Interesting article. Northwestern would be in a group with Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State and Purdue.
But they left out Air Force and Army - two teams with a large national following.
Not sure that would fly, especially with the two “other” service academies playing and winning bowl games, and right now, Army and Navy are favored by some pundits to play in their conference championship game, one week before the traditional Army-Navy game. The Commander in Chief Trophy apparently is expected to be decided by Army-Navy, unless one of them trips up on their way to Thanksgiving, since Air Force is in a major rebuilding mode this year.
At least we’re on the list of teams…
Go B1GCats
rsl
72 is too many. 64 would be double the NFL and I think that is an upper limit.
I prefer being with Wisconsin and Io_a, but at least we are surrounded by all B1G teams vs. having outsiders like Iowa State in our division.
In a 64 team ‘league’ would Northwestern make the cut?
This is mostly a pipe dream at this point, it could take a decade to unwind all the conference and media agreements, assuming that’s even possible.
I believe the SEC is locked in until at least 2030 and the B1G is similar. The ACC is potentially locked in until 2036 and I don’t see the networks being too willing to unwind things sooner for this idea.
The networks might be a bigger stumbling block than the conferences’ media rights agreements. Revenue allocation will be the key as far as most schools are concerned. I wonder if they’d try to sell the networks as a set of package deals like the NFL does?
The geographic alignment is kind of odd, Ohio State is in with Nebraska, Notre Dame with Virginia and Virginia Tech.
Navy is in, Army and Air Force are out. Temple and NC State don’t make the cut but Pitt does.
The Group of Five schools pretty much get left out.
it might be difficult to sell a set of package deals as the NCAA and the individual schools do not have an antitrust exemption which is what allows the NFL to sell its rights as a unit. That is probably one more thing the NCAA is asking Congress for and likely won’t get.
This has been more of a discussion on Twitter, but not here that there was a lot of crimson-cream at the stadium on Saturday.
Our tickets are the last row at the 125-126 west stands(25 yard line south) and it was sad to see. Red in the north you expect, but red in the $$$ seats in the south, WTF. Tons of red in the west stands including around us.
Without PSLs I could understand why people kept tickets forever as even if they attended only a game a year it wasn’t a major investment, but at minimum of $250/ticket adding $50 per game to the cost and the increased cost I believe our tickets were beyond double what they were last year for much worse seats.
Maybe I am delusional what people are willing to pay, but looking at the Northwestern at Michigan I can get lots of ticket pairs for under $50.
I did look at our Wisconsin game and seats in our section are about $300. Wisconsin fans can see them play Penn State for half the cost and much better seats.
I don’t understand the economics that make our ticket so valuable and yet so worthless.
We have a better business school?
Go B1GCats
rsl
Supply and demand? When you have less than 15K tickets available (this year and next), versus 107,000 for the Big House, there are going to be fewer tickets in the aftermarkets and that will usually lead to a higher price.
There was a lot of political blustering about the Taylor Swift ticket prices on the third party sites, but I don’t see our government actually doing anything about it.