The Conference Realignment Vigil- Update: Terps to Big10?

[uh_no]

I've argued that conferences of such size, including the account, shouldn't have divisions for basketball. You can't have it both ways, a Mega conference AND preserve your rivalries. So why not embrace the size. At least the big east gotthat part right.

think my thing is, the schedule's aren't balanced as it is, and people don't care one bit about divisional winners (except maybe the fanbase when they "clinch" it) so why not just play everyone once, and if there's any rivalries, play them twice. Its not like any individual school is REALLY going to have a rivalry against more than a couple schools anyway in a huge conference....so for us you could say play UNC twice, and MAYBE maryland twice....I wouldn't really care if ncsu or md or anyone else didn't make it to cameron every year (I also wasn't here when these guys were really rivals...so you can certainly disregard my opinion here)

but I think people need to realize times change. Yeah there is always a want to beat maryland and state, but its not what it used to be. Especially with gary gone and huge conferences. It also makes it more of a special occasion when you only get them in your gym every other year

anyway, just my opinion...i know people here think differently and would rather have some sort of complicated home and away vs division and maybe not play every team every year....shrug

maybe its also an effect of growing up a uconn fan who never really had really good rivalry against particular schools...

[BD80]

... maybe its also an effect of growing up a uconn fan who never really had really good rivalry against particular schools...

Calhoun's charges have had a fairly solid rivalry with the justice sytem over his tenure ...

Of course, the home "court" advantage has generally prevented justice from prevailing.

[snowdenscold]

then the two divisions never play each other ever until the conference tournament when the first round of games features interdivisional matchups

for those who were confused, the preceding was a joke

I got it

[ForkFondler]

I've argued that conferences of such size, including the account, shouldn't have divisions for basketball. You can't have it both ways, a Mega conference AND preserve your rivalries. So why not embrace the size. At least the big east gotthat part right.

Nuts. I would much rather have divisions with a home-and-home schedule. And yes I will care about the division title because the schedule will be balanced. Two regular season division titles, one tournament conference title. Make it happen.

[Scorp4me]

Nuts. I would much rather have divisions with a home-and-home schedule. And yes I will care about the division title because the schedule will be balanced. Two regular season division titles, one tournament conference title. Make it happen.

I'd much rather have a home-and-home schedule too, but then I'd also much rather have a conference with only 8 teams so that we could. I mean it's ridiculous to have a conference of 14 teams and argue it has a bigger geographic footprint and that it brings you into more recruiting hotbeds...if you only play half the teams.

Embrace what we've become. What's so bad about only playing each team once a year? Sure I'd hate not playing UNC twice I guess, but go with the times. I gave up on things being the way we should be after the first round of expansion to 12. I'd hate to not even play all the teams in our conference and I hate the unbalanced schedules. So why not.

[ForkFondler]

With 14 teams, I think a 19 team schedule is the way to go: Home and away within division + 1 game each against the opposite division.

If we go to sixteen, then I'd like to see a 18 game schedule where you only play regular season games against teams in the other division every other year. I'd even make the cross divisional matchups "preseason" games that don't count towards divisional standings -- maybe a preseason N-S challenge series. There would also be cross division matchups in the ACC-T, many of which didn't happen during the regular season -- which would make the ACC-T more interesting I think. The first round could be all cross-divisional matchup, and if the top seeds win out, they will all be cross-divisional. Duke and UNC would probably face Syr, Pitt, UConn once a year on average.

Two eight team leagues with a 16 team tournament at the end. Sounds pretty good to me.

[senkiri]

I'd much rather have a home-and-home schedule too, but then I'd also much rather have a conference with only 8 teams so that we could. I mean it's ridiculous to have a conference of 14 teams and argue it has a bigger geographic footprint and that it brings you into more recruiting hotbeds...if you only play half the teams.

Embrace what we've become. What's so bad about only playing each team once a year? Sure I'd hate not playing UNC twice I guess, but go with the times. I gave up on things being the way we should be after the first round of expansion to 12. I'd hate to not even play all the teams in our conference and I hate the unbalanced schedules. So why not.

