Big Ten Officially Considering Expansion, Will Get Back To You In 12-18 Months

Think the Big Ten expansion talk can't get wilder? (Whatever, in that lull between the season and the postseason, this is hot stuff.)  Think again ... and fear the Big 14!

Don't discount this: the Big 14.

Seriously.

Multiple Big Ten sources told the Tribune Wednesday that 14 teams, even 16, could be in play as it relates to the Big Ten's potential expansion. "Anything is possible," one source said, beyond the conventional wisdom of simply adding a 12th school.

OK, that sounds ... nebulous, to put it charitably.  Where are they going to find three schools where they've had a not-easy time getting one? Brian Cook agrees, and does so by yelling at a lot of people, but he's not wrong:

Just because some guy in the Big Ten office says "anything is possible" does not mean that we shouldn't be shocked if a conference that's attempted to expand three times in the last fifteen years only to come up empty all of a sudden adds three teams to become an unwieldy beast of a conference in which you only play about half the teams every year.

Fourteen is ridiculous. The WAC was sixteen for a while until it exploded because at that point you're not a conference but a Thomas Jefferson-style loose confederation.

In this scenario, go on and cast Jim Delany as James Madison. Never liked that guy.

As soon as the Big 10 announced plans to look into adding another team to the conference, the obvious candidate to join was Notre Dame. However, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrixk told the Chicago Tribune that it is Notre Dame’s “strong preference” to remain an independent.

“Our strong preference is to remain the way we are,” Swarbrick told the Tribune. “Independence is a big part of the tradition of the program and our identity. We’d sure like to try to maintain it.”

Why does Notre Dame want to remain an independent? For Swarbrick, it’s a matter of tradition being more important than finances. While Notre Dame could earn more money with a conference affiliation because of the radio and television fees the conferences collect, Swarbrick said he would rather preserve the rivalries that result from Notre Dame’s independent status.

“All of this has a lot more to do with our priorities than it does with business issues,” he said. “Our independence is tied up in a lot of the rivalries we have. We play Navy every year and have the tradition of USC weekends. Frankly, it works pretty well to play USC in October at home and in November at their place.”

With Tuesday's news that the Big Ten will at least consider the possibility of expanding to a twelfth team, speculation has already begun on which school will be tabbed. The Crimson Quarry looks at a whole list of candidates, from Pitt all the way to Nebraska, while Brian Cook at mgoblog uses a chart examine who makes the most sense (it's Pitt and Missouri). But SB Nation's Black Shoe Diaries says that all this speculation and discussion starts and ends with one school: Notre Dame.

Notre Dame has been irrelevant in college football for nearly 20 years. They were a national program back in the 80's, but today there are no kids walking around California wearing Jimmy Clausen jerseys. There are no Joe Montanas or Theismans playing in the NFL and winning Super Bowls. Jerome Bettis was probably the last Notre Dame player to make any kind of impact in the NFL, and he retired a few years ago. Your fanbase is rapidly aging. The only people who are Notre Dame fans today are the old timers who can remember the 80's and the recent alumni who went there. At a small private school, that isn't much.

Sure, Notre Dame makes a lot of money, but how long can they keep that up? They just turned down a bowl invitation because their expenses probably wouldn't cover the costs. They can't count on BCS money every year, or even every other year. And now Comcast is buying NBC. As a guy who has worked for companies that have been bought and sold, I can tell you with each change of ownership comes a new way of doing things. How much longer do you think NBC is going to want to have the exclusive rights to broadcast an average team with a dwindling fan base get blown out by USC and lose to service academies? The only thing national about Notre Dame anymore is the national desire to see them choke and set new lows for Irish futility. NBC might as well offer Syracuse an exclusive contract if that's what they're into. The NBC cash cow will not last forever, but in the Big Ten Notre Dame would enjoy economic security without the pressure of winning ten games every year to avoid massive budget cuts. Heck, if I were Delany I would tell Notre Dame to keep their NBC contract as long as they can and keep all the money for yourself. And when the NBC money runs out we'll include you in the revenue from the Big Ten Network.

It would immediately mean rivalries between the Irish and Penn State and Ohio State. "It's now or never, Notre Dame. The Big Ten can no longer afford to wait, and you cannot sustain yourself on your current path."

It bears repeating: the Big Ten has commanded better attention this week when there's no football in sight than it has on the field all year, and all in the name of no longer being the Big Ten. (Not that it's really the Big Ten as is, and while we're on the subject? For all Delany's posturing about the conference's academic prowess, you'd think some math genius at Northwestern would've invented a special character to stand for "eleven teams masquerading as ten" ages ago.)

The Rivalry, Esq. looks past the most obvious question (the who) and tackles the real thorny issue at hand (the how):

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?

Over at Black Shoe Diaries, they're explaining the why, as in, "Why now?" (with a brief stop to knock Notre Dame out of contention while they're at it):

The biggest opponents of Big Ten expansion have always been Michigan and Ohio State. For years they have feared a Big Ten Championship game would take the focus off of THE GAME as the marquee event of the conference. But Michigan'sfailure to be competitive with the Buckeyes the past few years has already diminished the matchup, and the rest of the conference has suffered as they sit and watch the last three weeks of the college football season unfold from their couches and their teams get leapfrogged in the BCS standings. Ohio State has finally wised up and realized it'stime to move on with or without the Wolverines.

And no, no one has yet addressed the looming specter of "What on earth are we going to call this contraption?", but Spencer Hall's on the right track.

Got to hand it to the oft-plodding Big Ten; they sure know how to liven up a dead week of college football. In typical Midwestern fatalistic fashion, reactions from in-conference writers have been neither fervently opposed to nor over the moon for the idea of expansion; it's already taking on an air of fait accompli. Brian Cook likes Pitt and Missouri's chances the best, and by fancy charting, concludes the Panthers are the more likely candidate:

Rich tradition in football and has been intermittently decent over the last decade; basketball program has recently built itself into a national power but has little in the way of history.

Scholastically Pitt would be an average Big Ten team, which is very strong relative to other serious candidates. And there's no question whether they would jump or not: Pitt would kill to get in the Big Ten. They'd get to play Penn State, they'd get a ton more football revenue, the basketball would be fine, and they could play WVU out of conference.

Back in the SBN fold, The Crimson Quarry has an exhaustive rundown of prospects from Cincinnati to Maryland to Kentucky, and a bit of historical context:

Expansion is not something that the Big Ten undertakes lightly.  Penn State joined in 1990.  Michigan State joined in 1950.  Before that, the last new members to join were Indiana and Iowa in 1899.  The University of Chicago is the only school to leave the Big Ten permanently (per Wikipedia, Michigan left the conference from 1907-1916, but was a charter member when the conference was formed in 1896).  All current and former members of the Big Ten are major research institutions ranked in the top 100 by US News & World Report and are members of the Association of American Universities.  The Big Ten cares about its brand, academically and athletically.  

Yes, well, here's hoping this addition to The Brand goes smoother than the last time Jim Delany tried to shake things up.