A Case for the Big Ten

I hear the line repeated a lot, but no one seems to know what the schools receive. They automatically just divide the total reported figure by eleven schools, and assume that’s what the schools are getting, which is probably not accurate at all.

You guys should definitely go, you are underappreciated.

I offer my full support for Texas going to the Big Ten.

I think I kind of know what you guys are feeling right now. There was a lot of apprehension about Penn State joining the Big Ten 20 years ago. A lot of Penn State fans were against it because it meant giving up traditional rivalries like Syracuse, Pitt, Maryland, West Virginia, and Rutgers. And a lot of people in the Big Ten were against Penn State joining. The geography didn’t make sense, and the Big Ten was kind of down at the tail end of the 80’s while Penn State was winning national championships. So a lot of people thought Penn State was going to come in and dominate the league. It hasn’t worked out that way, but I sure like playing Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan State, and Purdue every year instead of the teams I mentioned before.

Now, 20 years later, I think it was a great move for all the parties involved. The Big Ten has benefited from adding the PA market. Michigan and Ohio State routinely raid PA and NJ for recruits they never got before. Illinois is very strong in what Washington DC area for some reason. And from Penn State’s perspective, they’re making a lot more money now than they would have as an independant. Plus, all of the programs have benefited from the move. With the exception of probably men’s basketball, every Penn State sport is highly competitive.

I really think Texas could do well in the Big Ten. Because you are outside of the traditional B10 footprint, you have a natural recruiting advantage. PSU can lock down PA, NY, MD, NJ, and New England. They don’t have to fight with Illinois, Indiana, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan State and Michigan to lock up the talent in their home state.

I’d like to see Texas join the Big Ten. Heck, I live 90 miles from Austin, so it would give me a chance to see my Nittany Lions every few years. But I kind of doubt it will happen. The state of Texas might secede from the union over this.

Does Texas (or Texas Athletics to be more exact) need the money? Not really.

Are the “academics” of the Big 12 holding Texas back? Not that I’m aware of.

Does Texas need to recruit the Big 10 states? The State of Texas has more than enough talent.

Will Texas be on TV more? I, for one, don’t really count being on the Big10 Network as an achievement. Pretty much every big Texas game gets on TV.

Would being in the Big 10 help us reach more National Title games? We went to one less MNC game than Ohio St. in the 2000’s. Insert asterisk joke here.

Why on Earth would we want our team to play in a conference with a bunch of Yankees, so that our away games will be prohibitively hard for most of our fans to get to?

What’s wrong with the Big12 for the love of VY? We get plenty of money and prestige where we are and our boys rarely have to play in the snow. Let the Big 10 stuff go.

Or more than i currently do with the current TV situation without having to pay an arm and a leg. A Big Ten network would accomplish that. If just for that, I’m for the move. And oh yeah, the Big 12 is just pulling us down right now. The North alone. Sheesh. Let’s toss aside the anchor and move on to bigger and better things.

I would love to play the Big Ten schools. Like most Texans, I am a transplanted mid-westerner and there are a lot of us here in Houston. Many Longhorn fans have ties to other midwestern states, and the viewing audience would be huge. I watch Big 10 sports, including wrestling on ESPN.

Many businesses focus on this same middle geographic region—for instance the late, great Marshall Field’s and Neiman Marcus were both focused on the similarities of folks from Chicago and Dallas/Houston.

Big Ten schools do have a better academic reputation and I would love to see Texas with Michigan/Purude/Penn State, Wisconsin.

I don’t want to see aTm stuck blowing in the wind.

Baylor and Tech don’t deserve to be in a top tier conference in my opinion so I don’t really care what happens to them. They can join UH in Conference America or do something with the BYU and Utah, etc. Or perhpahs BYU/Utah will join the Big XII.

OU—They have run such a shady program for so long I kind of like the idea of Texas stepping up to a higher level academic conference and leaving them at their lower academic level. OU takes recruits that would never survive our academics, so let’s just call it like it is and step up.

I also kind of feel like Tulsa HS in regards to playing Jenks HS. After the Jarrett Lake fiasco and the non-termination of Coach Trimble—who will be back this year—Tulsa told the shady Jenks program that they won’t play them anymore despite the historic non-conference rivalry.