Like the old Taco Bell commercial said: por que no las dos? (why not both?)

Seems to me that as long as the ACC stays at 14 we can have both. With two divisions of seven schools, you can have an intradivision double round robin schedule and still play every team in the other division once as well.

Total conference games would be 19, not terribly more than the current 16. 12 from home-and-home games with your divisional rivals and 7 games from the other division. Presumably the interdivisional games would be half home, half away for one school, with the location of a given game alternating annually.

Becomes tougher if the conference expands any further though...

[Class of '94]

Apparently, there may be some disagreements between the Big 12 Commissioner and some schools, particularly OU, over expansion. Apparently the commissioner is pushing for the league to remain at 10 while some schools would like to expand further; and to noone's surprise, Louisville is the top target. IMO, Louisville might still be working behind the scenes to generate interest from Big 12 members to bring Louisville into that conference.

Here is the link: http://eye-on-collegefootball.blogs...56338/33219479 .

[BD80]

Apparently, there may be some disagreements between the Big 12 Commissioner and some schools, particularly OU, over expansion. Apparently the commissioner is pushing for the league to remain at 10 while some schools would like to expand further; and to noone's surprise, Louisville is the top target. IMO, Louisville might still be working behind the scenes to generate interest from Big 12 members to bring Louisville into that conference.

Here is the link: http://eye-on-collegefootball.blogs...56338/33219479 .

Never fails to draw a chuckle. Big 12 to remain at 10

At least the Big 10 at 12 members makes a little more sense, 12 is a very big 10.

Why even pretend that these are educational institutions when they can't count to ten?

[A-Tex Devil]

Apparently, there may be some disagreements between the Big 12 Commissioner and some schools, particularly OU, over expansion. Apparently the commissioner is pushing for the league to remain at 10 while some schools would like to expand further; and to noone's surprise, Louisville is the top target. IMO, Louisville might still be working behind the scenes to generate interest from Big 12 members to bring Louisville into that conference.

Here is the link: http://eye-on-collegefootball.blogs...56338/33219479 .

Yeah. I think this is Lousville, with perhaps McConnell's help, backchanneling this through Boren at OU and the OU media to try to get into the Big XII. Surprised Castiglione backs 12 teams, frankly. The TV contract pays them the same as if they had a CCG, so adding 2 teams is just going to split the pie more unless the Big XII can reopen negotiations. Do Louisville and Cincy/BYU move the needle that much? I doubt it.

Ten is fine with me. Only the Big East adds teams just to add them, regardless of the value (or lack thereof) they bring.

[throatybeard]

Treachery is usually rewarded on this earth. Congratulations to the Longhorns for singlehandedly destabilizing an entire conference. Before this season, I'd never have even conceived of a rooting interest in the Texas-Texas A&M game. I was totally neutral on that rivalry. Why would I care? Now I will regard Texas revenue athletics with disgust for the rest of my life.

Poor A&M. At least they get to live in a conference Texas isn't trying to sabotage. The announcers keep eulogizing the series. Frankly, I hope they're right. I hope the people in power at A&M never negotiate again with Texas, ever again. Five years from now, it will still suck that they don't play Texas. But in forty, they will have something just as rich with LSU. I salute A&M, Mizzou, CU and NU for seeing the writing on the wall and getting the heck off the raft Texas shot a cannonball through while still standing on it. Since I have to listen to a lot of the Mizzou news in the local media, I'm sympathetic to KU for their own rivalry ending with MU, and I get why they're mad at MU. But KU needs to be considering whether they ever play Texas again, and realize their rivalry MU was just collateral damage. KU should be madder at Texas than MU, who was just jumping in A&M's life raft. Likewise CU-NU, NU-OU, etc. These rivalries have died because of Texas. If Carolina ever plays Texas, well, go Heels. No offense to UNC for putting you in a sentence with Texas.

Lastly, I'm really sorry for Gail Goestenkors. I really really like her. I'm sorry for her that she's hitched her wagon to that Athletic complex* and the unbelievable dishonesty issuing from it.

