Maryland is official. Rutgers expected to announce officially tomorrow. I've also heard that the Under Armour CEO (Maryland alum) is expected to pay much of the exit fee. I understand why the Big Ten is doing it, but realignment continues to get more and more ridiculous by the year.
While I'm sure talking about the newcomers to the Big Ten on this forum is waste of breath as it all comes down to football and basketball revenue, but let's just say it.... This is soon to become the Big20 or is it the Big Ten x 2. There should be a little less whinning by those Big Ten soccer teams who want more competition (wait till more competiton happens in recruiting too ) The only thing that is getting somewhat off is the original spirit of conferences....to play within a region. It just gets harder for both fans and athletes to be traveling around. At least Washington DC (College Park) and Rutgers have more direct flights out of Indianapolis, Detroit and Chicago/Milwaukee for most teams.
Well that is pretty vague already. If you want to follow a Pac12 or WCC team now, you are talking a 2000 mile commute. Even the ACC has been 1500 miles or more between FSU Miami and BC, hasn't it? How many direct flights do you imagine there are between San Diego and Spokane?
8 non-stop flights a day between Minneapolis and Washington National, 11 flights a day between Minneapolis and Newark. And that's not even counting Dulles, BWI, Laguardia or JFK. When the conferences were originally formed, it was actually a journey to play your furthest flung rival. Now it's a commute.
How many non stop flights to Happy Valley? When the NCAA sent UP there, it was a 13 hr trip with a 5 hr layover over 2 days with a 3 hour bus ride tacked on.
I went to State College for a football game in 2003. Flew Minneapolis to Baltimore, rented a car, had a crab dinner in the city and then made the 3 hour drive. Definitely among the harder schools to get to if you don't want to pay the crazy premium to fly into the local airport.
Posted this on the UNC thread, but heard tonight that UNC is considering moving to the Big 10, and possibly followed by either Virginia or Georgia Tech. With Maryland and Rutgers coming over already that is going to be a serious womens soccer conference.
I doubt UNC makes the move, they're too connected to Duke and NC State being in the same Metro area. I think we're more likely to see GT, UVA or Florida State. Maybe Georgia Tech would add women's soccer if they moved to the B1G? Hasn't one of their arguments for not starting a team been the quality competition in their conference? Rutgers and Maryland are already solid additions for B1G soccer. While the conference has always been strong, I'm hoping that bumping it up a level will entice some of the elite kids to stay closer to home. Over the past 10 years there have been many players from the Big Ten footprint starring on the coasts.
What I can't figure out is why no one is out there promoting sanity in the midst of all this football driven conference re-alignment. If various schools are lusting after the football and basketball TV exposure and the big dollars, go ahead and get those alignments as they want them and rake in the TV markets and cash. But why should this money grab necessarily involve the olympic sports? The non-revenue sports should be in sane conferences too, where travel distances are reasonable, rivalries make sense, and competition is at the level desired. The system could work out for everyone if the big football and basketball schools got their leagues, and the olympic sports got what they wanted too. Why Not?????
The Big Ten is a major academic consortium as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Institutional_Cooperation) which is why schools like UNC, GT and UVA appeal beyond their athletic prowess and media market size. From a Minnesota standpoint, where the closest major D1 school is over a 3.5 hour drive away, traveling to cities with major airports is a lot easier than going to Indiana or Penn State. There are a zillion flights between MSP and ATL on a daily basis. In the midwest we're not all jammed together like on the coast.
OK. I get that you've added an academic consortium to the mix too. But why on earth should THAT then be tied in with football, basketball or olympic sports??? My question could also just be raised in terms of the old argument about what athletic conferences are and what higher education has to do with hiring professional football and basketball teams (which unarguably is what big time D-I football and basketball are.)
The university of Chicago is in the consortium. I think they last played in the big 10 when my father played football in the thirties.
Questioning the validity of college sports is a broad and heavy topic to cover when addressing whether schools should make the jump to the Big Ten. BTN airs more "olympic sports" coverage than anything the ACC schools are getting right now, so not sure how it'd be viewed as a negative in that regard.
Our experience has been that BTN is widely available and nondiscriminatory in what they air and tried to give all the teams roughly equal coverage. ACC aired NC area games first and just made sure the northerners got at least one game. This had nothing to do with quality - NC State which was at the bottom of the ACC (rather consistently) had something like 5 games televised in 2012. Fall 2012 Florida, a non-ACC school, had more games televised on the ACC network than BC or Maryland (Good luck to Pitt and Syracuse).
in all fairness, almost no one gets ACC network anyway. Making their programming decisions inconsequential