Here’s hoping this USC/UCLA-Big Ten merger careens off the track, crashes and burns | Jones

I woke up Saturday morning with the intention of looking at how this crazy Large Ten expansion in Los Angeles could be streamlined into a viable model.

Simply, the more than I consider information technology, the more I want to see the entire Play tricks Sports-led Big Ten acquisition venture come crashing downward and explode in one huge ball of burn down. And so, I have built a stage for that vision, ane that I tin back up.

First, an updated outlook review as of Saturday night. Several reporters I trust have posted recent key developments:

• Dennis Dodd of
CBS Sports
reported that Oregon and Washington have been told the Large Ten are quiet for now and is waiting for Notre Dame to decide whether to join B1G as well.

• Scott Dochterman of
the athletic
inferred quite logically that FOX is not at all interested in a new B1G Due west division that would prevent USC and UCLA from messing with the Large 10 East powers Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State more than than once every four years. Television people desire the big-rated splash games as oftentimes equally possible.

• Influential Portland radio host John Canzano, formerly of OregonLive, wrote an open plea to 84-year-old Nike founder and generous benefactor of the Oregon Ducks Phil Knight to salvage what’south left of the Pac-12 by encouraging a proactive Big 12 incursion, assuming quite logically that it’due south ane conference or another that will survive. I mean, maybe not either, but that’due south some other story.

•
Sports Illustrated‘s Pat Forde suggested that, if nosotros actually are in survival mode of the fittest unknown, What’s keeping these budding superconferences from shedding unwanted baggage?schools that accept never struggled financially like Purdue and Minnesota and Vanderbilt and Mississippi Land?

It’south chaos out there, every league and school for itself. There are no rules anymore. It’due south an Ayn Rand biosphere. And thanks to Disney and Fob stealing bodies from the SEC and B1G and hatching their larvae within college football game, simply one asset matters. It’s not about tradition, collegiality, rivalries, gangs, or whatsoever of the other facets nosotros’ve always loved virtually college sports.

Information technology’due south about money. Simply money.

Hither are the architects of this acquisition. Accept a good look at them. They are primarily responsible for what has happened to the games on their campus. Jimmy Pitaro, president of ESPN. Marking Silverman, president of FOX Sports. The former greased the skids for Texas and Oklahoma to join the Southeastern Conference and leave the Large 12 in shambles. The latter headed to Southern California and UCLA running into the Big X and leaving the Pac-12 afloat and most likely irrelevant.

This super league concept is what the money men of European football game tried to practise with the Premier League. It didn’t happen because fans who love the game, including many who wear the powerful colors of Chelsea bluish and Manchester red, championed the smaller, poorer clubs of the 1920s and shouted the concept.

But some of that feeling is missing in America. Because we are such a divided nation in so many ways, no ane seems to care about the well-beingness of others. Go yours, make sure the argue line is secure and
screw
your neighbor! These are at present the bromides of college sports.

I don’t feel similar many B1G or SEC fans care in the least that the landscape across their e'er-increasing footprints is being scoured. That the brave underdogs of the state of Iowa and the state of Oregon and, yes, at present Pittsburgh, are vulnerable to being swept away by a tidal wave of unbridled greed.

My hope is this: That Kevin Warren’s incompetent Peter Principle “leadership” will be exposed again. That this FOX money heist will blow up in the face of the Big Ten when all USC and UCLA athletes start realizing what they’ve been tied up in: weekly trips of a minimum of 12 hours in airports and planes to and from from slate-colored, Midwestern and Eastern outposts covered in stratus clouds. I expect an all-out rebellion, than recruiting craters in Los Angeles schools considering give-and-take of mouth spreads: you don’t desire to do this, man. information technology’s brutal

These are two regional cultures that practice not become together. Both are cute in their own right: the diligent windswept plainsmen of the Cornbelt and the flamboyant dominicus-kissed sons of SoCal. They accept nix in common. And what the telecast speculators don’t sympathize is that a league must have a common civilization. It is non but a division of professionals. It is a group of university students who yet represent a specific portion of the country.

I have a feeling this isn’t going to work. Network executives don’t take that premonition considering they are soulless opportunists who only empathize fiscal metrics. They simply try to pool the most valuable assets in the belief that they tin can maximize profits.

Well, telephone call me a spread bettor looking for a loss. I remember this USC/UCLA takeover is headed for disaster.

Had Warren had the audacity of his predecessor Jim Delany, he would accept at to the lowest degree thrown himself into this Western expansion. He would accept watched the SEC’s Texas/Oklahoma play USC/UCLA and raised information technology with Oregon/Washington/Utah to course an entirely new Western division made up entirely of Pac-12 members,
after
made a big blustering offer to Notre Dame to practice xx. If ND refuses, NC is the contingency.

If you’re going to make this superconference move, do it big, assuming, and brazen. You lot give the Trojans and bruin brothers-in-arms to make them experience included in their new digs. Of form, the folks at Flim-flam have already told Warren and the B1G presidents that Ducks, Huskies and Utes don’t provide enough value to make TV money worth an equal slice of a reduced pie.

And I don’t call up Warren has the kind of stones or vision to go against his advice. He’s going to slow play his hand similar the ass that he is. And the Large Ten are going to end upwards with a couple of incongruous, ill-adjusted members with no Pacific brothers to join them. He’southward going to disgust them. Actually, it’south going to suck for everyone.

And and so, I expect exactly that: a giant bomb so dysfunctional and chaotic that it completely implodes. That, by the end of the decade, USC and UCLA will be back in a kind of western briefing along the coast with their neighbors. And the Big 10 is dorsum in the cornfields where it belongs.

However, that is the question in this world without laws and without borders. No ane knows who they are anymore. They just intendance what they’re worth.

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•
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•
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