Thought of another possible effect. Many Big 10 schools are located in fairly remote areas. Is stadium attendance going to suffer because you won’t get many fans from California willing to fly to Bloomington, Indiana for a weekend game? It’s fairly easy to drive around the original Big 10 schools with Minnesota a bit of an outlier. But flying from the West Coast is probably going to mean a connection.
Of course, that could also be a reason for more neutral site games. Have Indiana play UCLA in Indianapolis, an easy flight from anywhere in the USA. Have USC play Illinois in Chicagox etc.
It’s going to be interesting, there’s times I just want the old college football world back that I loved. But, it’s gone. At least I can see almost any game I want to now.
I’ve been to about 10 ND/USC games in South Bend. Judging by the number of private planes that fly in, I’m guessing they’ll just fly directly into Bloomington Regional. Now, that’s a traditional rivalry with a lot of history - I’m sure attendance at the IU game will still be above-average (meaning, more than a few thousand will show up), because it’s a big name coming to play.
You think that LA scensters go to college football games? lol. Anyway, that’s exactly what they do now and I haven’t heard that there are plans to change that. I doubt that the pro teams want the turf fucked up every week before their games.
Oh, I don’t think they’d move every game to the pro stadium. Just the very biggest matchups and they could use the stadium Labor Day weekend, college football kicks off then often with big matchups and the NFL doesn’t begin until Thursday after Labor Day.
You’d want to maximize revenue. Fewer people but more $$ spent per person would probably be the goal. Selling a nosebleed ticket and then setting up a pop up beer tent won’t make as much as a luxury box in a modern stadium.
You want to maximize profit, not revenue. I’m sure that someone has run the numbers and there’s no indication at this time that anyone is moving game locations. There may also be contractual problems and it might not be worth it to the SoFi people.
I don’t know if this was the goal, but it’s definitely going to be what we get. There are 2 super conferences, and everybody else quarreling for scraps – including the remainder of the Pac-12, and my beloved Cal Bears. 100 years of tradition and history in the dumper, as we patch together a conference of the Mountain West and Pac-x leftovers. This totally sucks.
Here is a pretty interesting article that explains in UCLA’s case how much more money they’ll be getting and how necessary it was.
TLDR; UCLA’s athletics was in very serious debt and in the brink of default. When the Big10 gets their new media deal, they will be in the black and very healthy in a couple of years.
I doubt that UCLA will field an ice hockey team. They aren’t required to do every sport.
Of course not. Only about half the Big Ten plays ice hockey. Other schools do not field teams in sports played in the conference. Wisconsin, for example, does not have a baseball team.
Exactly so. The Badgers did have a baseball team, up until the early '90s. My recollection (as an alumnus) is that they discontinued it, in part due to the difficulty of fielding a team during late winter in Wisconsin (they typically had to play most of the first half of the season on the road, though that obviously doesn’t keep schools like Minnesota and Michigan from doing so), but mostly due to budgetary issues in the athletic department.
Arizona State has a hockey team and I believe they will join the Big Ten as a hockey-only addition as Notre Dame has already done and as Johns Hopkins has done in lacrosse.
Thus spelling doom for the PAC-12 conference. There are now just 4 teams left (Oregon State, Washington State, Cal and Stanford). They’ll be scrambling to find a way forward…probably merging with the Mountain West, relegating those 4 to G5 status.
As an alum and very long time fan of one of those 4: this absolutely sucks.
Someone has created a site for the remaining Pac schools:
I know there was some talk that the Big… 18 now was also kicking the tires on Cal and Stanford. It’s nuts to think that a few years back when Texas and Oklahoma went to the SEC, the remaining big Big12 schools were practically begging the PAC to take them in.
What seems worse for fans is their team joining a mega-conference full of heavy hitters, dramatically lessening their chances of winning the conference/making the CFP. For teams lacking a lot of historic success, joining a more competitive conference seems preferable to getting your brains beat out on a regular basis.
Of course, school officials mostly care about making $$$ through big TV contracts.