B10 could go to 21 teams with 3 divisions of 7 teams. 4 team playoff could be winners of each division plus a wild card team.
USC, UCLA to join the Big Ten in 2024
- Status
dgcrow
- Kelso, WA
I know there's been talk about doing away with divisions, but assuming only USC and UCLA are added in 2004, would there be some merit in simply adding them to the Big 10 West, with Purdue sliding over to the BIg 10 East? Schedule 7 conference games within the division and 2 in the other?
Its so crazy to think that Illinois could be in a division with USC, UCLA, and Nebraska
illini80
- Forgottonia
I hope not.
Interestingly, Michigan is the only B10 team that has a combined winning record against USC and UCLA.
We're still not discussing this enough in 21st century terms. What's happening is the Amazonification/Teslafication of college football. It's not revenue streams, it's control over markets. Amazon lost multiple billions in its first four years as a public company. Tesla took eleven years before finally turning a profit in 2020. But their stock prices soared anyway because it was not about earnings. The value in poaching a particular school is measured not so much by the revenue it brings but the leverage gained on the conference it left. Hard to believe this process is anywhere near complete.
Shief
- Champaign Area
If there are pods, I can see a push to have the rep from each pod but I would prefer picking the top 4 teams overall. If it's protected rivals and rotating games, I would assume the top 4 teams would join the mini-playoff.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
That's an excellent analogy to describe the exact opposite of what's happening here.
Tesla and Amazon eschew profit to invest heavily in new lines of business and innovate in the explosively growing areas of the future.
Major college football, correctly considered as a whole, is downsizing struggling markets and watering down its service in order to prop up profitability in the fewer remaining markets, extracting the maximum possible dollars out of the settled habits of the aging existing customer base while it lasts.
That's K-Mart. That's Blockbuster Video.
You know how there are combination Taco Bell/KFC/Pizza Hut's now? Concentrating brands with lesser menus in one building to save on labor and overhead? THAT'S the Big Ten. USC vs Purdue is getting a side of mashed potatoes with your Crunchwrap Supreme.
If you have 15 minutes, watch this video in full. The data is insane and covers factors I didn’t even think of.
Champaign Toast
Fan since Kiwane Garris
Riffing on your Euro soccer comparison...
I don't believe the below worthy of a serious discussion*, but it's interesting to consider a Big Ten that has itself into 1st and 2nd divisions for football with promotion and relegation between them...
*...because how could you even do year #1? Would we never again face certain conference rivals? Does half of the conference demand bigger shares of conference payout? Do booster $$$ for 2nd division disappear? Is the hit to recruiting too great for 2nd division in a given year?
Regular season: Play everyone within your division once, plus additional # of cross-division conference games as the schedule allows.
After regular season outcomes: Top 2 promoted from 2nd division, bottom 2 relegated from 1st division. Top 2 in 1st division earn automatic bids to a college football playoff.
Picture this as an example of an imagined 2024 season...
1st division
USC
Iowa
Wisconsin
Michigan State
Michigan
Ohio State
Penn State
Notre Dame
Oregon
2nd division
UCLA
Nebraska
Minnesota
Northwestern
Illinois *by 2024 we're better than this!?!?!?!
Purdue
Indiana
Maryland
Rutgers
illini80
- Forgottonia
Well that hits a little too close to home there Gritty! However, I agree with your takes on these changes more than I want to.
I see little discussion or concern on how this affects the athletes themselves. It would seem to mean fewer or least less lucrative opportunities for many of them. I suppose that will be weighed against more national NIL opportunities for the very few at the top.
Last edited:
Some say Tesla and Amazon eschewed profit to invest heavily in new lines of business and innovate in the explosively growing areas of the future. (No doubt Amazon and Tesla say that.) Others say Tesla and Amazon eschewed profit to build market share until they could manipulate pricing and bury potential competitors underfoot. A lot of people probably could have figured out how to ship you a pair of socks in 18 hours. The Amazon business model ensured it would not be profitable for anyone but them to try unless Amazon said so (and got a cut).
