Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The first question comes from Sean Vergowven, who asks, “Curious as a Wisconsin fan (which we don’t hold against you) what are your thoughts on the new Big Ten”

For those of you who don’t know what the Big Ten is, it is a college sports conference. It used to consist of ten large colleges in the Midwest that would also play each other in various sports. These tended to be large land grant institutions such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State, Minnesota, and Iowa.

In 1990, they expanded to eleven teams by allowing Penn State to join, but they kept the name Big Ten. This addition wasn’t really that bad.

Then, in 2010, three more universities joined: Nebraska, Maryland, and Rutgers. Nebraska made sense, but Maryland and Rutgers were completely out of wack and took away from the Midwest nature of the conference.

Recently, USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington announced that they would be joining the Big Ten, bringing the number of teams to 18.

So, my thoughts are…..

18 teams is too much for a conference, and the conference no longer has any regional focus. The reason this is being done, of course, is for money. College sports, especially football and basketball, are big business.

The current trend of dismantling and merging conferences makes no sense, especially considering that it is only for a few sports.

College football should consider a complete reorganization that only affects football and leaves every other non-revenue-generating sport alone. Even he current system of determining a champion is a bit ridiculous, selecting four teams by committee rather than determining a champion on the field.