* - yes, I know UT has a whole nother AD for Women's athletics. But they still have to live in the bed UT football has made.

[OldPhiKap]

Treachery is usually rewarded on this earth. Congratulations to the Longhorns for singlehandedly destabilizing an entire conference. Before this season, I'd never have even conceived of a rooting interest in the Texas-Texas A&M game. I was totally neutral on that rivalry. Why would I care? Now I will regard Texas revenue athletics with disgust for the rest of my life.

Poor A&M. At least they get to live in a conference Texas isn't trying to sabotage. The announcers keep eulogizing the series. Frankly, I hope they're right. I hope the people in power at A&M never negotiate again with Texas, ever again. Five years from now, it will still suck that they don't play Texas. But in forty, they will have something just as rich with LSU. I salute A&M, Mizzou, CU and NU for seeing the writing on the wall and getting the heck off the raft Texas shot a cannonball through while still standing on it. Since I have to listen to a lot of the Mizzou news in the local media, I'm sympathetic to KU for their own rivalry ending with MU, and I get why they're mad at MU. But KU needs to be considering whether they ever play Texas again, and realize their rivalry MU was just collateral damage. KU should be madder at Texas than MU, who was just jumping in A&M's life raft. Likewise CU-NU, NU-OU, etc. These rivalries have died because of Texas. If Carolina ever plays Texas, well, go Heels. No offense to UNC for putting you in a sentence with Texas.

Lastly, I'm really sorry for Gail Goestenkors. I really really like her. I'm sorry for her that she's hitched her wagon to that Athletic complex* and the unbelievable dishonesty issuing from it.

* - yes, I know UT has a whole nother AD for Women's athletics. But they still have to live in the bed UT football has made.

Other than the "ge Heels" I am with you generally. But I can't root for Mack Brown no matter what, so I was pulling for A&M regardless.

Sad to see this rivalry on ice, and I don't understand how some are making A&M the bad guy here. They did not ask for the landscape to be shuffled.

[A-Tex Devil]

A lot of emotion without a lot of facts throaty but that's par for the course for you on this thread.

It was a great game tonight, and I would have been proud of the 'Horns regardless of the outcome tonight after they weathered the initial blow. The Aggies played a hell of a game themselves. Good luck to A&M in the SEC. My two best friends in the world are Aggies, and after a lot of long, sometimes heated, but always good natured, conversations with them, I've come to understand why it was the right move for them and I think they can be successful eventually. The next few years will be tough though as they rebuild this senior laden team in the ridiculous SEC West.

Hook 'em.

[throatybeard]

A lot of emotion without a lot of facts throaty but that's par for the course for you on this thread.

Par for the course for me, ha. It is your actions on this board that initially propelled me to the conclusions I have now made. I thought, surely no one else can really be arguing these things, in good faith. Then I checked, looking at other UT fans, and I was just appalled, and amazed.

Let me reiterate: I had no dog in this fight previously. None. I was neutral. Why on earth would I care about an in-state rivalry over yonder?

I am not neutral anymore. Indeed, as a Humanities/Qualitative Soc Sci guy, I'm instinctively predisposed to like a UT over an A&M. But when the UT people act a certain way, my sympathies migrate to a school like A&M. You folks have really done a number, and you've alienated a lot of people who might have otherwise sympathized with you.

I'm sorry the Aggies didn't win that game 70-0. But I'm thrilled for the four schools who have thrown off UT's yoke. And I hope the others in that conference find other landing places free of the burnt orange prevaricators. I'd be thrilled with KU to the B1G, for example.

[arnie]

Par for the course for me, ha. It is your actions on this board that initially propelled me to the conclusions I have now made. I thought, surely no one else can really be arguing these things, in good faith. Then I checked, looking at other UT fans, and I was just appalled, and amazed.

Let me reiterate: I had no dog in this fight previously. None. I was neutral. Why on earth would I care about an in-state rivalry over yonder?

