![]() ![]() Athletes in these sports will have to spend months taking five-hour-plus flights. ![]() In the Big Ten, it will mean trips to Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and the Washington, D.C., metro area. In the Pac-12, that meant trips to the Bay Area and Arizona. I bet all those lakes in Minnesota have beaches somewhere!) While a college football team only plays in a handful of games each year, UCLA’s four-time national champion women’s volleyball team played 10 conference games on the road last season. (USC’s back-to-back national champion beach volleyball team will reportedly have to find a new conference, since the Big Ten does not have a beach volleyball league … yet. These sports are a big deal at USC and UCLA, two of the three college athletic departments to have amassed more than 100 NCAA championships. The Big Ten is now set to have 16 teams, although it gave up on numerical accuracy years ago.īut the true absurdity of this news only becomes clear when looking past football and considering the dozens of other sports played at the NCAA level. ET kickoffs and games featuring 90 points in 80-degree weather for nooners played in 40-degree downpours in West Lafayette, Indiana, with final scores in the teens. The Big Ten’s championship game, recently a fixture in Indianapolis, could reportedly be played at the Rams’ new arena the Rose Bowl, long a showcase for the Big Ten and Pac-12 champions, could possibly feature a matchup between USC and Oregon. There are funny, football-specific quirks to this arrangement. The figures will soar especially high with two new marquee members. The Big Ten numbers are expected to soar higher after 2023, when its next TV contract will be settled. In 2021, each Big Ten member school received over $40 million from this alone each Pac-12 school got less than $20 million. And for UCLA and USC, it’s noteworthy that the Big Ten’s media rights contracts are colossal compared to the Pac-12’s. The idea is that TV networks will pay gargantuan sums of money to conferences to broadcast football games featuring two name-brand schools-the quality of the teams and the Q rating of the schools matter more in this respect than whether the game is a longstanding regional rivalry. Leagues long had cultural identities that their fans could rally around now every conference’s culture is “let’s add the schools that can bring in the most money.” If you can think of a prominent cultural connection linking Los Angeles and Iowa City, please let me know. When the SEC announced in 2021 its plans to add Texas and Oklahoma, it signified the dawn of the superconference era. The move is clearly an attempt to keep up with the Joneses. schools is Nebraska, which is 1,500 miles and two time zones away. The closest Big Ten member institution to the two L.A. The longest distance between two opponents in the supersized Big Ten will be roughly 2,800 miles, from L.A. By adding two schools in Los Angeles, the conference will span the entire continental U.S. It expanded east with additions of Penn State in 1990 and then Maryland and Rutgers in 2014. Once a Midwestern league, the Big Ten is now primed to stretch from coast to coast. The Big Ten member presidents have unanimously voted to accept their Californian brethren. As with last year’s news that Texas and Oklahoma are headed to the SEC, this bombshell is at once totally unexpected and on the verge of completion. USC and UCLA-that’s the University of Southern California and the University of California-Los Angeles-are set to join the conference after spending about 100 years in the league now known as the Pac-12. Thursday, news broke that the Big Ten is working on a move that thoroughly shatters whatever remained of the old regional conference model. Dozens of other conferences popped up around the country that followed the Big Ten’s blueprint: They were regionally based, like the self-explanatory Southeastern Conference many featured conceptually similar schools, like the predominantly Catholic Big East. Seven of the 10 were located in states that border Lake Michigan. Nine of the 10 institutions that comprised its membership until the 1990s were state schools with massive student bodies. It existed for more than a century as a competitive structure for athletes at geographically convenient, like-minded member schools. The Big Ten is the oldest college athletic conference in the United States, having been founded in 1896. ![]()
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