Howe: The Birthplace of College Football Has Experienced a Tough Life

[uihawk82]

Rutgers today feels like Northwestern was treated back in the 1980's. Great academic school with awful athletic teams and tradition.

Time will tell if the Big Ten screwed up, but right now it feels like a huge mistake. The whole push to the east coast to gain cable tv markets looks like a big misfire longterm as the future switches to streaming apps and to actual fans that are willing to subscribe to those apps.

In the long run, taking Missouri, who easily would have accepted, and who fits the Big Ten culture, would have made Iowa fans much happier. This also would have maybe made it easier to get big schools like Texas to eventually join the Big Ten.

Oh well, Rutgers is part of the family now, like the deadbeat brother-in-law that your sister married. Maybe they will get their act together someday and get their program to at least a Northwestern-type level.

See my reply just above this one as streaming services are just like cable and satellite.

 

[uihawk82]

Pitt and PSU also already play each other every year in one of the better (in my opinion) rivalry games and they frequently play B1G opponents, so it would be a mostly seamless transition.

Notre Dame would boost the legitimacy of the West and even out some of the historical advantage that UM and OSU have in the East.

Rutgers obviously needs to be an FCS team and could easily find a conference (not that they ever would); Maryland OTOH wouldn't be able to find another major conference home due to geography and the fact that the ACC is even numbered at 14 now. The Big 12 is a perfect place for a bastard stepchild like Maryland but they're half a country away.

Well West Virginia in the Big 12 is pretty geographically weird but now about the same as Big 10 West teams having to play once in awhile at PSU maryland and buttgers

 

[VTHawk]

Rutgers is not a great academic school. It's probably on par with the middle of the pack Big Ten schools and given the skew of rankings toward local population, it is an absolute tire fire. The smartest kids in New York and New Jersey want nothing to do with Rutgers, which makes it totally different than most of the flagship schools in the Big Ten, which will lose some kids to more elite schools, but will still be able to maintain a healthy percentage of the smart kids in state. There are plenty of smart kids in places like Minnesota who dream of going to Minnesota, same with Wisconsin, Michigan, OSU, PSU, etc., but no smart kid in Jersey dreams of going to Rutgers. They all want to go Ivy or some other elite northeastern college.

I am not sure how Jim Delany thought he was securing the New York City television market with Rutgers or making the Big Ten a better conference. I live in the NY metro area and nobody cared about Rutgers before joining the Big Ten and nobody cares now. Yes its true Rutgers enjoyed some very brief success and was put on the national map for a very brief moment in time. There was a lot of media coverage (especially locally) regarding that success, but I would say most people who live here thought it was going to be one of those nice success stories that never lasts and won't be seen again.

I am not sure what Jim Delany was smoking. I see parallels between this and the expansion of the Big East. The old story of money and greed. I feel like Jim Delany got swindled. I don't know the details of the deal but I feel like Jim Delany was given a common New York con job at best.

The saving grace for the Big Ten is that there is just too much money in College Football. Though that doesn't solve the problem that the move weakened the conference.

 

[Seth53]

I went to the game in Piscataway in 2016.
Had a great time....re-visited NYC for the first time in 35 years, saw Manhattan from a cruise ship, visited Broadway, Soho, all the sights.

Oh, the game...right. A 14-7 snoozer on the heals of losing at home to NDSU. OK stadium. Polite crowd.
Boring environment. The rare season ticket holders I sat by had really no connection to the B1G, knew nothing of Iowa's program, were there basically for an event rather than the passion. They had as much association with the Midwest as Iowa would have with the dark side of the moon.

And yes, who in the world world would choose to live there. What a mess. I was never so glad to see corn fields and tractors upon landing at MLI and coming 'home.'

 

[eyekwah]

Clemson is a markedly better school than Iowa, Sparty or Nebraska. And SEC members Georgia and Florida are better than all the Big Ten state schools other than Michigan. The population growth in the South is quickly changing the landscape of big state schools. It will be interesting to see how that landscape continues to change in the next few decades. We've already seen the B1G relegated to second tier status in football, the same thing is happening with brain drain in the North, it's just that seeing the results takes a little longer.

