Reports coming out that UCLA and USC likely to the Big Ten.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Finally a chance for Northwestern to get revenge on USC for the 1996 Rose Bowl

I'm looking forward to the geographical rivalry game between UCLA and Iowa.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Is The Rose Bowl just going to become the B10 Championship Game now?

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https://twitter.com/DrKenCast

Are Rutgers & UCLA legends or leaders?

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Are they gonna drop Purdue now?

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They need teams to give the good teams a free win every year.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

national championship

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

That's what the Illini are for.

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I'd say we have long since passed the time when these were "conferences" in the traditional sense of the word. Essentially all these are is amalgamations of schools in large media markets that jointly negotiate media contracts.

Will be a long day of football when UCLA@Rutgers kicks off at 9AM PST and Michigan@USC kicks off at 10PM EST

I wish football and possibly basketball would just do their thing and leave the conferences more geographically aligned for the rest of the sports.

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2018
#ExtendLafleur

so what's next? big ten far east division with schools from china? will likely give nebraska and northwestern a game in basketball

We can't compete with their mathletes.

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There should be three conferences nationwide. Each champion gets an auto bid to the playoff.

The fourth spot will be reserved for whichever independent finishes the season with the highest ranking in closest proximity to Chicago.

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At what point are there not only diminishing returns on things like this, but the value of the product gets degraded?

Who is excited about this other than guys in the Big Ten commissioner's office? I'd certainly think USC/UCLA fans aren't excited by this both from a viewer standpoint, and also from a tradition standpoint. As a Wisconsin fan/alumni there isn't anything to get excited about.

It might be just me, and obviously as I've gotten older I just can't follow as many sports as I could when I was 23, but I'm just not a "college football" fan anymore. Sure I'll always be interested in the Badgers, and enjoy those games, but aside from a half a dozen Badgers games, nothing is appointment viewing for me.

If you told a 23 year old One Post that in 2022 there would be college football fantasy leagues, daily college football fantasy leagues, wall to wall games from Thursday night through Saturday night, I'd just have assumed I'd be unemployed and consuming college football 24/7/365.

On a personal level, I'm just surprised at how disengaged I have slowly become from college football, and really all college sports. Maybe I'm getting old, well I certainly am, but I don't think any of the changes over the past 15 years: conference realignment, transitory nature of the sport, the playoff system, conference championship games, etc. have enhanced the appeal of the sport on a broad level.

When I was 25 years old I could have named you 5-15 guys on each team in the top 25. I honestly don't think I could name 5 guys who will be college football players this September when the season starts.

I'm excited by the Big Ten doing this. Hopefully they don't start kicking teams out though. Purdue and Northwestern would probably be launched first.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I'm not trying to be obstinate at all, but in what way are you excited by this?

From my perspective the Badgers are trading off games against traditional conference opponents like Michigan, Ohio State, Mich State, for games against UCLA and USC, one team that hasn't been relevant since the early 1990s, and the other one that is coasting on the fumes of Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart.

It's already terrible enough to have to cycle through Rutgers and Maryland, along with playing Nebraska every year. But at this point, Ohio State will be stopping at Camp Randall every 12 years or so. Sounds great, I'll be booking my flights for 2033!!!!

USC is going to explode with Lincoln Riley as coach.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

They certainly will be better than they were under Clay Helton.

That said, Lincoln Riley had at least two losses in each of his seasons at OU playing in a watered down Big 12. The OU program he inherited finished top 5 in the two prior seasons. This USC team is a pretty average PAC 12 outfit.

Also, since John Robinson left in the late 70’s, the only coach with real sustained success was Carroll.

The list is much longer of coaches who were going to explode a place in theory and it never happens.

Everyone thought Chip Kelly would resurrect that UCLA program. He’s 18-25 with one winning season out of four.

Wouldn't it have been smarter for OK and Texas to go to the Big 10 where they can be overrated? It's probably in USC and UCLA's thoughts.

There are a few reasons.

The primary reason is that the SEC power play did have a nightmare scenario where they poach the Big Ten powers of Ohio State, Michigan, Illinois, and Penn State along with USC/UCLA, Notre Dame/Clemson, and then probably a few others to get to the magic number of teams they want either 32 or 40. This all but assures that the Big Ten and SEC at least in terms of money are equals. The SEC still has the football geographic recruiting advantage and the Big Ten crushes them in basketball, for whatever that matters, but it actually brings a fair amount of balance to college sports. Now, obviously there is still the chance that the Big Ten starts kicking out schools but for many reasons that is highly unlikely.

