Just this was interesting. I was messing around with Google Maps today and found out the street view for State College lets you "walk down" the tunnel on to the field at Beaver Stadium. I decided to check the other Big Ten stadiums and this seems to be the only one it allows you do this with. I haven't checked any other conferences' stadiums.

Does anybody know if Google is connected to Penn State somehow?

The other post on Notre Dame joining the Big Ten is now closed for comments. Please allow me to make a point here.

Consider Notre Dame's football schedule. There are typically  the following opponents: Boston College, USC, Army, Navy, and Stanford. Now let me list those again in terms of their location: Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington DC metro area, and San Francisco. They hosted Washington State in Texas at the Alamo Dome.  Add a game with a southeastern team like North Carolina or Georgia Tech. South Bend itself is pretty close to Chicago. They hit most of the major media markets and all of the major geographic regions of the nation on their schedule.

Barnstorming the country is a big deal for Notre Dame. It is part of their recruiting.It is part of their identity.

The other thing is the pride factor. As pumped up as the Big Ten is, and with cause, Notre Dame is also a proud institution. I find it unlikely that Notre Dame would ever consent to join any conference that could be considered regional.

It's just never going to happen.

A Match Made In Heaven

Big Ten & Notre Dame Together

"Come Together, Right Now, Over Thee" -  Beatles Song  (Thee Big Ten)

There is one thing in life that I don't understand...and that is of Notre Dame and The Big Ten not coming together! Notre Dame originally applied for the Big Ten back in the early 1900's, but the Big Ten rebuffed them because of their Catholic affiliation. In the 1976 book "Big Ten Football" on page 26; Knute Rockne wanted in the Big Ten Conference in the 1920's...but because of his school's dominance over other Big Ten schools...Notre Dame was rebuffed again. Even when the University of Chicago quit playing athletics in the Big Ten in 1939 and left the Big Ten in 1946...Notre Dame along with a host of others like Nebraska, Pittsburgh, Iowa State, Marquette and Michigan State were the likely candidates to fill the void...with Michigan State finally joining in 1949. Again Notre Dame was left out because of their football supremacy.

Fast forward to the 1990's...Now the Big Ten has extended an invitation to Notre Dame and Notre Dame has rebuffed The Big Ten a couple of times now. Notre Dame enjoyed their football Independence for decades and has many Nat'l Titles, Heisman Trophys and All-Americans to boast about to most other schools envy. But those days are a faded memory. Notre Dame has not won a title or heisman trophy for well over two decades now. The college football landscape has changed. Notre Dame cannot draw talent from smaller Catholic schools because the talent isn't there now because parhocial schools have had such a hard time with the priests and how they have been unsavory in their relationships with our youth. Then add in the strong academics standards that Notre Dame possesses. No high profile coaches want the job because of how hard it is currently to win there.

If Notre Dame joined the Big Ten, They would recruit stronger. The way it is as an Independent..if they lose 3 games in a season they are not in the BCS. But if they were in the Big Ten they could lose 3 or 4 games overall... and have a shot of getting in the Big Ten Championship Game and winning it for a BCS bid. Plus who is to say that Notre Dame will continue to get the NBC deal of $9 million annually in the future when NBC has recently been sold. The Big Ten Network will always thrive especially if Notre Dame was a member school.

So its high time the Fighting Irish get with the program of the future and forget about the Independant past and stop and think about their options...and make a historical move to the Big Ten Conference with other schools they have in common with, like Legendary Traditions such as Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Illinois, Michigan State and etc. This would solidify The Big Ten as the greatest conference in the Nation. Notre Dame needs the Big Ten...and The Big Ten needs Notre Dame! I think you'll see that things would change dramically for the Irish and they would enjoy the success of all their athletic programs in the future.

Notre Dame would only have to play 8 Conference football games a year during the regular season. That leaves 4 or 5 games that they could still play Southern Cal, Navy, Boston College, Stanford, Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech and etc. No one seems concerned about their basketball program playing in a Conference...namely The Big East. It looks like Notre Dame has already broken the rule of being Independent when their basketball team joined the Big East. Its time for the Notre Dame to call up The Big Ten and commit to membership...because the Big Ten is not going to wait for them forever. Now's the Time...Wake up the Echos! The echos of being open to change!

