Big Ten Officially Adds Johns Hopkins, B1G Lacrosse Conference Starts in 2015
Per BTN. JHU will be an affiliate member. http://btn.com/2013/06/03/big-ten-adds-lacrosse-johns-hopkins-men/
Edit: Press release can be found here.
Imo this is, pound for pound, WAY more valuable to UM and the B1G than the Maryland addition.
Low cost, high return in Lax and maybe academics (I say maybe because I still don't fully "get" how beyond bragging rights academics impact these sorts of things).
This basically shifts the balance of power in mens Lax towards a 2 conference sport (B1G and ACC, with scattered ivies and schools like Towson, Loyola, Denver, etc thrown in). As a former UM laxer who hailed from the East Coast, I can speak firsthand to how big Hopkins is in the history of the sport. Having them and Maryland (which immediately becomes THE rivalry in B1G) lax will be great for everyone.
JHU-MD in lax = M - OSU in football. Similar festivities around 100th games, etc.
Pretty cool that the B1G is the largest conference with these moves. Not thinking about the piles of cash that our conference sits on, it at the very least shows our support for the largest student athelete group of any conference.
Same link as in OP:
http://btn.com/2013/06/03/big-ten-adds-lacrosse-johns-hopkins-men/
Biggg FifteeeeennnnnnnNNNNN!!!!!
Yesterday when the reports were coming out I was fairly incensed at the thought of an associate or affiliate membership, but it now seems that the benefits outweigh any drawbacks to the plan. Welcome JH!
If they don't join the conference academically as well as athletically, then all my smug assurances that schools like Cincy or Louisville are never going to be considered for conference membership might not be worth the pixels they were written with.
You and your academics, I swear.
/s
so I can't help it. It's in my genes.
(My grandfather attended UM from 1901 through 1904 as an undergrad, and then got his masters from UM in 1910. There's a photo in his scrapbook I have that was taken from the sidelines during the 1904 UM-Chicago game.)
I got you beat: my grandfather graduated from the dental school in aught-2
Interesting move. There was much speculation that Johns Hopkins wouldn't join. How does this impact Virginia and Duke? I know the Grant of Rights is in place, but litigation could POTENTIALLY change that (as an attorney, potential is always a keyword, I know), but doesn't this make the Big Ten more attractive for those schools now?
At least for now, it's very unlikley a lacrosse move has any impact on conference expansion/realingment. First of all, the existence of a Big Ten lacrosse league probably does little to entice the lax decision makers at those schools, since one would exist anyway if they joined, but most importantly - the lax decision makers probably get almost no say in this stuff anyway.
I've got little doubt that if anyone came up to Dave Pietramala and said, "you're joining a conference, pick one, but you have to join," the answer would've been ACC in a heartbeat. I don't think the B1G gives a rip about having a lacrosse league except that it makes for a convenient excuse to add a research powerhouse to the CIC.
Not so sure of that Wahoo - I think Petro has had admiration for the B1G for a long time. When he talks about being part of a conference that strives for excellence I think he sees that in the overall way the B1G does athletics - not just lax- more than the way the ACC does it. I remember well the comments he made about being here in Ann Arbor for fall ball back in 2008. He spoke about how excited he was about exposing the Jays to big time college athletics and the atmosphere that goes with it (they went to the M-OSU game that weekend.)
Announcement - Ron Daniels (JHU president), then Jim Delaney (interesting thoughts on mid-atlantic footprint - basically said, we are in this neighborhood already), then Dave Pietramala (JHU coach). Delaney is at about 4:15 in. Daniels has some interesting things to say about academics and the B1G.
Give it a decade and you'll see that having a strong lacrosse conference is a big deal. We would have had one in a decade without this move, but this gets the league started sooner, as well as adding a huge name that gets people talking Big Ten lacrosse without waiting for the Big Ten schools to get good (which they will).