I agree with your analysis. I'm much older than most of the forum members and there has always been a northern superiority complex that people in the southeast part of the country are not as intelligent as the remainder of the country. It is one of the stereotypes frequently employed by those who want to feel better about themselves. Along with the demographic changes you mentioned is the changes ahead for higher education. I don't believe that academia is aware of how fragile position it is in. Dropping student enrollment, shrinking state government support and being over priced are affecting many colleges and universities. It isn't popular to say here, but the zany social and economic ideas coming out of the universities isn't helping their cause.

 

[MikeyLikesIowa]

Ask ISM and Akrum Wadley how much they like Newark more than Iowa. That's all you need to know.

 

[DenverHawk94]

The ‘garden state’ doesn’t begin until you get to princeton I might as well have been driving in Cedar Rapids. I would never live there, but working there for two weeks showed that it was not remotely as bad as what I thought I’d find. Go Hawks!

 

[MoseSchrute]

I thought it was a huge mistake to turn away Missouri as well, they have a couple of decent size markets in Kansas City and St Louis. Plus by turning them away they allowed the SEC to get into the midwest.

They have a nuclear reactor for crying out loud. Probably would have come in pretty handy in the B1G's quest for world dominance...

 

[okeefe4prez]

Streaming services like You Tube TV/Hulu etc are still based on channels like ABC, Espn, Fox etc so it doesnt matter if you have cable, satellite, or streaming you are paying for channels. You are still locked into a certain number of outlets unless you are great at finding 'free streaming' of events and shows.

I will want to see a pure cafeteria-plan type service come out where the subscriber can just 'buy' programs without being locked into a certain number of channels. You could buy an NBC drama, then buy an espn sports show, then buy a netflix original series. Pay a little more for commercial free or pay less for the ads.

There is so much more that subscribers could like about this and it will be interesting to see if and when a provider will try this model.

I am on Sling Blue for now which has FS1 and NBCSN. But without ESPN and BTN it is super cheap. My membership renews on the 22nd, so then I will flip to Youtube for 2 months. Here's the problem with streaming if you are a conference - the economic model is based on them getting $1 per month from every in market subscriber. But with these skinny bundles available, the people who don't watch sports are leaving and then people like me who do watch sports will just get the appropriate bundle during the season. I'm not going to pay for BTN and ESPN in the winter, spring and summer. I don't watch any sports other than NASCAR and college football, so I don't need 50 sports channels.

 

[uihawk82]

I am on Sling Blue for now which has FS1 and NBCSN. But without ESPN and BTN it is super cheap. My membership renews on the 22nd, so then I will flip to Youtube for 2 months. Here's the problem with streaming if you are a conference - the economic model is based on them getting $1 per month from every in market subscriber. But with these skinny bundles available, the people who don't watch sports are leaving and then people like me who do watch sports will just get the appropriate bundle during the season. I'm not going to pay for BTN and ESPN in the winter, spring and summer. I don't watch any sports other than NASCAR and college football, so I don't need 50 sports channels.

You are right that the streaming services do not have lengthy contracts and that is a problem. Most of the channels on tv, whatever the delivery mode, are just effing junk. A 160 channel Directv package only has about 10 channels we would watch. What I am saying is I would spend proportionately more money per channel to pay on a cafeteria plan to purchase the 10-15 channels I watch.

 

[okeefe4prez]

You are right that the streaming services do not have lengthy contracts and that is a problem. Most of the channels on tv, whatever the delivery mode, are just effing junk. A 160 channel Directv package only has about 10 channels we would watch. What I am saying is I would spend proportionately more money per channel to pay on a cafeteria plan to purchase the 10-15 channels I watch.

I think a huge number of those channels have arisen as a result of each of them being able to draw a dime to a quarter a month off of every cable subscriber. I thought I saw a stat that most households only watch between 9 and 12 channels.