Get to 20 with Stanford/ND or Stanford/Cal or (shudder) Stanford/FSU.
Big Ten East and Big Ten West.
Problem solved! 
STEPHEN J. TRUOG
sjtruog@yahoo.com
The conference is not going to change its name. Itâs a brand
The dust hasnât quite settled yet. Stanford probably has a better chance of finding a good home quickly than Cal, Wazoo or Oregon State, but will they insist on bringing Cal along?
The Big Ten is the most logical choice for Stanford, but I think the Big Ten is waiting, at least briefly, to see what happens in the ACC, because the only real pearl of great price out there is still Notre Dame. Clemson, FSU and North Carolina are not seismic needle-movers unless the Big Ten feels it desperately needs exposure south of Maryland, and FSU doesnât seem like it would be willing to take a partial share deal like what Oregon and Washington just took if itâs already grumbling about equal shares in the ACC.
ESPN has an analysis piece saying Notre Dame doesnât need to be in a hurry to do something. They probably had a similar article on the Pac-12 last year. Notre Dame is the school no conference will say ânoâ to, but independence will get harder to justify and afford, possibly sooner than anyone expects.
I suspect if one researched the trademark records, theyâd find out that Big Eighteen, Big Twenty, Big Twenty-two and Big Twenty-four are already registered by someone. But I also think being mathematically accurate is less important to the brand name, the Big Ten has been numerologically inaccurate since 1990. I wonder if âBIGâ has been trademarked?
If the SEC continues picking up teams from outside its eponymous territory, their name wonât be all that accurate, either.
Notre Dame will get enough from NzbC when combined with its ACC share to remain independent. The only sure way to force ND into a conference is take away their path to the CFP and I think thatâs unlikely due to TV.
The departing PAC-12 members donât have exit fees to pay. The media rights deal expires at the if 2024 academic year which is why theyâre all hanging around next year.
Well if Cal and Stanford wont get any exit money then I hope some well healed alumns can underwrite some of their lost TV revenue Lots of Silicon Valley Billionaires ! As big a media market the Bay Area is, it does not have a big college football or basketball fan base. ( except for the local alums)
As fellow lister Paul pointed out, Both Bay Area schools have made tremendous commitments over the years to support the non revenue producing sports.
Harry
Iâm not as sure of that as you are. As I understand it, NBC only gets Notre Dameâs home FB games, of which there are 7 this year. And some of those are against schools like TN State and Central MI.
NBCâs joining the Big Tenâs media partners seems to portend that they recognize they need more and better inventory than just a handful of Notre Dame games, some of them against much lesser talent.
NBCâs move for the B1G was and is designed to complement ND. those games are afternoons while the NBC/Peacock package is for prime time. Will it expand to late night or will they be able to sell the late night package to a new media partner - streamer perhaps?
There is also the matter of NDâs contract with the ACC requiring it to join the ACC if it chooses to bring football into a conference.
They remain the most interesting piece of the remaining puzzle.
\
The Fighting Irish probably need to raise the level of competition if they want to continue to keep their ranking, and ratings with NBC, they have to start playing a schedule with 4 or 5 really tough teams, the way the B1G teams do.
Of course, they could join the ACC or the B1G (or maybe the SEC?) and play a full league schedule, and keep their âshowcaseâ games, but then theyâd run the risk of a few 5-5 or worse seasons⌠The Irish fans wonât tolerate that very much.
Go B1GCats
rsl
The Big Ten and the Evil Empire both seem to be in a waiting game right now.
FSU probably has the next move in all this chaos.
If the Noles leave the ACC, it could be abandon ship time for ACC schools and there would be some the SEC and Big Ten (and Big XII) would show interest in. If the Noles stay, the ACC is probably solid as the fourth of the Big Four.
I still think the Big Ten would love to have Stanford (maybe just not Cal) and the Treez will land on their feet. The Big Ten still at least pays lip service to academics and a conference with NU, Stanford, Chicago, Johns Hopkins as well as the top public universities in the country would be a feather in its cap (which is probably Calâs best card to play).
But if Notre Dame shows interest, the slot is theirs (bye bye Bears) as all of their biggest rivals from SC and Stanford to Michigan and MSU would be in the Big Ten with them.
