Also, USC and UCLA decided to leave their other conference foes behind in the pursuit of $$$. It doesn’t seem that they care much about them. I’m opposed to making concessions at the expense of the existing members.
Especially when you consider those road trips from USC and UCLA to Washington and Oregon are 1100 miles each. They aren’t gaining much. At least in some sports, teams can do one road trip to LA and play both teams. That doesn’t seem so bad. It’s a lot better logistically than adding other far flung schools.
If you were to give an appropriate weight value for each sport, football and basketball would total 100%. No other sport is even remotely relevant to this discussion.
I think the biggest issue travel-wise for the LA schools will be the time change. All the other schools are 2 or 3 time zones away. That’s going to make midweek scheduling complicated. Adding more Pacific time teams could allow the league to use some kind of pod scheduling.
They can often make the LA schools road games later starts. That makes sense for TV ratings anyway. They’ve signed on for dealing with frequent trips through multiple time zones and that’s going to happen regardless of whether a couple more schools are added. Making travel worse for every other school seems really unnecessary.
What does every possible way mean? Rutgers is one of the better schools in the BigTen, they literally invented football, and in recent years have put out competitive programs that have featured some of the sport’s most talented stars in Ron Harper Jr. and others. Perfect cultural fit if Penn State is now considered a fairly established member.
Realistically, all Big Ten schools don’t carry the same weight. These are two of the three most successful sports schools in NCAA history. The Big Ten will want to accommodate them and add more teams in their time zone - maybe not immediately, but after they’ve gone through a year or two of all the travel.
Rutgers probably was a reach to add and if they were not added 10 years ago or whatever we likely would not be looking at adding them now. But they’re here and probably deserve to be as much as Purdue does athletically so it is what it is
I’m actually pulling for Rutgers to build up and have some solid success. Just saying why many people are unhappy with them. If we’re gonna break up traditions and add programs, we should be doing so for competitive purposes. Rutgers was added for the wrong reasons, but they’re here now so hopefully they can take advantage of the B1G money and build something.
Let’s not end up with an echo-chamber here by running off the one solitary fan of another school that posts here on the regular because some you feel the need to repeat the scorching hot take of ‘Rutgers is bad’ over and over.
It’s nice to have input from another school’s fanbase and he’s not here arguing that Rutgers is some powerhouse about to roll through our conference or anything so ease up a bit.
Softball and baseball players had to deal with traveling to the west coast or the south for early season tournament/invitational. Since most classes are online thanks to pandemic that it can be done. They’ll have academic peeps helping coordinating between professors and the athletes to ensure they are on track to finish the courses
The Arizona schools, Colorado, and Utah will get B12 invites, and will have a choice between the remnants of the Pac (plus a potential allegiance with the ACC) or an expanded B12.