Notre Dame could probably be in a Division of their absolute liking. This is how the 2 Divisions could look like:

BIG  TEN  CONFERENCE

GREAT LAKES DIVISION                                                                                                                                                              Iron Sledge Trophy

Notre Dame Fighting Irish

Michigan Wolverines

Purdue Boilermakers

Michigan State Spartans 

Northwestern Wildcats

Illinois Fighting Illini

MIGHTY RIVERS DIVISION                                                                                                                                                                 Steel Axe Trophy

Ohio State Buckeyes

Penn State Nittany Lions

Wisconsin Badgers

Iowa Hawkeyes

Minnesota Golden Gophers

Indiana Hoosiers

The Winners of the Axe & Sledge would play for the BIG TEN CHAMPIONSHIP GAME and Big Ten Trophy!

Like I said...ND & The Big 10...A Match Made In Heaven!

The league would keep the same name of the Big Ten, and it would symbolize the original 10 schools...and "Being a 10" means being THE BEST!

The Big Ten Conference that is!

Thank You!

Dutch Holland

PS

Great Lakes Division ( Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario)

Mighty Rivers Division (Mississippi & Ohio)

Although we don't traditionally cover recruiting on the site, these highlights from last week's Under Armor All-America High School Football Game, give a good idea of what's in the pipeline.

The game took place on January 2nd in St. Petersburg, FL, and featured 88 of the top football players in the country.  Led by a suffocating defense, Team Black (Nitro) defeated Team Blur (White) 32-, with Florida commit Dominique Easley (Staten Island, NY) earning MVP honors.  Easley shared the defensive spotlight with his fellow Gator commits, who accounted for all 4 of Team Black’s interceptions. The exclusive video includes the game’s top plays, as well as individual footage and soundbites from some of the outstanding performers.

Ohio State fans should play close attention to WR James Louis, playmaker Corey Brown, and OLB Jordan Hicks.  According to Rivals.com the Buckeyes currently have the 24th best class in the country.  This number is likely as low as it is because of the comparably small size of the class (16 commits), and the number of scholarships the scarlet has available.

[bumped because it's the kind of thinking that worked for the Gopher basketball team---Bama Hawkeye]

Somebody in another thread floated that trial balloon, and my initial reaction was no.

But after watching that egg the Gophers just got done laying in Tempe, do it.  Something needs to be done, because Minnesota football needs a shock to the system.

I grew up in Minnesota, and I could never embrace Gopher football.  They were either terrible, disappointing, or terribly disappointing.  I never thought much of Glen Mason; he politicked too hard to get the Ohio State job when Coop got fired, and I think he always seemed to view the Gopher job as a consolation prize.

I initially liked the enthusiasm and high goals that Tim Brewster brought to the program, but local columnists made fun of him for daring to dream big.  After a decent recruiting class and a new stadium, I thought Gopher football (a program that has more national championships in the Big 10 other than OSU and Michigan, BTW) was on their way to a renaissance.

But no.  Same old Gopher football. 

Shake up the conference.  Bring in Mike Leach.

If anyone is interested, I've created the Big Ten Expansion Index that evaluates each of the candidates based on the most important criteria.  There are 6 categories (Academics, TV Brand Value, Football Brand Value, Basketball Brand Value, Historic Rivalries/Cultural Fit, and Mutual Interest) that receive different weights depending upon how important they are in the decision-making process.  If a school were to receive a perfect score in each category, then it would have 100 points.  Here are detailed explanations of the categories and how they are weighted:

Academics (25 points) – This is a zero-sum category: either a school meets the academic requirements and receives the full 25 points or it doesn’t.  Casual sports fans tend to ignore this component since they just see conferences for how they perform on the field or hardwood.  However, academics are heavily weighted in this analysis because membership in the Big Ten also means membership in the Consortium for Institutional Cooperation (CIC).  That’s not a small consideration as the Big Ten universities plus former conference member University of Chicago share research and resources among each other for academic purposes.  Therefore, any expansion candidate needs to fit in with academic discussions among U of C and Northwestern faculty just as much as they need to bring prowess to the football field against Ohio State and Michigan.  Membership in the American Association of Universities is preferred but not required if a school is in the upper echelon of the U.S. News & World Report rankings.  Tier 3 schools, however, are going to be eliminated right off the bat no matter how much they might bring to the athletic side of the equation.

TV Value (25 points) – An expansion candidate needs to either bring new major TV markets to the conference or be such a massive national name that it would overshadow a small market.  Outside of the obvious school in South Bend, any school that overlaps a market that the Big Ten already has today without bringing new markets on top of that will receive 0 points – the most important point that people need to understand is that being within the current Big Ten footprint is a massive negative to the conference.  Too many sports fans mistakenly think the opposite way, where they think that because School X is in the same state as Ohio State or School Y used to have a long rivalry with fellow in-state school Penn State means that they are good fits for the conference, when in reality those types of schools bring little or no value to the Big Ten because they don’t add any more TV households to the table.  I’ll repeat the mantra here: think like a university president instead of a sports fan.

