Remember those commercials where the camera pans out and the couple kissing are an OSU and UM fan? Ew, just ew!
I think we should be looking to create a two-division football conference with the strong academic ACC and Pac 12 schools and–regardless of whether we’re ‘better’ than a completely corrupt SEC, work to preserve a little bit of the integrity and non-commercial appeal of the college game. Play up the passing of the revenue to increased scholarships to address decreasing minority enrollment; play up the fact that our schools are more than football factories; and have by far the best hoop brand to build on.
The time approaches, IMO, where a lot of people are so turned off by the commercial delays, the QBs with ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ tattoo’d on their foreheads, etc., that they give up on the game completely. (I’m pretty much there.) So many schools are going to be left by the wayside; serious backlash may be coming.
Absolutely love the concept. Now all we need to do is ask the greedy to be less so. And to your sentiment that “I’m already there” in hanging up watching CFB, count me among them. Every season for at least the last five or so, it’s only three schools among the 100+ that matter each season; the rest is background noise. That’s not a product I care about.
Oregon doesn’t have that many fans. Their state is not that populous and they share it with OSU.
And they’re on the West Coast so a lot of their games end late for Eastern viewers.
Nike has allowed them to massively punch over their weight class. They were basically something like Purdue or Illinois before Phil Knight started forking over mountains of cash.
If people are wondering about what B1G might do in conference realignment, it would be much more instructive to look at this list compiled in r/cfb on Reddit by u/rustybelts than any foootball or basketball rankings. It’s not perfect but is a good summary.
Apologies for the cut and paste as I didn’t have time to figure out how to link on mobile.
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Ranking FBS Schools by R&D Expenditures
Since it is #realignmentszn, I figured it would be useful to organize the research & development expenditure data that is floating around the sub. Forget TV ratings and on field performance; university presidents want some of those sweet, sweet research alliances!
For simplicity sake, I kept institutions separate and did not combine entities within the same university system. Ex: U. Nebraska, Lincoln is a separate entity from the U. Nebraska, Medical Center. Nebraska’s R&D figure reflects U. Nebraska, Lincoln.
There are inevitably a few mistakes in this compilation. Feel free to correct or clarify.
What motivates the thinking here? Does conference affiliation lead to greater… collaboration(?) for member schools? I might be missing the point but seems like an empirically testable question if that’s the logic.
As much as academics historically played into conference decisions and the idea of AAU research universities being a requirement for the B10 did have value…it feels like those days are gone. Rutgers and Maryland were not added because of anything other than TV markets.
At this point in time? It isn’t clear what drives any of these decisions. TV is still a major factor, but the format of those deals is evolving with streaming services. Competitive alignment matters to a point…but mostly for football and even that is a stretch (see: Rutgers). Other sports barely even are considered and that would include basketball (see: Rutgers, Nebraska). Geography used to matter, but doesn’t really anymore.
This is driven by money, power, greed, and football in some particular order. If the B10 thought they could get Texas or Notre Dame they would have - regardless of anything else. All of the other schools are pretty flawed additions to the conference in one way or another.
Big Ten Academic Alliance, formerly known as Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has for many decades have had much more errr communistic approach to the competition for research funding. Many federal and corporate research grants are collaborative bids between B1G institutions, and B1G have built over the last 50-70 years essentially shared back end support for their pursuit of the competitive research dollars such as merged library and information systems, collaborative graduate degree programs etc.
As you see in the above tables, competitive research funding acquisition is a huge business, Michigan’s share of it alone eclipsing the entire TV revenues of CFB.
So what the administration of the B1G universities are looking for are other universities that are successful in winning competitive research grants that can help expand the pull of the money brought into the entire collective. This is why AAU membership is such a big deal as that’s essentially a short hand for such qualification. Hopefully that gives a broad outline of what this means,
You might want to double check where Maryland and Rutgers rank in the above charts,
You are correct in that this has always been about money, but the football TV money is pocket change compared to research funding and sports fans often don’t understand the difference between so called academics vs. battle for research dollars and prestige that really drives decisions of universities who play in that rarified arena.