I get the traditional matchups argument but I also think the Big Ten blew that out of the water adding in Nebraska, Rutgers, and Maryland. If you throw in USC and UCLA in a situation where every 4 year period you play them each once at home and once on the road it doesn't change that much.



The general idea with scheduling will be that you have 3 teams you play every year, which for Wisconsin is likely Iowa, Minnesota, and before this I would have said Nebraska, but there has to be a few teams that play USC/UCLA under the same format and Nebraska may be one of them. All the other teams in the conference you would play 2 times over 4 years with one game at home and one game on the road.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I appreciate your thoughts Brick, and don’t dispute you are being genuine, but as a consumer of entertainment, none of the above will make me more entertained, and most of it will make me less entertained.

I guess that begs the question of how would you view the Wisconsin football schedule if OSU, Michigan, and PSU had all left to go to the SEC?

Maybe Wisconsin gets invited too depending on how big the SEC wanted to become but then you certainly lose the traditional games you've been watching your whole life as there is no chance Northwestern or Minnesota is invited, and Iowa likely doesn't get the call either.

I do agree that it was nice when you were in the Big Ten, played all the other teams in the Big Ten in most years, and they were the same teams you had played for decades. It's just not how the professionalization of college sports can operate.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Your last paragraph is the key, it was more entertaining the way it was. The difference between us is you are trying to tell me this, admittedly worse, situation is bette. I am simply recognizing that it sucks.

You are not in a “conference” with a school if you can attend a university over four years and never see them play in your home stadium. Again, that is not a conference it is a joint venture to negotiate contracts.

Your first paragraph rings hollow to me. Essentially you are saying would you rather (a) involuntary make the product less appealing/entertaining or (b) voluntarily make the product less appealing/entertaining?

I hope you can understand why (a) and (b) present no difference to me.

This is only partially true. The dam broke with the addition of Nebraska, and then Rutgers/Maryland. If the Big Ten could have been locked in forever after PSU then that would have been great.

This isn't going to be how it works though. This is the likely scheduling platform going forward with 16 teams. If it goes larger then 16 then it would require 10 conference games to work or only one protected rival.

4 pods. You play the 3 other teams in your pod every year. There are then 12 teams you don't play every year. You would play those teams every other year. So, over a 4 year period, you will go to OSU once and have OSU come to you once unless you are in their pod.

You are asking why I am excited about this. I would rather be in an elite conference rather than being in a secondary conference while all the best teams play each other in the SEC while Purdue plays in a conference with Iowa, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, and TCU.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I am no more or less entertained given the "elite-ness" of the conference in which my team plays. What you think is an "elite" conference Brick, is just some bullshit that the administrators of the Big Ten have served you. What they are really chasing is dollars, and telling you they are chasing "elite-ness".

You realize that Purdue isn't going to send you any of that money right?

Over the past 25 years college athletics administrators have told us who they are, and who they think we are. They have chased money incessantly at the expense of everything else that was entertaining about the experience. They have done so, and (a) assumed the consumers would eat this shit and (b) told the consumer it was for the better, when it most clearly wasn't. The administrators are telling us who they think we are: dumbasses who will slurp up whatever shit they feed us, and in some cases believe that it tastes good.

Again, you said it yourself, it would be more entertaining if the Big 10 had not expanded past Penn State. You admitted that the Maryland/Rutgers/Nebraska expansion made the conference worse. Now your rationale seems to be that because it was made worse as a result of that, making it more worse, will inexplicably make it better? Sorry man.

Earlier you lamented the fact that Wisconsin would be playing less traditional Big Ten teams. I pointed out that USC/UCLA was a way to make sure that 3-6 Big Ten teams didn't leave to the SEC.

You wanted to know why I was excited for the addition of USC/UCLA. My answer is that we aren't ever going back to the "good old days" where the Big Ten was 10 or 11 teams and that UCLA/USC are good for the health of the conference going forward as there was a real threat that the SEC would try and poach at least 3 Big Ten teams and maybe a few more.

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I imagine after a few years of NIL madness and conference realignment, the remaining large conferences will move off of football and men's basketball as scholarship sports and convert the participants from scholarship student-athletes to employees.

If/when that happens, it could spell doom for women's lacrosse and rowing and such that exist as scholarship sports to balance out the funding provided to football/men's basketball. Once football and hoops stop providing scholarships and other university funding, there will no longer be a legal requirement to provide equal scholarships/funding to non-revenue generating women's college sports.

That would be cool. I hope you are right.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!