Expansion was inevitable and is more than football

"When deciding on who to join our conference we were really looking for schools with high academic standards and good basketball teams. "



Not one person ever

football, all orther considerations are either seconday or public relations.

Whichever answer means that academics has absolutely no part of it. It is tv money and being afraid of being left out of the tv money in the future. Nothing more, nothing less.

We are talking about Graduate level research.  Michigan per grad student spends more than double Notre Dame on research.  Or 12 times as much total.

Notre Dame is a great school, they just are weak at research.  That is why Notre Dame's faculty joined the BigTen...to get better...at post graduate academics.

Their faculty approved of Notre Dame joining the BigTen so they could join the CIC and share in on the Billions of research dollars we have combined.  Too bad ND's football pride beat out graduate academic benefits.

a few things:

1) the big ten conference is not a corporation, and while it needs to be proactive to create the best climate for its members, it also is one of the pillars of college football. college football would not move on to something like playoffs or whatever without the inclusion of the big ten. i would not have minded if the conference had chosen to use some of its might to stay above the fray, rather than dilute the brand. what is the point of being Goliath if the conference has the power to determine its own amibtions, if that is to get more tvs than another guy by changing the fundamental nature of what an althetic conference is, then i guess that is what it is.

2) i think it is highly unlikely that state politics in Virginia or North Carolina will allow those state's football programs to separate, since that is what brought them together in the first place.

3) personally, i am ashamed of the big ten with this. every system that college football has ever had or will ever have is imperfect, that is just the nature of sports. this whole idea that there is some simple tournament solution that will make everyone happy is ridiculous. they are chasing piles of cash and when you have your piles of cash, then what? what happens when you have monetized every aspect of your operation? the conference, whatever that is anymore, is not going to say, we have our pile of cash, let's sit pat. they are going to find new piles and most of those piles are in our pockets. and the one thing that i even care about any of this for, the experience of going to a game with my family and singing as loud as a i can when things go well and crying as hard as a can when they don't has not benefitted from this in the least.

4) i am not a nascar fan, but this whole college football goldrush for marketing seems to reek of what happened to them. there is a niche sport, quaint, cozy, well loved by milions of dedicated fans - something that CEOs consider under-utilized. so they get their hands into it, try to broaden the appeal, try to make the championship more exciting, polish it up with cell phones instead of cigarettes, build huge facilities around the country with luxury boxes and charge insane new psls and ticket prices. after that balloon is puffed up and the casual fans wander to the next casual thing, and tv ratings fall apart and advertisers look elsewhere, the people left holding the bag are the ones that were there in the beginning, although now they are paying three times as much for a worse product. this is what this is and i pity the people who will never know the joy of piling into the car to drive to west lafayette for a simple fall day just because you can and i regret that i may never be able to do that again.

What about Duke?

Right, but the key difference is that UVA and UNC are top notch undergrad schools.

You haven't listed a single thing Rutgers/Maryland bring.

Equal or less research dollars brought in.

Worse sports.

MUCH WORSE undergrad reputation.

Nothing except the fiction that people in NYC care about Rutgers or DC (check my login name) care about Maryland.

What were you thinking when you coined the phrase "Nebraska-like research bounty"?

You realize that the cable companies first have to agree to pick up BTN, correct?  We're basing this entire transaction on whether there are enough Rutgers fans (haha, I know already a longshot) living in NYC/NJ who are willing to lobby/change cable providers to watch maybe six Rutgers games a year, and those are the lesser Rutgers-Indiana games! 

Fits the geographic and academic profile.  Agreed they don't add a major market or are better choices than the others, but the list of schools I named were only focused on the geographic and academic profiles.  If by glaring omissions you're including schools in NC, GA or other non-contiguous states, those by Delaney's admission are not in the running.

Something makes me think that Atlanta, the second largest college football market, is high on Delaney's list.  GTU