Look, I love the old Rose Bowl days and Big Ten/Pac 10 as much as anybody ⌠but that era is over and this is the new era. I love the idea of Washington and Oregon joining the Big Ten and more west coast games for west coast NU alums (#BigTenAfterDark! ) ⌠plus the SC fans seem to be steaming over the Ducks coming in, which makes me happy.
Iâm guessing this settles down at the Big Ten East and Big Ten West for a 20-school league. It just makes too much sense. Either itâs Stanford/Cal or Stanford/ND. It also would help with pod scheduling with four five-team pods or two 10-team divisions.
But if the ACC crumbles completely, it could go up to 24 with ND, UNC, UVa, FSU and maybe Miami (ick) joining. As Iâve often said, thank goodness we have a solid home in the Big Ten. Itâs a lot more fun to watch this from the safety of that shore instead of weathering the rough waters out there.
GO CATS!!!
-SjT
I like Big Ten East and Big Ten West better than Paul Sullivanâs Big Ten Best and Big Ten Worst, even if Nebraska did make the âbestâ group by the skin of its teeth and historical record.
But I still donât know how cross-division schedules would work, and having 10 teams you almost never face is worse than being in some other conference where you can at least schedule them as non-conference games.
And playing something like 5 or 6 in-division opponents and 4 or 3 cross-division opponents sounds like a real mess to me.
A 5/4 mix of division vs cross-division games might work.
1 protected division rivalry, so you alternate playing the other 4 every other season.
1 protected cross-division rivalry so you see every school no worse than once every three years. That also provides some phase-shifting to avoid having the same group of division and cross-division non-rival games every other year.
But having only 5 games in division means messy tiebreak rules to determine division winners.
Another idea might be to divide into 4 pods of 5 teams each. (Who gets stuck as the âwesternâ team to match up with the west coast 4? Nebraska?) So you have 4 in-pod games and 5 cross-pod games, which could mean playing a RR against each pod once every 3 years, but that breaks a bunch of rivalry games, so it probably wonât fly.
And it could mean a round of semi-final conference championship games. TV might love it, and we all know the TV money drives the bus.
4 Pods and a total conference of 24 might work better. Can they find 6 teams theyâre willing to take to make up the Big Ten West Coast Pod? At that point, the season schedule might start to look like the NFLâs scheduling model, with some tweaks for cross-pod rivalry games, even if that means the 2026 schedule isnât available until late in 2025 or early in 2026. The Big Ten basketball schedules seem to work even though theyâre not set multiple years in advance.
The five pod system probably works best, which is where Stanford comes in. UNL will be with Minny, Wisky, Io_an and probably NU, as the Ill-noise ties with IU/PU is better than any of ours.
I think your idea of expanding conference games might work there too. Four in the pod and 2 rotating from the other three pods.
Could also see a semifinal in Indy and one in Pasadena before the Big Ten championship perhaps?
Definitely gonna be interesting.
STEPHEN J. TRUOG
sjtruog@yahoo.com
There is no chance whatsoever that there would be both a B1G semifinal and final. There will be one title game. The winner will get a bye to the CFP quarterfinals to be played on 1/1/25. Prior to that game, there will be first round games on college campuses in mid-December 2024, with seeds 5-12 playing in those games.
As for 18-team scheduling, the 1 rivalry game and then playing the other 16 teams over 2 years certainly works.
Another idea would be a 3-pod system with 6 teams in each pod. Youâd play all 5 teams in your pod every year, along with 2 games vs teams in the other 2 pods. Teams with natural rivalries would largely be in same pod, including Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa in one pod, along with Purdue and Iowa.
A second pod would be all the eastern teams: Maryland, Rutgers, Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan and Michigan State. That would leave us in the third pod, with Illinois, UCLA, SC, Oregon and Washington.
Jim B.
Admittedly the NCAA would have to get involved in a 4 team conference playoff, and it would interfere with the playoffs if the regular season continues to end on Thanksgiving weekend. But personally I HATE that, Iâd rather the season ended a week earlier, then the conference semifinals could be on Thanksgiving Weekend and the Championship game fits into the playoffâs schedule plans. And donât rule out TV saying it likes the idea and that gets the ball rolling. I suspect there are people at SEC HQ who are also thinking about what happens if they grow further.
