The Big Ten is Expanding

 

The average person would think that since there is the number ten in the Big Ten, there are ten teams in the conference. However, that person would be wrong because coming in 2024, the Big Ten will expand to 18 different schools in its conference. 

Up until 2014, the Big Ten, still not living up to its name, had 12 schools in the conference until Maryland and Rutgers joined the Big Ten expanding the conference to 14 schools. Before the expansion, the conference was dominantly filled with teams from the midwest with the exception of Penn State. 

Fast forward almost a decade and the Big Ten is on the verge of another major expansion, this time adding four schools from the Pac-12 conference. These four schools are as follows: Oregon, Washington, UCLA, and USC. Now a conference which was a decade ago purely made up of schools from the midwest has expanded to schools from both the east and west coast of the United States. 

Conferences and divisions in all college and professional sports have historically followed the tradition of putting teams together that are from a certain region of the country. For example, the Southeastern Conference, also known as the SEC, only contains teams from the southeast part of the United States. 

The Big Ten is setting a new precedent that this tradition does not apply anymore. They are primarily doing it for more lucrative and new TV contracts and other forms of revenue that will benefit the conference as a whole. The new schools being added the conference were arguably the faces of the Pac-12 and will bring that all over to the Big Ten. 

I dislike the expansion as a whole for the Big Ten. Sure, it will bring in more money to the conference and benefit them in other ways, but having schools in the same conference from different sides of the country, and others that are not across the country but still far away from one another ruins the whole dynamic of a conference. 

There's going to be a time where one of the new west coast teams has to take over a five hour flight across the country, or one of the east coast teams has to do the opposite, stay there for a night or two, play the game, and then make the journey back across the country. The definition of a true conference really just will not apply anymore come in 2024 for the Big Ten.