West Coast Johnny
Full Member
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8654190/on-urban-meyer-ohio-state-wisconsin-big-ten-expanding-include-maryland-rutgers
Forgive me a personal indulgence, but I want to get this down so I can forever remember where I was the moment that the Big Ten extended its clublike footprint all up into the Northeast corridor's blue-state posterior: I was actually sitting in a press box at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin, preparing to write a story about the epic football-related failures of the Big Ten conference. Adam Rittenberg, one of ESPN's hardworking Big Ten bloggers, informed me of the rumors, and I did not believe them at first, because I could not imagine that even this tree sloth of a conference would engage in such a reflexively cynical exercise in eastward expansion.
By the third quarter, the story had broken: Maryland and Rutgers, a pair of athletic programs with questionable finances and perpetually bland football traditions, were barreling headlong toward membership in the conflagration once known, in its earliest days, as the Western Conference. It was all about television markets, we were told, about "expanding reach," about every damned MBA concept you could think of except the actual product, because I guess the assumption in the Big Ten offices is that the product will eventually catch up to the money being thrown at it.
Meanwhile, maybe you've noticed that Big Ten games have gotten slower and slower, and less and less compelling. Do you know the last Big Ten quarterback to be chosen in the first round of the NFL draft? It was Kerry Collins, in 1995. The two best pros the Big Ten has produced in recent years, Drew Brees and Tom Brady, came from Texas and California, respectively. Russell Wilson, who transferred to Wisconsin for his senior season, went to high school in Virginia. And in case you missed it, all of this was hammered home by the high-profile oopsy-daisies of standard-bearing Ohio State in BCS bowl games throughout the '00s.
Forgive me a personal indulgence, but I want to get this down so I can forever remember where I was the moment that the Big Ten extended its clublike footprint all up into the Northeast corridor's blue-state posterior: I was actually sitting in a press box at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin, preparing to write a story about the epic football-related failures of the Big Ten conference. Adam Rittenberg, one of ESPN's hardworking Big Ten bloggers, informed me of the rumors, and I did not believe them at first, because I could not imagine that even this tree sloth of a conference would engage in such a reflexively cynical exercise in eastward expansion.
By the third quarter, the story had broken: Maryland and Rutgers, a pair of athletic programs with questionable finances and perpetually bland football traditions, were barreling headlong toward membership in the conflagration once known, in its earliest days, as the Western Conference. It was all about television markets, we were told, about "expanding reach," about every damned MBA concept you could think of except the actual product, because I guess the assumption in the Big Ten offices is that the product will eventually catch up to the money being thrown at it.
Meanwhile, maybe you've noticed that Big Ten games have gotten slower and slower, and less and less compelling. Do you know the last Big Ten quarterback to be chosen in the first round of the NFL draft? It was Kerry Collins, in 1995. The two best pros the Big Ten has produced in recent years, Drew Brees and Tom Brady, came from Texas and California, respectively. Russell Wilson, who transferred to Wisconsin for his senior season, went to high school in Virginia. And in case you missed it, all of this was hammered home by the high-profile oopsy-daisies of standard-bearing Ohio State in BCS bowl games throughout the '00s.
