Enough no longer enough for greedy Big Ten
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As the Big Ten draws closer and closer to expansion, the whole idea gets a little oilier and a lot more pungent.
Why do I keep picturing the expansion announcement as a prime time Big Ten Network event, televised live from downtown Chicago, where all the self-suspecting candidates have gathered in a kind of Let's-Make-A-Deal audience of breathless contestants?
Figuratively or not, this isn't where I want to see Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg in his Panthers' outfit, frankly.
The realists say that Pitt and Rutgers, Missouri and Nebraska, Texas and whoever else the Big Ten might anoint will have no choice but to shriek with glee at the prospect of joining the ancient, prestigious Big Ten, if for no other reason than the hot boost of adrenalin to that school's financial pulse.
The whole process has begun to project the assumption that no other reason exists for this, or for anything else, and it's unseemly.
The Big Ten, the brand name itself a lie since 1993 when it added Penn State as its 11th member, is the nation's wealthiest conference now that its cable network has a vast regional foothold.
The University of Michigan, which just committed $20 million to upgrading Crisler Arena, its basketball facility, also broke ground this spring on a $23.2 million Basketball Player Development Center.
I think that used to be called a playground.
Certainly the general funds at many or all of the conference's schools and hundreds if not thousands of students have benefitted as well from this profitability, but not quite like Michigan's two dozen basketballers.
This isn't to tear down Michigan. Rich Rodriguez can do that on his own.
This is about a larger question: When you're swimming in cash, when you're the envy of just about every other athletic conference in the country, when you've got your own cable network and an iconic college football presence that goes back more than a century, what do you do if you're the Big Ten?
You grab for more, of course. With both hands.
It is so Wall Street, isn't it?
Bored with your millions? Make it into billions. What, it'll put 15 million people out of work? That's capitalism baby. Hey, it's a jungle out there.
Sure, maybe that overstates it, but the Big Ten has everything it needs and plenty more without being anywhere near satisfied with its financial profile. But unlike the banks and the big investment houses who got busy curdling the economy, at least the conference sounded the warning. It's about to raid the other major conferences to fill out its ever-broadening cash fantasies, fallout be damned, and there will plenty of fallout.
First Published May 30, 2010 12:00 am