But if you view college football as a product that is retailed to aging consumers like VHS tapes, cheap fast food, or off-brand jeans in a disheveled brick and mortar discount store, then your predictions make sense. I guess consolidation is how you get more out of something that people want less. But I don’t see indications that people want less. The value in CFB for those who look to extract it seems to be that it is content that reliably attracts eyeballs to screens. Consolidation of the vendors and distributors of that content to control the market is hardly surprising. Maybe that’s destructive and maybe that’s bad. But how it signals the desperate retreat of a shrinking outdated business, what is the evidence of that? Please, convince me.
But if you view college football as a product that is retailed to aging consumers like VHS tapes, cheap fast food, or off-brand jeans in a disheveled brick and mortar discount store, then your predictions make sense. I guess consolidation is how you get more out of something that people want less. But I don’t see indications that people want less. The value in CFB for those who look to extract it seems to be that it is content that reliably attracts eyeballs to screens. Consolidation of the vendors and distributors of that content to control the market is hardly surprising. Maybe that’s destructive and maybe that’s bad. But how it signals the desperate retreat of a shrinking outdated business, what is the evidence of that? Please, convince me.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Uber is sort of the classic example of that business model.
Not sure how to tie that analogy into this, tbh.
Exactly!!
That's why I originally drew the analogy to local newspapers. It's end of life cycle profit harvesting for a completely viable business. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Washington State football. Wiping it off the map to consolidate revenue in the remainder is purely an act of destruction, even leaving aside the deadweight loss of burning up decades of tradition within the Big Ten.
You're left with fewer eyeballs on TV's and fewer butts in seats for the sport as a whole. That's just objective fact. And subjectively, feel free to disagree but I'm telling ya, you're presenting a less interesting product unmoored from the things that made the sport popular in the first place, for which the audience is always going to be anchored upon those who grew up caring about the real Big Ten, which is to say an ever older cohort.
Btw, just to throw out what I would have done, back in the late Aughts when it became clear that the BTN was going to be a viable and durable presence on people's cable packages, instead of cynically trying to push a product that gets low ratings for second tier football and basketball games and literally zero ratings for anything else into totally disinterested markets to siphon off the cable bundle scam, the conference should have heavily invested in diversifying its fan interest into baseball, hockey and soccer, proven TV commodities that could be leveraged off the popularity of the existing school brands. Which in turn then strengthens those brands, deepening the attachment to the marketplace in which the Big Ten brand means something.
We didn't know it then and hindsight is 20:20, but the possibilities NIL introduces in that regard are huge. If the groundwork had been laid a decade ago this could be taking off now. Creating more products more people want to watch is something that will be durable across all changes, all media environments.
Instead we made a ton of money off of Rutgers and Maryland getting us basic cable carriage fees in NYC and DC, and now that cable is dying (as was completely obvious at the time) we're stuck with two deadweight mouths to feed and opponents no one cares about until the end of time. Shortsightedness beyond belief.
chrisRunner7
- Spokane, WA
Wow, insane is correct... this is a crazy video from some random fan on the internet. He has me sold on Stanford being in the next round of expansion, whenever that happens.
Take the University of Washington for example. The conversation here and elsewhere tends to focus on that program's current revenues and whether adding them would increase the profit share for each member school. But I don't see why the B1G would care about that. UW's revenue picture will be altered anyway the minute you add them. So the operative question is, by not adding them, are you lowering the price you can demand on a per-team average basis in future contract negotiations if you don't control that particular segment of the market. That's what I meant by Amazonification. It doesn't matter what your profits are now. It matters which competitors you need to eliminate to maximize your leverage someday in the future. From that perspective, I don't think the B1G/SEC consortium's task was complete just by flipping Texas/Oklahoma and USC/UCLA. There are still enough bits out there left to drive down prices and raise costs. It will serve the interest of the superconferneces to get those schools off the open market, the sooner the better.
