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. 

Brandon thinks he's still selling pizzas.

He just doesn't get it.

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.

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.