Another important consideration here is that the Big Ten’s future media revenues are going to be heavily dependent on the performance of the Big Ten Network.  As with any basic cable channel, whether it’s ESPN or the Food Network, the Big Ten Network’s revenues and profitability are largely based upon getting into as many basic cable households as possible – pure and simple.  The TV ratings for a particular school in a market don’t mean as much as whether such school has enough leverage and drawing power in a region or market to get the Big Ten Network onto basic cable there.  What this means is that there’s going to be a heavy premium (if not outright requirement) that a new school delivers the largest number of cable TV households possible on top of what the Big Ten has now.  On the flip side, if a school doesn’t add any new Big Ten Network subscribers, then that school is a non-starter.

Football Brand Value (30 points) – This is the most heavily weighted category as a reflection of the reality of the college sports landscape.  The revenue generated from football is so massive in comparison to the other sports (including basketball) that no expansion is likely to happen in the Big Ten unless the new school is a bona fide gridiron power.  It’s why the ACC was willing to water down its basketball conference with football schools like Miami and Virginia Tech a few years ago and the root of the massive unilateral pushback from the major conferences about any type of NCAA Tournament-esque college football playoff proposal – there’s so much money involved with football that there’s no rational economic reason for the BCS conferences to share it.

It must be emphasized that Football Brand Value puts much more weight on the long-term history and financial underpinnings of a program over short-term or recent success.  Thus, Team A that has sold out 80,000-seat or even 100,000-seat stadiums for decades whether it wins or loses is much more valuable than Team B that only sells out a 40,000-seat stadium when it’s in the national championship race, even if Team A has had a mediocre seasons recently and Team B happens to rank in the top 3 of the BCS rankings this year.  The “What have you done for me lately?” attitude of most sports fans doesn’t apply here.  Instead, the proper question is the opposite: Even if the target school goes 0-12 in a season, will it still attract TV viewers and attendance?  In other words, the true value of a football program is really measured by how much attention it still receives when it’s down as opposed to how much attention it gets when it’s up.  The Big Ten will only consider programs that have large and real hardcore fan bases that will stick them in good times and bad as opposed to programs that have bandwagon fans that will bolt when there’s a 7-5 season.

Basketball Brand Value (10 points) – Personally, there’s nothing that would make me more delirious as a sports fan than Illinois winning the national championship in basketball.  However, when it comes to conference expansion discussions, basketball simply won’t be much of a consideration, which is why the Football Brand Value category is weighted three times as much as the Basketball Brand Value category.  A common argument that you’ll see on blogs and message boards is that “Team A won’t leave Conference X because Team A is a basketball school and Conference X is so much better in basketball than the Big Ten.”  Once again, this is a sports fan view as opposed to a university president view.  As I alluded to before, the financial value of football outweighs basketball interests by such a massive margin that every single all-sports athletic director in America will take a bad football program in a top drawing football conference over a championship caliber basketball program in the best basketball conference without hesitation.

That being said, if all things are relatively equal in the other categories, then basketball considerations could be the tipping point.  In that event, this index assigns 10 points to a school that would be a legitimate marquee basketball program in the Big Ten, 5 points to a middle-to-upper middle class basketball school that isn’t quite a top program but would at least provide some depth and 0 points to a school that doesn’t bring anything to the basketball side of the equation whatsoever.  There might also be a specific case where the conventional financial argument between football and basketball could be turned on its head (which will be addressed in examining how Big Ten Network distribution could work with a certain school located in Upstate New York).

Historic Rivalries/Cultural Fit (5) – This is more of a “smell test” category.  Does a school have existing or historic rivalries with any Big Ten schools?  Is the atmosphere balancing academics and athletics at the expansion target in line with the rest of the conference?  When the average sports fan looks at the conference alignment, does it seem to make sense?  5 points are given to a perfect fit across the board, 3 points are given to a good fit in some respects but maybe less so in others, while 0 points are given to anyone that simply would stick out like a complete sore thumb (with much more emphasis on the character of the school as opposed to geography).

Mutual Interest (5) – The basic question is the likelihood of whether an expansion candidate would actually accept an invitation from the Big Ten.  This is relevant because Notre Dame publicly declined an official Big Ten invitation in the late-1990s, which was a drawn-out process and left a lot of sour feelings among the conference members.  As a result, the conference has no desire to invite anyone unless that school has confirmed with its university president and board of trustees that it will say “Yes” without a public debate or discussion.  5 points are given to a school whose university president will be on the next plane to O’Hare and start popping champagne the moment that the Big Ten extends an offer, 3 points to a school that will give an invitation heavy consideration but could go either way and 1 point to a school that will hear the Big Ten out yet will almost certainly reject any offer.

