[BostonCard]

Jamesy has it right. The Pac-12 is dying whether we like it or not. By far the best outcome for the top West Coast sports programs, including Stanford, is for enough of them to join the Big 10 that the distance actually isn't that tyrannical as we're mostly playing our normal geographic footprint anyway.

Except the distance will be tyrannical for a non-trivial number of games, if not for football, then for basketball, volleyball, and all the other sports where you can’t just play most of your games within your division.  Obviously more teams out west moves the geographic center of the conference westward, but per 538, “ The distance from Los Angeles to the geographic center of the Big Ten is a whopping 1,621 miles.”

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how...n-20-maps/

This is nuts. It’s one thing to make professional athletes fly coast to coast routinely for games. It’s another thing to make college athletes, who are ostensibly students, do it. Just once, I would like to see the powers that be in collegiate athletics make a decision to forgo more money to further the academic interests of the student athletes in their charge. What we need is fewer games, more student friendly game times, less travel, and more of an opportunity for the student athletes to, you know, do what they are supposedly in college to do.

BC

[BostonCard]

Jamesy has it right. The Pac-12 is dying whether we like it or not. By far the best outcome for the top West Coast sports programs, including Stanford, is for enough of them to join the Big 10 that the distance actually isn't that tyrannical as we're mostly playing our normal geographic footprint anyway.

Except the distance will be tyrannical for a non-trivial number of games, if not for football, then for basketball, volleyball, and all the other sports where you can’t just play most of your games within your division.  Obviously more teams out west moves the geographic center of the conference westward, but per 538, “ The distance from Los Angeles to the geographic center of the Big Ten is a whopping 1,621 miles.”

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how...n-20-maps/

This is nuts. It’s one thing to make professional athletes fly coast to coast routinely for games. It’s another thing to make college athletes, who are ostensibly students, do it. Just once, I would like to see the powers that be in collegiate athletics make a decision to forgo more money to further the academic interests of the student athletes in their charge. What we need is fewer games, more student friendly game times, less travel, and more of an opportunity for the student athletes to, you know, do what they are supposedly in college to do.

BC