When you explain it this way, I can see your point. There is a tier of power 5 programs who's brand strength and fan experience is going to be significantly diminished, and that's going to drive people away and burn a lot of money. Can't argue that. And I also see your point that in many respects the quality of the product will be reduced. To be fair, I was never in the camp that was excited about superconferences. I barely have the bandwidth to know what's going on in Champaign. I'm definitely not keeping track of developments out of Eugene Oregon or Chapel Hill North Carolina.
But I still don't see this superconference reality portending the decline of college athletics. Subjectively, many of us aren't going to like it, and we'll speak our displeasure with our dollars if the experience is no longer fun. But below the power five, programs aren't especially struggling financially or otherwise and I don't foresee that the structures supporting those programs are going to change radically. At a certain depth even the NIL impact is not strongly felt.
Besides, my sense is that the real driving force here is not the traditional NCAA revenue streams (TV contracts, mainly) but the more amorphous concept of engagement with content across all platforms, something inscrutable that I admit at my age I do not really understand well. To the markets, the Ohio State Buckeyes aren't Friends or The Sopranos. They're a youtuber with 90 million subscribers. They're MrBeast, which is something I only know exists because I have an eight year old son. I have no idea who monetizes MrBeast or the process by which it's even done, but I'm sure the guy is worth a half-billion dollars, or that amount in NFTs or bitcoin, and more words that have no meaning to me. We see this as well with other sports. We saw this with international soccer. Even Formula One is a thing in America now. I'm not sure major college football needs the old-man version of me to still be watching their specialty network on channel 472 of Spectrum Cable ten years from now. They might be broadcasting on Instagram TV to a demographic of Austrian teenagers. Maybe that's going too far. But in 2022 it seems pretty clear that money is still flowing in. I don't see an obvious mechanism that will be shutting it off.
I’m just kinda jacked up thinking the quality of B1G cheerleading is going to go way up
illini80
- Forgottonia
Thanks for articulating what I was trying to say convey earlier and making it way more understandable! I don’t think anyone has a clear picture of what the kingmakers are thinking despite the strong opinions on this board. My guess is the same arguments are being had behind closed doors.
Mr. Tibbs
- southeast DuPage
like many, I'm simultaneously excited about the new B1G landscape, and yet wish for the simpler days of the Original 10 (or even the 11) .
But change has come in many ways to the college games of football and basketball.
- there is basically no governing body anymore
- Players get money legally
- players are basically free agents
- games are held on every day of the week
- a national championship in football is only a real possibility for about 6-8 schools
- a B1G football championship never comes from the west division
that said, there are still many reasons to embrace the college football and basketball game and continue to choose to spend your time following the Illini rather than the Bears or Bulls (or other pro sports).
Im looking at the glass as half full, not half empty
But change has come in many ways to the college games of football and basketball.
- there is basically no governing body anymore
- Players get money legally
- players are basically free agents
- games are held on every day of the week
- a national championship in football is only a real possibility for about 6-8 schools
- a B1G football championship never comes from the west division
that said, there are still many reasons to embrace the college football and basketball game and continue to choose to spend your time following the Illini rather than the Bears or Bulls (or other pro sports).
Im looking at the glass as half full, not half empty
Last edited:
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
I gotcha. But I don't think it's the right framing to look at the Big Ten as the unit of measurement rather than big time college football as a whole.
Anyway, at this stage, there is not enough outside the B1G/SEC to combine and form an economically meaningful competitor, at least not in the present world where football is the revenue alpha dog. That was probably true once Texas/Oklahoma happened and there can be no doubt now.
That's not true at all.
College football attendance declines for seventh straight season to lowest average since 1981
Even the best teams and conferences across college football saw attendance drops this season
www.cbssports.com
Most NCAA Division I athletic departments take subsidies
All but 23 Division I athletic departments received subsidies.
www.usatoday.com
That's kind of the point I've been making. Between the level of drawing its revenue from declining and increasingly non-viable cable TV structures and a lack of penetration into emerging media, college sports are in as vulnerable of a position as any major American sports entity besides baseball.