The data is interesting but there’s a lot of hand waving happening here. The scale of the difference in TV contracts is $5-20M per year. The marginal annual contribution an institution generates for another institution is not likely on that scale, regardless of the size of research budgets. If it were, though, you’d see at least some of these conferences behaving very differently than they do.
The current theory is, basically, to add a school to a conference, they have to bring at least as much revenue to the table as the schools are currently getting from their TV contracts. If that’s false, you should see the conferences which supposedly have more concern for research budgets willingly add many more conference members so long as their ability to generate new research $$ exceeds the dilution you’d see from TV. What examples of that exist? Not being dismissive, just interested in the evidence.
I know the B1G reasonably well and that’s only n = 3. But just eyeballing it, like, it’s pretty easy to work through why Rutgers rather than Pitt was added. Or why Nebraska was added. Or any of the myriad plausible geographic + academic fits that never happened, particularly ones where their sports are meh at best like Vandy and Georgia Tech. That’s not to say the B1G doesn’t care about AAU status or all sorts of things but if you were trying to figure out the weight the B1G puts on TV vs. research dollars, looks to me like TV is in fact what’s actually contributing to the bottom line.
You ask for evidence and I don’t have specific public data to point to other than my past conversations with B1G universities high level administrators, including many of the p/vp level on professional basis. To them, marginal benefit in adding the right schools were considered significant, although it took right school for it to make sense.
I recall when PSU was invited, no one on that level talked about PSU’s invitation to BIG10 as anything other than “courtesy invitation” as a part of their invitation to CIC. I used quotes there as that was the actual phrase used in internal communications, both formal and informal.
I’ve left the academia some time back so I don’t have direct interaction with the administrations anymore, but I still have some contacts left in Academia and when these kinds of discussions come up from time to time, it doesn’t seem like base mind set has changed much if any over the years.
The only semi convincing public data point I can offer other than my personal anecdotes is that in most current rumors about B1G expansion, the AAU membership still comes up as a requirement.
So please take what I say however you would. After all, it’s just another random person posting on an internet message board.
I do think that historically academics has played a larger role in conference alignment and I also agree that with the B10 specifically they will at least consider it whereas other conferences (coughSECcough) likely won’t consider it at all. This data to support your point was very helpful.
At the same time, Nebraska would be an indication of how the modern B10 thinks. Overall their athletic department stinks and brings a net negative to the conference. The theory was that their historically strong football program would be a positive and that’s what drove the decision - even without their own TV market, just their strong fan base. They are the lowest ranked university on your list by over 10 spots. They are the only non-AAU institution in the conference.
There are plenty of schools that would be “interesting” to add like Iowa State, Kansas, Pitt, Missouri, Syracuse, etc. All of them are flawed one way or another. If we were trying to grow from 10 to 12…I’d be interested. I just don’t see the point or value of growing from 14 (already big) to 16+. Why bother?
If you want to sell me on some sort of new league or if you want to have different “conferences” for different sports (similar to hockey) then I’m listening.
Yeah I don’t think you’re “wrong” or something. I’m confident AAU membership does matter bc people talk about it mattering when they report on what presidents are thinking. Just saying that a lot of things matter and we can probably guess at the weights institutions put on each of those things when we look at their behavior. The demand for schools w/ lesser athletics in meh TV markets but crazy research budgets should be very telling in that regard.
Nebraska lost their AAU membership after joining the Big Ten. I think it’s fair to say the Big Ten reached a little on their academic standing, but if the AAU was a requirement, they didn’t waive it.
As far as I know, most of the other athletic conferences don’t have an academic alliance similar to the Big Ten’s.
And to your sentiment that “I’m already there” in hanging up watching CFB, count me among them. Every season for at least the last five or so, it’s only three schools among the 100+ that matter each season; the rest is background noise. That’s not a product I care about.
