https://www.goiowaawesome.com/the-big-ten/2018/09/3108/the-big-ten-needs-to-contract
There was a time, not that long ago when The Big Ten was actually a big ten. From 1952 to 1992, the league was made up of core schools in a basic footprint. Ohio State in the east, Iowa in the west, eight other schools in between. And while it might not have been the most interesting football conference -- two schools in particular had a tendency to win all the time -- it certainly wasn't totally embarrassing (1970s Iowa and pretty-much-the-entire-timeframe Northwestern notwithstanding).
But Ohio State/Michigan/Hayden-era Iowa/occasionally interesting Mike White-era Illinois weren't enough for the league, especially once the NCAA stranglehold on televised football came to an end. And so the conference added some star power: Joe Paterno's Penn State, which was the first post-ten Big Ten team in 1993. The Nittany Lions spent the rest of the 90s running the show, going 70-16 overall and 41-15 in the conference. And then Paterno finally slipped for a while on the field, and then Paterno's mistakes off the field ended his tenure.
Penn State was a decent fit. It was in a state further east than any other Big Ten school, but the school was still largely Midwestern. It's west of the Appalachians. It has a dairy. It's in the middle of nowhere, and it was a traditional football powerhouse that was still relevant at the time it was added. Furthermore, Penn State didn't lose its recruiting territory when it came to the Big
Ten; many of its players were drawn from within the Big Ten footprint or neighboring states, where Penn State Football was still Penn State Football. If you take away the horrible crimes committed within its program and the stigma that came from those crimes, there would be little reason to dispute Penn State's inclusion in the conference.
But that's a big 'if'.
We were told that business mandated expansion to include Nebraska in 2011. The Big Ten Network, the biggest gamble ever taken by the league, was a gigantic success, a money tree that somehow didn't grow so large that it harmed the conference's top-tier broadcast rights.
But the Big Ten Network/broadcast television revenue model bastardized the league's goals. Now the league wanted big names -- and the big national broadcast dollars their games could command -- and cable-connected local television sets with cable companies willing to pay absurd carriage fees for BTN.
Jim Delany first used all of his television money to destabilize the Big 12, correctly sensing that the conference was quickly falling into a black hole centered in Austin and that its lack of history and geography made divisions natural and inevitable. He waved a bunch of cash at Nebraska and promoted the Big Ten's all-for-one mentality, and suddenly Nebraska was a Big Ten team.
But the Nebraska that Delany landed was a decade removed from relevance. They had jettisoned not just their coach and staff, but their entire philosophy, in 2004. The result had been a disaster, at least compared to the previous decade's standard, and a second coaching change had peaked with the Cornhuskers as a solid also-ran in the Big 12.
Nebraska's move to the Big Ten didn't do anything to help bolster the Huskers. Quite to the contrary, it added a modicum of academic standards missing in those mid-90s teams. And to the extent that Nebraska had a post-Osborne recruiting philosophy -- Texas, California, Florida, sometimes all at once -- it certainly wasn't inside the Big Ten footprint. Nebraska's previous mistakes had made it less relevant on the national stage; Nebraska's move to the Big Ten only accelerated the slide.
In 2014, Delany shocked the world by adding Maryland and Rutgers to the conference. It was a blatant play for cable-connected televisions in Washington D.C. and New York City, and nothing more. Maryland athletics was saddled with crippling debt that Big Ten lucre could fix; Rutgers was essentially a mid-major program. Neither had a football program with any sort of history; Maryland had won a single ACC championship since 1985, and Rutgers had long since lost program savior Greg Schiano to the NFL, quickly falling back into the lower tiers of mediocrity.
(con't)
There was a time, not that long ago when The Big Ten was actually a big ten. From 1952 to 1992, the league was made up of core schools in a basic footprint. Ohio State in the east, Iowa in the west, eight other schools in between. And while it might not have been the most interesting football conference -- two schools in particular had a tendency to win all the time -- it certainly wasn't totally embarrassing (1970s Iowa and pretty-much-the-entire-timeframe Northwestern notwithstanding).
But Ohio State/Michigan/Hayden-era Iowa/occasionally interesting Mike White-era Illinois weren't enough for the league, especially once the NCAA stranglehold on televised football came to an end. And so the conference added some star power: Joe Paterno's Penn State, which was the first post-ten Big Ten team in 1993. The Nittany Lions spent the rest of the 90s running the show, going 70-16 overall and 41-15 in the conference. And then Paterno finally slipped for a while on the field, and then Paterno's mistakes off the field ended his tenure.
Penn State was a decent fit. It was in a state further east than any other Big Ten school, but the school was still largely Midwestern. It's west of the Appalachians. It has a dairy. It's in the middle of nowhere, and it was a traditional football powerhouse that was still relevant at the time it was added. Furthermore, Penn State didn't lose its recruiting territory when it came to the Big
Ten; many of its players were drawn from within the Big Ten footprint or neighboring states, where Penn State Football was still Penn State Football. If you take away the horrible crimes committed within its program and the stigma that came from those crimes, there would be little reason to dispute Penn State's inclusion in the conference.
But that's a big 'if'.
We were told that business mandated expansion to include Nebraska in 2011. The Big Ten Network, the biggest gamble ever taken by the league, was a gigantic success, a money tree that somehow didn't grow so large that it harmed the conference's top-tier broadcast rights.
But the Big Ten Network/broadcast television revenue model bastardized the league's goals. Now the league wanted big names -- and the big national broadcast dollars their games could command -- and cable-connected local television sets with cable companies willing to pay absurd carriage fees for BTN.
Jim Delany first used all of his television money to destabilize the Big 12, correctly sensing that the conference was quickly falling into a black hole centered in Austin and that its lack of history and geography made divisions natural and inevitable. He waved a bunch of cash at Nebraska and promoted the Big Ten's all-for-one mentality, and suddenly Nebraska was a Big Ten team.
But the Nebraska that Delany landed was a decade removed from relevance. They had jettisoned not just their coach and staff, but their entire philosophy, in 2004. The result had been a disaster, at least compared to the previous decade's standard, and a second coaching change had peaked with the Cornhuskers as a solid also-ran in the Big 12.
Nebraska's move to the Big Ten didn't do anything to help bolster the Huskers. Quite to the contrary, it added a modicum of academic standards missing in those mid-90s teams. And to the extent that Nebraska had a post-Osborne recruiting philosophy -- Texas, California, Florida, sometimes all at once -- it certainly wasn't inside the Big Ten footprint. Nebraska's previous mistakes had made it less relevant on the national stage; Nebraska's move to the Big Ten only accelerated the slide.
In 2014, Delany shocked the world by adding Maryland and Rutgers to the conference. It was a blatant play for cable-connected televisions in Washington D.C. and New York City, and nothing more. Maryland athletics was saddled with crippling debt that Big Ten lucre could fix; Rutgers was essentially a mid-major program. Neither had a football program with any sort of history; Maryland had won a single ACC championship since 1985, and Rutgers had long since lost program savior Greg Schiano to the NFL, quickly falling back into the lower tiers of mediocrity.
(con't)