We could still play the Aggies out of conference and even play OU too, but the more I think about it the less I care what happens to OU.

I was about to start an entirely separate thread as a result of this article, but I realized that that would create four active realignment threads.

A writer for SI is calling for the Pac 10 to go after Texas. (Not Texas Tech. Sorry, Skin Patrol.)

One interesting point in particular:

Would the Longhorns leap? Probably not. As we’ve noted, the school already makes plenty of money, and it’s exploring the formation of its own TV network, which could produce even more revenue. Also, the state legislature could get involved, as it did in the early 1990s, to protect other state schools. But Scott needs to at least ask the question and learn the answer. And if it means inviting Texas A&M, too, go for it.

I’ve argued elsewhere that I don’t think that the Legislature would be inclined to block a Texas move to the Big 10, but if it were so inclined, and Texas believed that it needed to bail on the Big XII before it otherwise imploded, the Pac 10’s need for two teams could allow Texas to drag along the Aggies if the Pac 10 really wanted Texas (much in the same way that the Virginia Legislature forced UVa to support Virginia Tech’s entry into the ACC if UVa were to cast a vote in favor of expansion).

On the other hand, the author seems to imply that UT would listen to offers from the SEC, which seems extraordinarily unlikely, and he states that it was Texas which turned down the Pac 10, which seems contrary to what most of us seem to know about the realignments of the 1990s, so maybe he’s not the most reliable source.

A writer for SI is calling for the Pac 10 to go after Texas. (Not Texas Tech. Sorry, Skin Patrol.)

I support UT going to the Pac 10 as well.

would destroy one of the best college baseball programs in the nation.

Is it just money?
I’d be really interested to see both the age and birthplace demographics of those who support and those who oppose the move.
Who wants to watch Texas play Indiana or Purdue year in year out?

If we like what we see when we look into our own TV network, we could just drop the Big 12 and go independent. We could keep Tech, A&M, Baylor, and OU on the schedule, revive the Arkansas rivalry, and then start exploring some big game options. I wonder how that would work? I can see it being difficult to keep a tough schedule, since most of the big team wouldn’t want to play us (or couldn’t for five years or something when their schedules open up again). The big advantage would be the opportunity to keep all our revenue from bowls and TV. Even if this isn’t necessarily a huge improvement over the Big 12, we could at least use the threat of it as leverage. Jumping the Big 12 would probably be a near death blow, maybe we can get the league office off its collective butt to do what we have to in order to get a proper TV deal. There’s no way we should make less from TV than Northwestern.

How many Texas fans could / would make the trek to any of our Big 10 away games? I get the feeling we are headed for a major reconfiguration of the conferences, with TV markets, $$, academics and $$ (yes, twice for emphasis) trumping geography and longstanding rivalries. If that happens, I hope it’s not piecemeal, as a Texas-to-Big 10 move would be. Why not break up the big conferences now and create the superconferences we are headed for, but with some semblance of geographic balance. I would sooner see Texas in a super-con with Florida, Georgia and LSU than Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. Then again — is Gainesville that much closer than Madison?

The $22 million figure is the actual payout to each of the schools after the expenses of the Big Ten Network. It’s a massive cash cow. Please note that the $10 million annual increase is (1) the MINIMUM that Texas would receive, since projections of getting the Big Ten Network at the maximum rate across the state of Texas would probably kick that increase up to more than $15-20 million per year extra (which would be a total of $25 million to over $30 million for Texas in TV money annual as opposed to the $12 million that it receives now) and (2) more than the value of Notre Dame’s vaunted NBC contract, which is worth $9 million per year.

So, Texas, at a minimum, would be adding more than the value of the entire Notre Dame NBC contract to its coffers by joining the Big Ten. ND travels from coast-to-coast for football and is a member of the far flung Big East for other sports, so it’s pretty obvious that $9 million is plenty in terms of covering travel expenses while maintaining a rich athletic department (much less the $25-30 million that Texas might be getting total in a Big Ten move). That amount of money is definitely not chump change to the athletic department (and doesn’t even consider the academic benefits of being a CIC member).