Seth9

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2 days 12 hours ago Va Tech is not happening

The Virginia state legislature forced UVA to leverage Va Tech into the ACC in 2003 over Syracuse. They will not let Va Tech abandon UVA now without UVA having an equally good fallback. Furthermore, even if Va Tech could leave UVA behind, they know that doing so would poison relations between the schools, which is not good for Va Tech if they care about academic partnership's with the state flagship.
1 week 9 hours ago Just to be clear

The reason that the other conferences have an incentive to support bowl games over home sites is that it gives them an implicit competitive advantage by screwing the Big Ten. Home sites is more fair and would be more profitable.
1 week 9 hours ago Rebuttal Rebuttal Rebuttal

What 1. shows is they've already conceded the home playoff games, and now they can't go back and say "we want them" and be taken seriously.  However, the other side can say "we never thought we should take anything but the top 4 teams" or whatever stupidity the Big Ten is fighting for, and look consistent. And then the Big Ten ends up with jack shit.

This is a fair point, but I personally think that looking consistent isn't very important to the decision makers. As evidence, I present pretty much everything a non-Big Ten School/Conference has said about conference expansion/reconfiguration and the NCAA Rules Enforcement system. Because there's no outside body holding people that has the power to hold people to their word when they say something to the media, the only real consequence of inconsistent statements is some bad PR.

The Big Ten has as much or more leverage than the rest.  The Big Ten doesn't join, and it doesn't really change the status quo. But it does invalidate the system. They tried that once with the Bowl Alliance, and people hated it more than the BCS.  You end up with 1997. A playoff needs the Big Ten for it to be new and effective; the Big Ten dosen't change much by holding out to get what they want.  The default is to renew if they can't come to an agreement, so the playoff proponents have the deadline, not the league.

I don't think this holds true in a playoff system. If the Big Ten were to back out of a playoff and the other major conferences participated, then even if the Big Ten champ is rated #1 after the regular season, the best they can do is beat 1 more top-10 team, whereas the winner of a playoff will have beaten 2 equal-if-not-better teams. Furthermore, the people involved with a playoff will probably require any poll they're involved with to rank the playoff winner #1 at the end of the year, if they even allow Big Ten teams to be ranked at all. Except for the rarest of occasions, this would mean that the Big Ten champ would not be eligible for the national championship. Furthermore, it is doubtful that the Rose Bowl would agree to a Big Ten tie-in since they'll be involved with the playoff, meaning that we'd have to agree to a mediocre bowl tie-in that would match us up with teams outside of the top-10 as often as not. So a playoff formed without the Big Ten's cooperation is not necessarily a non-starter.
 
Meanwhile, if we try to hold out, the other conferences can screw with us all kinds of ways. For instance, they can all jointly refuse to schedule us in basketball or stop agreeing to bowl tie-ins with us. These would be extreme steps, to be sure, but if we play hardball with the other 4 major conferences (sorry Big East, but you don't qualify any more) then they can certainly return the favor.

I don't think there's much poll basis to say causal fans favor the bowls.  Most polls are in favor of a playoff, not the bowl system. And this is speaking as someone who likes the bowls. But the ESPN driven media has been beating the playoff drum for so long, most people believe we need a playoff, even if the average person doesn't know why.

The question is not whether casual fans prefer a playoff to bowls, but whether they prefer bowl sites to home sites as part of a playoff. However, you are right to say I have no poll evidence for this, so I withdraw the point. As for your last point, I think we had a communication error because I'm not really sure how it applies to anything I said.
1 week 14 hours ago Rebuttal

1. I think Shoe's comment above is correct in the horsetrading aspect of this, but, if so, Delaney and the ADs are doing it wrong, politically. You don't publicly abandon what had been a strongly stated position (home playoff games to achieve locational parity) without first receiving concessions on the selection process. And you announce them all at once, to avoid the impression that you got rolled.  The stupidity of the Rose Bowl protection process that Brian points out, to me, shows that Delaney and the ADs may be good businessmen (almost certainly are, given the financial health of the conference) but they're bad legislative politicians, and setting this up is much more akin to writing legislation than arranging business contracts.

I could not disagree more. This much more akin to arranging business contracts than writing legislation in that the people making and implementing the playoff system are doing this to make more money. There are no real consequences to appearing to roll.

2. The Nietzschian term that Brian closes with (Will to Power) is exactly descriptive of what the Big 10 lacked. Delaney and the ADs folded not because of a lack of power, but because they were unwilling to utilize the power of their position effectively. They obviously could have easily marshalled the vast majority of Big 10 fans behind them, given the reaction here. They could have also easily convinced the coaches through appeals to the competitive advantage home playoff games would provide. I suspect they also could have easily swayed key voices in the media in favor of that situation. And they could have easily shown that at least the Rose Bowl would be protected. All of those would have carried a lot of weight.

