Jeff MacGregor on why expanding the Big 10 is stupid

I understand the column and what he was getting to, including the way he wrote it to get people's attention. Now that he did get my attention, I wanted to see facts to backup his argument, not cheap shots towards the Big 10. I would love to see him do that back in '96 with the Big 12.

 

Reaction to something on sj means nothing about it being generally compelling. We do dozens of pages on "ack."

 

Jeff Jacobs thinks if the Big 10 is considering Mizzou, then Texas would be the most logical choice. It expands the footprint and includes all those nice big TV markets, not to mention opens up Texas to recruiting.

He also makes some cogent points about the Big East being proactive in expansion.

http://www.courant.com/sports/uconn-men/hc-jeffcol1218.artdec18,0,5227023.column

 

That's just it. ALL he did was turn phrases. He touched on his point in a perfunctory manner, then went back to purple prose. It was the equivalent of having the Ace of Cakes people spending two weeks decorating a Wal-Mart cupcake.

His mission as a columnist is to provide a compelling, well-written argument. He did everything except the compelling and the argument.

 

This is just another example of Macgregor trying to preserve his seat at liberal cognoscenti convention. It's always Jeff against the big. bad ,greedy and corrupt structures of our way of life. As "plastics" became a cliched metaphor to describe all that is phony in the 60's, "Mcmansion" was used by the hip intelligentsia in the late 90's describe all that is too big. Jeff is about 10 years to late to the party.

Someone needs to tell him that when he started taking a paycheck from ESPN he lost cognoscenti card. He sold out to the man.

 

I respect Jeff's ability and his career, but this was mostly all sizzle, no steak. I've never been huge on phrase turning for phrase turning's sake. Partly because I'm just not particularly good at it. Partly because I think that sometimes sports writers feel like we have to wax poetic and metaphorical in order to justify ourselves. I think that this is a dangerous sort of column for young writers to take their cue from and try to emulate.

I also am not naive enough to not understand that what really going on in this thread has more to do with battle lines of SportsJournalists.com office politics than anything else.

 

Solid commentary Waylon but I don's see the connection between Macgregor and SJ.