Nitt Picks And The Fiesta Grew Up Together

just asking.

no way in hell they pass on the Texas Florida BCS title game, that’s been written in stone since the spring games

I would love to fill Heinz Stadium, and not have to play Pitt

I calculated the numbers a bit ago, and Minnesota comes in at #2 for average distance to other schools, longest distance to next closest school, and longest distance to furthest school. All second to PSU, if I recall correctly.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST = fun

we need a bowl selection hate post

if only to trigger a more explicit bsd-bhgp feud.

Florida is PSU territory, not Iowa’s.

I was not trying to imply that, say, Iowa, is just as responsible for the Big Ten’s current rep as Ohio State, but that they have played a factor that few are willing to acknowledge, as has every Big Ten program.

err one=won

You can’t have you cake, etc.

The point of the post was not to “point fingers”, but to make an attempt at assessing blame fairly, which is not what most people are interested in. People like scapegoats. Ohio State, being the conference’s premier program even with the BCS losses, is an easy scapegoat, and laying all of the blame on us lets everyone else off the hook.

It’s the only city that fits the widest range of Big Ten alums and fans. Even Penn State has a decent contingent there and obviously travels extremely well, anyway. In contrast, putting it in a place like Pittsburgh puts the game at great risk if Penn State or Ohio State isn’t involved. There’s very little downside from the Big Ten’s perspective to playing the game in Chicago no matter who is participating while there’s tons of downside in virtually any other market. Plus, if you’re talking about travel destinations in the Big Ten territory in general, Chicago is pretty much at the top – weekends in Detroit, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis for people that aren’t from those towns don’t exactly make hearts flutter. Finally, there’s the branding standpoint from the Big Ten. If you want a big-time event, then it ought to be played in a big-time market. Chicago is pretty much the only market that the national media gives even a whiff of attention to in “flyover country”. The more that the Big Ten is associated with Chicago as opposed to the Rust Belt generally (much like the Pac-10 has tied itself to LA), the better.

The closest I could possibly see is either a Cleveland or Cincy. If then. I think we would definitely be stuck with a rotation of Chicago, Indianapolis and possibly Detroit.

Anyways, I would also love to see a big ten title game being rotated between all the above cities, plus Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Minneapolis just to flesh out the footprint.

though I tend to side with jesse, mostly because I like variety. Chicago is by far the best “average” distance city for all the schools, and also the best city in the midwest, but if you look at jesse’s earlier plan (which would be a very reasonable scenario, though I’m already shivering thinking about Lambeau field, even though it wouldn’t be any worse than Soldier Field), it would still be in Chicago 3/12 times (I’m pretending ND would be our 12th team, and that they’d go to Indianapolis, though I could potentially see them doing Chicago), Indy 3/12 times, Detroit 2/12 times, and then other “smaller” venues the other 4 times.

That seems like a pretty fair distribution to me, and the driving distance only gets extended far out of the “center” 1/3 of the time, and that’s only if the teams are coming from the opposite side of the footprint.

… I’m just looking at it if I’m in the shoes of the Big Ten commissioner. The Big Ten isn’t like the new ACC or Big 12, where schools are so dispersed that there’s no natural center (meaning that it makes sense for those conferences to rotate conference title game around). The Big Ten alumni presence in Chicago is more like how Atlanta is the center of the SEC – you can make the game a permanent fixture in Chicago just like the SEC title game in Atlanta and you’ll come pretty close to having a neutral site in the vast majority of hypothetical matchups as well as sell out the game no matter who is playing. Physical distance from schools isn’t as important as where the alumni live (because those are the people more likely to buy/afford conference title game tickets as opposed to students). It’s one thing to rotate a basketball tournament around where you only need to sell 17-20,000 sets of tickets. For football, however, there’s very little reason to take the financial risk of rotating a game around when you’re virtually guaranteed to sell 70,000 tickets in a permanent location year in and year.

I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures of the empty stands at the ACC title games in Jacksonville and Tampa. The ACC made the mistake of thinking that it ought to cater to Florida State and Miami as opposed to going to their home base of Charlotte and they got completely burned. If I’m running the Big Ten, I wouldn’t make the same mistake. The Big Ten has the benefit of a natural alumni center, so it doesn’t make sense to ignore such benefit.

Look, I can understand the frustration of being on the geographic edge of the conference. Penn State brings immense value to the Big Ten with its Eastern fan base. Still, at a conference level, you’ve got to be a realistic business person if your job is to sell 70,000 tickets on an annual basis to a game that no one will know the participants of until a week before. It’s the old adage of “location, location, location”.