That doesn't mean doomsday, it's not like Formula One is going to be more popular than college football any time soon, but it's a troubling landscape and shrinking the product and making it less meaningful the way the powers that be are doing is exactly the wrong thing.
Oklahoma playing Georgia in an NFL palace in Atlanta for an SEC Championship title that puts both of them into the playoff the programs actually care about anyway is not the sport that put its roots deep into the American soil. It just isn't. Growing vs. Harvesting.
DaChief4ever
- Urbana
The FSU Chief will become a traveling symbol for all SEC schools......
i don't disagree but I want ND to be "forced" (for want of a better word) into a conference such as the Big 10. They are always overrated at least 10 positions higher than they should be and play a weak schedule I mean, c'mon, playing Navy every year. Just have to look at this year's schedule, they start with OSU but it is the first game of the season and anything can happen in the first game of a season. In the Big Ten that game would be scheduled later when things are more settled, weaknesses are addressed, etc. Their next few opponents, Marshall, California, North Carolina, BYU, Stanford, and UNLV. I don't follow football much so I don't know if these teams are good this year but I still see this as a pretty weak schedule. I seem to remember that when Penn State joined the Big Ten Joe Paterno was all for it because he thought PSU football would dominate the Big Ten and they would win many championships. Didn't exactly work out although I am not saying PSU hasn't done well, just not as well as they thought and PSU is generally ranked where they should be. I think this will happen to ND. They will be good (in football) just not as good as they are usually regarded (wrongly). ND would just be another good football team but would not be overrated like they are every year. Sorry, just my rant about ND football.
Mr. Tibbs
- southeast DuPage
the same can be said about Nebraska when they joined. They all thought they were going to be perennial champs too.
Not sure if that is what ND secretly fears, but they will find it real hard to go through a B1G schedule with less than 3 losses every year, should they every join
Joel Goodson
- respect my decision™
ND knows that their schedule will be much more difficult. For anyone thinking that isn't a factor, wanna buy the Brooklyn bridge?
Regardless of which side of the Amazon debate you fall on, I’d just like to express my thanks for the thoughtful, respectful, and informative discussion here. A+ stuff. Props to @ChiefGritty and @AutoPoster 3000 and all on the site.
Agreed!
Latest theory of mine, college football is actually retracting from a long era of over subsidized, over expansion.
Peak college football was probably pre-NFL when the 80K-100K stadiums were built and Red Grange played. Then I'd posit there was a long era of college football as cheap advertising. Lots of players, cheap stadiums, cheap coaching staffs, etc. led to every college and university in the country fielding a DI team whether they could fill the stands or not, just so Podunk State could claim to be "Big Time".
I'm too lazy to look up the data. But I'd be interested in seeing how college football's slice of American's entertainment dollars has tracked over time against the number of D1 schools.
As near as I can tell, the only reason small programs have survived as long as they have into the modern era is they could sign up to get pounded on for 3-4 games a year as practice material for the big programs. Not sure how healthy that was for college football as entrainment, let alone the players.
Peak college football was probably pre-NFL when the 80K-100K stadiums were built and Red Grange played. Then I'd posit there was a long era of college football as cheap advertising. Lots of players, cheap stadiums, cheap coaching staffs, etc. led to every college and university in the country fielding a DI team whether they could fill the stands or not, just so Podunk State could claim to be "Big Time".
I'm too lazy to look up the data. But I'd be interested in seeing how college football's slice of American's entertainment dollars has tracked over time against the number of D1 schools.
As near as I can tell, the only reason small programs have survived as long as they have into the modern era is they could sign up to get pounded on for 3-4 games a year as practice material for the big programs. Not sure how healthy that was for college football as entrainment, let alone the players.
- Status