I am not neutral anymore. Indeed, as a Humanities/Qualitative Soc Sci guy, I'm instinctively predisposed to like a UT over an A&M. But when the UT people act a certain way, my sympathies migrate to a school like A&M. You folks have really done a number, and you've alienated a lot of people who might have otherwise sympathized with you.

I'm sorry the Aggies didn't win that game 70-0. But I'm thrilled for the four schools who have thrown off UT's yoke. And I hope the others in that conference find other landing places free of the burnt orange prevaricators. I'd be thrilled with KU to the B1G, for example.

I'll gladly take the other side on this discussion as I attended a weeklong engineerng conference at A&M in the 80s. The A&M faculty has this attitude of "we're the best cause we're the largest". The conference had nothing to do with school competition, but it seemed at every moment they were bragging about their collective greatness. A simple seminar dinner became a marekting ploy for the school. I was even asked about my school by a faculty member in the elevator - total sneer when I told him where I graduated. These people have an inferiority complex that goes beyond anything I've ever seen.

[Des Esseintes]

Treachery is usually rewarded on this earth. Congratulations to the Longhorns for singlehandedly destabilizing an entire conference. Before this season, I'd never have even conceived of a rooting interest in the Texas-Texas A&M game. I was totally neutral on that rivalry. Why would I care? Now I will regard Texas revenue athletics with disgust for the rest of my life.

Poor A&M. At least they get to live in a conference Texas isn't trying to sabotage. The announcers keep eulogizing the series. Frankly, I hope they're right. I hope the people in power at A&M never negotiate again with Texas, ever again. Five years from now, it will still suck that they don't play Texas. But in forty, they will have something just as rich with LSU. I salute A&M, Mizzou, CU and NU for seeing the writing on the wall and getting the heck off the raft Texas shot a cannonball through while still standing on it. Since I have to listen to a lot of the Mizzou news in the local media, I'm sympathetic to KU for their own rivalry ending with MU, and I get why they're mad at MU. But KU needs to be considering whether they ever play Texas again, and realize their rivalry MU was just collateral damage. KU should be madder at Texas than MU, who was just jumping in A&M's life raft. Likewise CU-NU, NU-OU, etc. These rivalries have died because of Texas. If Carolina ever plays Texas, well, go Heels. No offense to UNC for putting you in a sentence with Texas.

Lastly, I'm really sorry for Gail Goestenkors. I really really like her. I'm sorry for her that she's hitched her wagon to that Athletic complex* and the unbelievable dishonesty issuing from it.

* - yes, I know UT has a whole nother AD for Women's athletics. But they still have to live in the bed UT football has made.

Having grown up a K-State fan before I came to Duke, I've followed realignment fairly closely and with some anxiety. What I don't understand from this and your other posts is why you think it's so easy to assign blame. For me at least, the past 24 months have only made it harder to tell the heroes from the villains. Not to say the heroes and villains don't exist. They very well might. There might be some schools more money-hungry or more power-hungry or more perfidious than others. But given the number of players on the board, the complexity of the game, its multiple iterations, and the fact that it is played behind closed doors, sussing out responsibility has become an almost impossible effort. If Texas is the evil first mover--and hey, perhaps they are--it is far from as obvious as you make the matter out to be. I don't think blanket denunciation lifts the level of discussion. It seems childish both in the sense that it's a weak form of argument and in the sense of betraying a simplistic vision of the field.

I will also say that A-Tex Devil's posts in this thread have been (for me) informative and clarifying. Perhaps that's just the proof of my own stupidity, my own mistaking heat for light from a Texas barker. In any event, we all have some angle from which we're coming at this thing. I think the most we can ask of anyone in the discussion is to be intelligent and to be forthright about their biases. A-Tex passes both of those tests, and I don't understand the rancor directed his way.

[jafarr1]

Having grown up a K-State fan before I came to Duke, I've followed realignment fairly closely and with some anxiety. What I don't understand from this and your other posts is why you think it's so easy to assign blame. For me at least, the past 24 months have only made it harder to tell the heroes from the villains. Not to say the heroes and villains don't exist. They very well might. There might be some schools more money-hungry or more power-hungry or more perfidious than others. But given the number of players on the board, the complexity of the game, its multiple iterations, and the fact that it is played behind closed doors, sussing out responsibility has become an almost impossible effort. If Texas is the evil first mover--and hey, perhaps they are--it is far from as obvious as you make the matter out to be. I don't think blanket denunciation lifts the level of discussion. It seems childish both in the sense that it's a weak form of argument and in the sense of betraying a simplistic vision of the field.

