Pac 12 will break up. Pac 12 cannot survive without usc & ucla
NCAA will break up. What is ahead may not serve T&F and XC and other “non-revenue” sports.
I think the NCAA will remain intact for non-revenue sports and for non-Power5 football. In all honesty, the Power 5 football programs just need to break off and form their own league. At least by doing that, they could be honest and transparent about the fact that they already basically are their own league.
Travel nightmare for UCLA and USC team sports, but a big payday for the conference with the BigTen Network and TV deals with ESPN and ABC.
Meanwhile, G5 schools bankrupt their other departments to continue to chase football playoffs rankings points as well as basketball tourney hopes. We could see mid-majors cutting Olympic sports to the quick if not eliminating them.
I cannot see Pac 12 telling the west coast everything is fine when Pac 12 replaces USC & UCLA with Long Beach St. & Cal St.-Northridge.
Replace with San Diego St. and have BYU pull out of joining the Big 12
PAC 12 probably will do something goofy like raid the MWC & Big 12. BYU, SDSU, Colorado State and TCU probably wouldn't say no, neither would Nevada, San Jose St., or New Mexico. The remaining CA schools plus UW and UO will ensure the conference isn't completely gutted and will add something more significant than the likes of Long Beach, Northridge, and UCSB.
The conference realignment is absurdly out of whack, IMHO.
So, with that move the Big TEN(???) conference will have 16 teams and stretch from NJ to CA.
Let me guess, one will be in the East Division and the other will be in the West.
The Big 10 has the East & West divisions now. If this happens they’ll need to take a few of the current teams in the west & put them in the east.
I agree that all of this realignment stuff is out of control. This is totally being driven by media markets. Rutgers was added to get the NYC media $. If this really happens the Big 10 will have a presence in the 3 largest media markets - NYC, Chicago, and LA.
This is not a good thing. I grew up as an Ohio State football fan and one of the things I looked forward to (prior to the BCS stuff), was seeing who would win the Big 10 and go to the Rose Bowl. The Buckeyes won a lot, went to the Rose Bowl a lot, and, unfortunately, got their butts kicked a lot, but the anticipation of those games have a lot of memories for me. I still like the Rose Bowl. I guess that will be no more. Regardless of who the Big 10 representative was in the Rose Bowl, even if scUM, I was a fan of that team in that game.
I, too, miss the old bowl game alliances. I'm a gator fan, so usually whichever SEC team was in the Sugar Bowl was my team to cheer for. Now, when it was FSU vs. Tenn for that early BCS championship, that was tough to stomach.
Anyway, I also realize that the old bowl game stuff is long gone, and basically an entire generation of college football fans have come along without those types of tie-ins. I'd like to see a proper playoff rather than the nonsense we have now. But I'd also like to see SOME kind of geographic sense to the conferences.
My guess this is due to the fact that their XC programs are trash. UCLA continually underperforms and USC, with a terrible women's team and no men's team, perpetually feels inadequate and pathetic due to the rest of the conference's success. Better slink to slink away to a lesser conference than continue their embarrassment.
I heard rumblings and dismissed the story, only to now be inundated with posts, reports, articles, saying that it will probably actually happen. Mind blown. What are the track and field, XC implications? I wouldn't think the move helps USC or UCLA track, but really how does it hurt them? Track doesn't really have a conference season like basketball or football where it has to compete against only conference members for a set number of weeks. Plus, I assume, they're going to have richer athletic departments. I guess the other question is how does it affect the remaining PAC schools for track and XC.