First of all, the Big Ten's leverage in this negotiation is minimal. The Big Ten doesn't really have the option to not be involved in a CFB Playoff so they cannot pull out of negotiations. Furthermore, the only conference that would actually benefit from having home-site playoff games is the Big Ten. The other conferences that will likely produce playoff teams, namely the SEC, Big 12, Pac 12, and maybe even the ACC, all benefit from using bowl games. So none of them were going to agree to home sites or even a northern neutral site game, which only serves to benefit the Big Ten.

Secondly, with regards to Big Ten fans, the commenters on Mgoblog are not a representative subsection. Mgoblog commenters supported Rich Rodriguez well after most of the fanbase turned on him and many here still feel that he did a good job under the circumstances, unlike the vast majority of the Michigan fanbase. Casual fans and older fans are, by and large, in favor of keeping the bowl system around and would have to be convinced to support home sites, thus making it difficult to rally them in the cause.

Finally, even if Delany managed to get Big Ten fans up in arms around the cause of home sites, what would that actually accomplish? The answer is almost certainly nothing because unless fans are actually willing to boycott travelling to and watching playoff games not held at home sites, then the other conferences still have no incentive to agree to home sites.

The major competitors in college football are disproportionately found in southern, warm weather areas where the important bowls are held. Unless that changes, the Big Ten will not have the necessary leverage to get playoff games at home sites because it will always be to the advantage of these teams to oppose home sites and the possibility of having to play up north.
2 weeks 2 days ago PSU will settle

I sincerely doubt that PSU wants to discuss the full particulars of their response to McCreary's initial allegations in open court. I also doubt that they want to deal with the media attention that would result as well.
5 weeks 2 days ago Wait...

You're saying that you think he's credible because he says things you want to hear about OSU?
8 weeks 1 day ago I assume that you mean...

I assume that you mean Vanderbilt, Rice, Tufts, Rutgers, Notre Dame, etc. are apparently terrible schools.
9 weeks 5 days ago We're at a bit of a disadvantage there

Western will bus in their students. We are scrambling to find people to drive on St. Patrick's Day.
11 weeks 9 hours ago Hmm...

I think that when he said "icing", he meant to say defense.
11 weeks 2 days ago I don't think it's insurmountable

Basic cable fees are only one element of what new additions to the Big Ten will do in terms of increasing overall revenue. The sale of first-tier cable rights are far more valuable than the revenue from the BTN at the moment, and that's with an undervalued Big Ten first tier contract (it's an old one due for renewal soon). And ND is a big draw ratings wise, particularly when they're playing other big names, which they would do a lot inside the Big Ten.

Furthermore, adding these teams will increase the quantity and quality of BTN programming. This will happen because there will simply be more games to air on the BTN with the additional teams, all of which are either good programs or are located in large markets. So in addition to an expanding footprint, the BTN will be improving its content as well.

If I were Delany, these four teams would probably not be my first choice. Rutgers and Maryland are useful for expanding the footprint, but they add little value to our first-tier rights, which are the most important consideration. Additionally, I believe that it is possible to capture the NYC market without adding Rutgers if we instead took a team like Syracuse, who would increase our first-tier rights significantly for basketball, if not for football. Maryland, at least, is worth considering due to the possibility of adding Baltimore-DC, their basketball program, their strong non-revenue sports (which give the BTN more things to show during the offseason, which would be nice), and their history with PSU. But at the same time, there are potentially more valuable additions in BC, UVA/Va Tech (although they are unlikely to leave the ACC), Kansas (in conjunction with Syracuse, the balance of power in the MBB world would heavily shift towards the Big Ten, which could yield substantial financial dividends as the Big Ten would have games between high-profile programs pretty much every week), and others.

That all said, at the end of the day, expanding to 16 teams is a risky proposition at best no matter who is added. Expanding to places like Georgia risks dilutes the character of the Big Ten, which in turn dampens the passions surrounding in-conference games, which makes the games themselves less interesting to watch. And a failure to expand the footprint limits the number of new viewers that will tune into Big Ten games, which would lead to financial losses for individual schools. And then there is always the worry that an addition will simply not mesh well with its conference members, which can easily lead to instability (hence, the current state of the Big 12). So I highly doubt that the Big Ten will expand to 16 teams in the near future. But I cannot dismiss the possibility because there are reasons that it could work out well financially and academically.
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