Big Ten expansion sounds good, anyway

It did sound good, anyway.

It was a little more than a week ago when we were sitting on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, listening to new Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti speak at the conference’s football media days.

Colorado was getting ready to move from the Pac-12 to the Big 12, so naturally Petitti was asked about any further expansion plans for the conference with USC and UCLA coming into the league next season.

Nope, Petitti said.

“What I'll say is all the direction I'm getting from leadership, our presidents and chancellors, athletic directors, is to focus on UCLA and USC,” Petitti said.

The conference had released its 2024 and 2025 football schedules, with every school playing everyone else once in a two-year period.

Petitti was so proud of that.

“I think it touches on all the right things,” he said. “We have significant work to do on scheduling of other sports, especially our Olympic sports, to come up with the best solutions. I believe we have a good plan in motion. I think we'll learn from it. Like anything, there will be tweaks and changes. Overall that's really where we are.”

The final sentence seemed so final.

“I'm not getting direction to do anything else other than that in terms of just what the conference looks like right now,” Petitti said.

I mean, it did sound good.

A week later, what do you know? The Big Ten added two more teams, Oregon and Washington, picking at the carcass of the conference it helped mortally wound a couple of years ago.

The fascinating part of the whole two days in the Indianapolis was a commissioner and coaches talking about “guardrails” for the earning power of their players through name-image-likeness deals, when in fact the only guardrails out there need to be on big conferences careening down roads, carving each other up for TV money.

No, a quarterback can’t get a nice deal from a car dealership in exchange for appearing in an ad or two, but schools can pack their checkbooks with money from FOX or ESPN, the puppet masters of all of these moves over the years, and we’re fine with that.

I believe in the free market, I truly do. Adding USC and UCLA, despite all of the hand-wringing that went with it, made sense as the Big Ten was trying to negotiate a new media rights package, because it meant the conference had a foothold in the nation’s top four media markets. And while we worried about the Trojans and the Bruins traveling around the country for games in every sport, and schools from the East Coast and the Midwest going to them, it was those schools who went to the Big Ten for help, not the other way around.

And you can make an argument for adding Oregon and Washington, because it gives USC and UCLA some West Coast neighbors, easing a bit of the travel burden. Two more teams in the Western time zone now help fill that last open TV window on late Saturday night, although you know it’s not going to be Ohio State, Michigan or Penn State playing until after midnight in Seattle or Eugene or Los Angeles.

Yes, the Pac-12 screwed the Pac-12. Poor leadership put the conference in its own mess, and poor leadership failed to put together a media rights package that was good enough to keep everyone together.

But it could have been just as easy for the Big Ten to sit out this round of expansion chess moves, to stay at 16, count the money, and wait to see what happens everywhere else. The league could have been choosy — yes, waiting on Notre Dame is futile — but upheaval somewhere else could have found some better partners.

We don’t know what the media landscape will look like when the current Big Ten deal expires. ESPN is having its money issues. FOX seems to have deep pockets, but eventually it will have other deals to make with professional sports leagues. NBC and CBS are willing participants, but how much more money can they bring?

And while everyone seems to think there’s money in the Amazon Prime and Apple TV world, that might be on shaky ground.

Iowa fans were among everyone else cackling on Friday at the Pac-12’s misfortune. But there are a lot of new voices in the Big Ten, and who's to say some of them won’t be whispering in the ears of the old guard of the conference in a few years, wondering if the league really needs the TV markets of Des Moines or Omaha or Minneapolis. Why split the money 18 or 20 ways when you can split it 14 or 16?

Sound far-fetched? Well, yeah. But it was also far-fetched not long ago that Iowa would be playing a Big Ten football game at USC or UCLA would be coming to Kinnick Stadium, and here we are.

And if it seems all so far away, remember that a conference commissioner was saying the league was happy with 16 teams, and then a week later those same presidents said yes to two more.

It did sound good, though.