I'm fairly puzzled by your logic here. Not every message board post needs to provide an eloquent level of intellectual discourse, nor can every post cover every aspect of what you acknowledge to be a complex field. Besides, claiming Texas to be a villain and A&M to be a victim does not contradict anything that you wrote, except to disagree with your assertion that no single entity can be classified as villain or victim.

While I agree that villains can be tough to distinguish, I do not believe it's difficult to see that Texas decided to push their own agenda, and continued to push that agenda in the face of stiff resistance, no matter what the consequences. In my mind, that casts them firmly in the villain role, and my opinion of UT athletics will likely never again be a positive one. And while expressing my opinion in that form seems to fit your definition of childish, we'll need to agree to disagree there as well.

[Des Esseintes]

While I agree that villains can be tough to distinguish, I do not believe it's difficult to see that Texas decided to push their own agenda, and continued to push that agenda in the face of stiff resistance, no matter what the consequences.

See, this is where I get lost. What does it mean that Texas pushed its own agenda? Let's try an exercise here.

"While I agree that villains can be tough to distinguish, I do not believe it's difficult to see that A&M decided to push their[sic] own agenda, and continued to push that agenda in the face of stiff resistance, no matter what the consequences."

Or how about:

"While I agree that villains can be tough to distinguish, I do not believe it's difficult to see that Nebraska decided to push their[sic] own agenda, and continued to push that agenda in the face of stiff resistance, no matter what the consequences."

Is either of these statements any more or less defensible than your original one? Maybe! I don't see how it's so obvious, though. What schools in this fiasco lacked agendas? What schools failed to pursue those agendas? I'm more than willing to hear an argument for why one school is a diablo and another one is not. I like reading those posts. But I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for some details.

[OldPhiKap]

I have not gone back to see where this all got personal between some folks, but it highlights the emotions that are involved.

From my perspective (that is, East Coast basketball fan who likes college football but doesn't follow it that closely) all parties have acted in what they perceive to be their individual best interests. No crime there. Texas is the big dog with the big money contract, and money is what matters in the current NCAA landscape. While I personally wish Texas had not started the current destabilization, it's their right to do it. And A&M has the right to decide that it wants out from under Texas' shadow.

I am sure defenders of both programs will point out why I'm wrong, which is fine. I am glad we're in the ACC and for once I am glad that Swofford acted proactively to help preserve it.

Good luck to A&M in the SEC West -- it's where good dreams go to die. Brutal conference.

[Newton_14]

I have not gone back to see where this all got personal between some folks, but it highlights the emotions that are involved.

From my perspective (that is, East Coast basketball fan who likes college football but doesn't follow it that closely) all parties have acted in what they perceive to be their individual best interests. No crime there. Texas is the big dog with the big money contract, and money is what matters in the current NCAA landscape. While I personally wish Texas had not started the current destabilization, it's their right to do it. And A&M has the right to decide that it wants out from under Texas' shadow.

I am sure defenders of both programs will point out why I'm wrong, which is fine. I am glad we're in the ACC and for once I am glad that Swofford acted proactively to help preserve it.

Good luck to A&M in the SEC West -- it's where good dreams go to die. Brutal conference.

Good post OPK. As for who started this, if my memory is correct it was the Big 10 commish (Delaney?) that had the vision of the mega-conferences and started pushing the landscape in this direction. I could be wrong, and would appreciate anyone weighing in who knows more on the subject. I just recall reading an article a couple of years ago discussing Delaney and his "vision". When A-Tex started a thread on this last year I thought he was nuts and this would never come to fruition, but I read the article which backed up what A-Tex was putting out there in his thread.

So did Texas really start this, was it Delaney, or a combination of several parties?