Big 10 to consider adding 12th school

I think the TV thing will bring out the greed and enough pressure to force them to add a team. We'll see.

 

Mizzou would be ridiculous to give up rivalries against Kansas, most importantly, but also Nebraska, K-State and Oklahoma.

 

FWIW, I read a report this morning that said the conference is looking at Syracuse (for whatever reason) and Rutgers. You'd have the big television market in the east and a natural rivalry for Penn St, which always seemed kind of out of place in a midwest conference (Lions fanboy who's bitter he can't see more games).

 

Mizzou, an original member of the Big 8, ain't leaving the Big 12 for the Big 10. Tigers already play Illinois in basketball and have a several-year deal to keep playing the Illini in football. Plus, no way does Mizzou walk away from more than 100 years of hatred for everything Kansas.

 

Pitt or West By God it is, then....

 

It.


Won't.




Happen.

 

It will, if only for the fact it will allow the Big 10 to avoid another three month delay between the end of the regular season and the last bowl game...

remember, the BT was one of the last to be dragged into a conference basketball tourney too.

 

I think one of the biggest problems the Big 10 would have should they expand to 12 teams is how the hell to divide up the conference. there's virtually no way to have competitive balance while at the same time maintaining as many rivalries as possible.

 

The Big Ten came to Notre Dame bearing gifts in 1998 or 99. They were willing to let ND join pretty much on its own terms -- Keep all their TV and bowl money for the first 3-4 years, make bowl deals on their own without any conference interference, and also guarantee them favorable division lineups in both football and basketball (put them in a Romper Room division with Indiana, Illinois, NW, Purdue and Michigan State or something like that).

Notre Dame told them to go piss in the wind. More and more the sentiment now is that if Notre Dame is ever invited to join the BT again, they will have to crawl all the way on their hands and knees, over acres of broken glass, to do it. In fact, there's rising sentiment in the conference to boycott them altogether. Michigan is considering breaking off their series altogether when it "lapses" in 2011, and Michigan State may follow suit.

They'll probably invite somebody like Rutgers, Louisville or UConn simply for the joy of telling ND to go fuck off.

 

Pitt makes the most sense, as PSU's travel partner. Therefore it probably won't be the Panthers to make the "Even Dozen Conference."

 

if it happens, force the conference at gunpoint to add a conference championship game, so lunacy like iowa/tOSU to the BCS without playing each other never happens.

 

Couple of problems there: The BT wants to add new TV markets, and they already have Pittsburgh (and all of PA) by dint of Penn State.

Plus, JoePa himself supposedly still has a hard-on for Pitt, which he felt torpedoed his original concept for an all-sports Eastern conference back in the early 1980s.

The "travel partner" concept is dead now, anyway. Everybody travels by plane. Even Minnesota to PSU is only a 3 1/2 hour flight.