Perhaps it’s a testament to the inherent dishonesty of college athletics that so much of the buzz about Big Ten expansion – Maryland on Monday, Rutgers on Tuesday – is about the hunt for the true, secret reason.
Among so many athletic administrators this makes little sense to any known paradigm – why add two debt-ridden, poorly run athletic departments with historically blah football programs? Why make the Big Ten worse today than last week? Why dilute rivalries and brand? What’s the upside, that Rutgers perhaps one day reaches its potential as a good-but-not-great program?
All this … for that?
Everyone acknowledges the money but then figures this is so unnecessary and counter to commissioner Jim Delany’s conservative nature that there has to be more.
So we get that Delany must be mad at Notre Dame. Or Delany wasn’t going to let ACC commissioner John Swofford – heretofore the king of bad expansion based on unlikely projections, pie-in-the sky dreams and the fear of being “left behind” – get the Irish as partial members without some retribution. Or Delany is going to retire soon and he wasn’t going to let someone else be in charge of the league’s legacy moves.
Continue Reading: Big Ten sacrifices quality for cash with expansion (Yahoo! Sports)
