B1G Expansion 'Almost A Necessity'

Just wanted to get something up quickly with a few thoughts from Hollis on the addition. Spoke on it for 25 minutes in his office at Jenison this afternoon and I'll have much more coming up shortly on how this impacts scheduling, divisional realignments, TV markets, etc.

I think 16 teams is now very, very likely.

This nukes the ACC for football when Clemson and Florida State go to the SEC. Notre Dame won't be aligned with the ACC for long, and the B1G can scoop them up and one other when it inevitably goes to 16 team power conferences.

Are we just completely uninterested in Pitt or are they reacting like Syracuse - just not interested? I cannot understand why we're taking Rutgers over Pitt.

It's solely about tv money. Rutgers will ideally open up the NJ and NYC tv markets, and Maryland the D.C. area. Pitt doesn't move the tv needle in it's home town, and PSU already takes care of most of Pennsylvania. Both Maryland and Rutgers are bad programs with poor teams and AD's in the red, but it's just about tv, very little about academic profile (AAU), and nothing really about on field/court performance.

Smart move and great timing. Those two are in prime markets and the $ will keep the B1G ahead of the game. I wonder who the other 2 will be?

I'm not an east coast guy, and I'm asking this as a serious question. . . Does Rutgers have a significant following in the New York area? Or is this just an opportunity to create a B1G following in the NY area.

To create a following basically.

I think UNC and GaTech are next, and then the SEC, BIG12, and PAC12 all go to 16. Then the football championship will be the league champions.

Good thoughts, but I can see a 12 or 16 team tournament coming out of this because of the imbalance of power that exists.

Frank the Tank had a chart up today that estimated the worth of Md at $50 million and Rutgers with NYC at $67 million for revenues to BTN. Yup, they can join.

Right, but his valid question was whether The Gators and The Cocks are going to allow that. You didn't address that.

We also should not forget the additional research dollars these two schools will bring the CIC. Since we are not that far out of 'election' mode, the best way to describe the expansion process with Rutgers and Maryland was picking schools that got you the most "electoral college votes."
Population wise, MD and NJ are big states. Thus, literally RU and MD will each buy you respectively 14 and 10 more "electoral college votes" in lobbying for CIC research dollars. And unlike a Georgia Tech, who would have to split their in state research dollars with UGa, UMd and RU had no other large public university to compete for their instate funds.
Adding in these 14 and 10 "electorals" to the totals from the other B1G states (which is proportional to how many reps and senators each state has in congress BTW), you get a grand total of 140, out of 535 nationwide, or 26%. This is a big deal when competing for federal research dollars, and don't think for a second this is not a big deal for university presidents.
And since no other conference really has a CIC, that means the 140 congressmen and women from the B1G states will have a huge clout over other competitors when federal research dollars are awarded.