The 3 pod idea works well for 2 pods, not so much for the third one, I donât see the west coast teams being excited about it, either, other than it maintains their natural geographic matchups. But Illinois and Northwestern every year? Donât see that as exciting them OR NU/Illinois. NU is likely to be cannon fodder no matter where it gets stuck for a while, but Illinois considers itself a program on the upswing.
But stranger groupings have happened, the Leaders and Legacies splits come to mine.
Will the 18 team conference make it to Labor Day before growing? I give it 50-50 odds.
I actually am warming to the two-tiers-with-relegation concept that Paul Sullivan wrote about in the Tribune.
It actually works pretty well with an 18-team conference: Two divisions of 9 teams (letâs call them B1G A and B1G B). Each play an 8-game round robin schedule within their division, leaving 4 self-scheduled games which in turn provides flexibility to preserve cross-divisional rivalries.
Then, the champion of the B division is promoted and the last-place team in A is relegated for the following season. Think of the drama that could arise. You could still have an A vs B conference championshipâeverything to lose for the A champ, opportunity to make history for the B champ. It wouldnât be more lopsided than East vs West has been. You wouldnât even have to worry about the fairness of the initial A/B assignments, because it would sort itself out in five seasons or so.
Your reward for being in the prestigious A division: an absolutely brutal schedule. Imagine a newly-promoted Purdue now having to face Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, USC, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, and Iowa in a single year. It would be no picnic, and itâs not hard to imagine programs like Wisconsin or Iowa permanently languishing in the bottom half of such a division. Get used to 6-7 win seasons, guys. On the flip side, Ohio State probably has to make peace with fewer 12-win seasons, because now thereâs no NU or Indiana to pad the conference schedule.
It would be interesting to run a historical simulation to see what kind of churn would be generated by the promotion/relegation process. As Stephen said, itâs a new eraâletâs think differently.
Unless the number of conference games is expanded, an 8 game RR division schedule leaves just one cross-division game. If that happens to be a rivalry game, that means NONE of the 8 remaining cross-division teams ever makes it to that teamâs schedule. And if there isnât a cross-division rivalry, then it takes nearly a decade to face all the other division teams. Thatâs probably worse than the way the SEC schedules cross-division games lately. Letâs not out-SEC the SEC!
Could a team schedule a cross-division team (rivalry or not) as a non-conference game? Ugh. Not Going To Happen
Hopefully the masterminds at B1G HQ have something completely different than what weâve talked about in mind, that is, if they have even thought the 18 team model out that far yet.
it happened in the. ACC, when UNC and Wake Forest got tired of not playing each other and scheduled a non-conference game a couple of years ago.
How critical is it that college football schedules, or at least the conference schedule, be set years in advance? I think if you go with pods, you do a schedule system something like the NFLâs. With four 5-team pods, you play your four division/pod rivals (alternating home/away every year) and the three teams from the other pods that finished the same place you did the previous year. Thatâs seven games. The other one or two could from a single other pod on a rotating basis and based on some SoS metric. It only works with an even number of pods, so 4x5 for a 20-team conference or 4x6 or 6x4 for a 24-team conference. For 24 teams, 4x6 (5 division games + 3 non-division games) keeps the weight of games in the division; 6x4 (only 3 division games + 5 non-division games) flips that, but potentially makes more competitive games because they get weighted more based on previous year record.
-Michael
I was thinking we were up to 20 members so I could propose East-West
Everything Illinois westward is west
Illinois
Northwestern
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Io_a
Nebraska
Washington
Oregon
USC
UCLA
East
Indiana
Purdue
MSU
Michigan
tOSU
PSU
Rutgers
Maryland
I would give up the east to keep Wisconsin, Illinois, and Io_a. The balance isnât awful as Washington, Oregon, UCLA, and Wisconsin are comparable to tOSU, Michigan, Penn State, and MSU(?). If you bring in UNC and Virginia then UNC could replace MSU as a heavierweight.
Obvious lots of travel for the west division. The east is so small. I was able to drive to Delaware in 12 hours last Monday vs. I wouldnât make it to the western side of South Dakota in the same amount of time.
I never did understand the need to schedule games 10-15 years out - but in the case of the Evil Empire, so many teams wanted to say theyâd played the Irish, they almost had to project a schedule that far away.
ND always played Army and Navy, and a couple of west coast teams?
Strange that that desire is still there, altho if they play the game at South Bend, they are on National TV.
rsl