anything that we needed to do.

I'm not quite sure how much I should be reading between the lines here, but to me, this parses as "From Michigan's perspective, adding Maryland and Rutgers was not something we needed." Which in turn suggests that it was schools other than Michigan who were driving for this. I sometimes wonder - Brandon is so politically savvy in how he talks that I'm pretty sure he'd always speak positively in public about decisions he was vehemently against in private. That leaves us fans wondering "why did he support this thing we think is idiotic," when in fact he may not have been in support of it at all. And I think it makes sense to suspect that Indiana, Minnesota, MSU, etc were bigger drivers in the move to 14 teams than Michigan and OSU were. Michigan and OSU view adding Nebraska as adding to the competitive strength of the conference, and getting us a championship game we otherwise wouldn't get. Adding more schools does nothing for us. Whereas from Minnesota's perspective, adding Rutgers helps add competitive balance more than adding Nebraska did, because it adds another school they can actually be competitive against. I think this is also why there's less push for having "competitive balance" in the divisions this time around: the less competitive schools are less worried because any way you slice it, they'll see more beatable schools on their schedule going forward.