Here's my blog post with a detailed analysis of all of the candidates:

The Big Ten Expansion Index

To give you a hint, I really like burnt orange (and the feeling might be a whole lot more mutual than people think).

THE GREAT NORTHERN UNION CONFERENCE :

Big Ten makes offers of Membership to Notre Dame, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas & Pittsburgh.

This makes a 16 Team Conference. New name of the Conference would be the "Great Northern Union Conference" or GNUC. The word "Great" applys to the "Great Lakes" and the "Great Plains" that would encompass the Conference. These are all  "Northern" schools and with the Mega-Expansion of the Conference...it would become a "Union".

"The GNUC"...is short for "knuckles" or it can also be called "The UNION". The Conference would have (2) 8 Team Leagues with a total of (4) Divisions with (4) teams in each Division. The Leagues would be called the Eastern and Western Leagues. The Divisions would go by names of tall mighty stately trees of the Central, Eastern  & Lake States...such as the Walnut, Ash, Maple and Oak Divisions. 

Here is a following of how the Conference would look in "The Holland Plan" :

                                          GREAT  NORTHERN  UNION  CONFERENCE

                                                                        GNUC

                       Eastern League                                                              Western League

Walnut Division                     Ash Division                     Maple Division                    Oak Division

Notre Dame                           Ohio State                        Wisconsin                           Nebraska

Michigan                                Penn State                       Minnesota                           Illinois

Purdue                                   Pittsburgh                         Iowa                                   Missouri

Michigan State                      Indiana                             Northwestern                      Kansas 

Walnut Division                       Ash Division                     Maple Division                   Oak Division

Fighting Irish                           Buckeyes                          Badgers                             Cornhuskers

Wolverines                              Nittany Lions                     Golden Gophers                Fighting Illini 

Boilermakers                           Panthers                           Hawkeyes                          Tigers

Spartans                                  Hoosiers                            Wildcats                            Jayhawks

These would be extremely competitive divisions with geography and rivalries intact. It would be the first Super-Mega Conference and fans would be proud to say '"You're in Great Northern Union Country" !!!

Please feel free to leave your comments...

Thank you,

Dutch Holland

[Bumped, because he got so much right - Bama Hawkeye]

Recently, Barry Alvarez caused a stir by suggesting the Big Ten was seriously exploring expansion to add a 12th team, thus allowing the Big Ten to split into divisions and play a Championship.  See the story here.

TRE is your one stop shop for all things Big Ten Expansion related...

Graham discusses pros and cons of adding a 12th team...and who it might be.

Lake Erie M argues for mega-expansion and a 14 team league

BHGP lists the 4 most important issues surrounding expansion.

Personally, as a fan, I love this idea.  But two problems tend to pop up with this:

1. Who is your 12th team? Potentially realistic suggestions include Rutgers or Syracuse (to bring in the NYC market), Pitt, Cincinnati, That School From South Bend, and Mizzou.  Less realistic suggestions (for academic, geographic, or athletic reasons) include West Virginia, Kentucky, Louisville, Nebraska, or Texas (seriously? Texas? Really?)
2. How do you divide the league into divisions without creating a serious "historical competitive imbalance" by placing too many of the big powers (OSU-Michigan-Penn State) in one division, and/or preserve traditional rivalries that teams and fans love?

So, to answer these questions, allow me to present the Chadnudj Plan for Big Ten Expansion -- in which the Big Ten adds Missouri, and divides into North-South divisions, while preserving ALL current protected Big Ten rivalries except one (and that one is Purdue-Northwestern, if you're curious and don't want to read further because this is the only rivalry you care about....what, no takers?)

Don't forget to go back and submit your Bowl Prediction sheet for another chance to win a prize. For winning the regular season OPC, Seattle Hawkeye won...a hat. You may win...something cooler. Hardest bowls to pick so far are Stanford-Oklahoma and PSU-LSU.

Continue reading this post »

So, Florida spends the entire season as the near unanimous number 1 by all the polls and the coaches.  They lose and now they get the rather lousy Sugar Bowl. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA TIM TEBOW CAN SUCK IT!!!  I was soooooo happy to see that Bama took down the Gators and it will be one hell of a BCS Championship game vs. Texas.  As the year progressed, Florida had begun to show signs that they were losing their dominance as they won a couple of sloppy games, won by a small margin, or had to come from behind.  Finally, they got their due.

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These are the things I do when I'm viciously rooting for Florida...C'mon Gators, beat Agent Smith!