Miscellaneous Minutiae, 5/24/2012

Just in case you needed a painful reminder. The pair of MNC game losses aside, Ohio State was obscenely dominant throughout the Tressel era: news at 11. From this week's Big Ten mailblog, these two points stand out:

• Ohio State hasn't lost to the same opponent twice in a row since 2003/04 (Wisconsin--the first being, yes, that game where Robert Reynolds did that thing). 
• The Buckeyes lost five conference games between 2005 and 2010. My goodness. 

These aren't things you reflexively think about because the previous decade or so is mostly a monolithic bloc of frustrating rivalry immolation. With that said, when you actually look at things like the above--in addition to other similarly shocking-but-not-really-shocking stats and/or anecdotes that make you go CRABLE WHY  or LLOYD WHY PUNT THERE WHY WE'RE NOT WINNING BY THAT MUCH--what the Buckeyes did to the conference was pretty amazing. Say what you will about the strength of the Big Ten during that span, but that is impressive any way you slice it. The odds of a run like that happening anytime soon are not that great. 

With that said, the 2012 schedule for the Buckeyes does feature more than a few opportunities to see the aforementioned streak end. Michigan State, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Michigan are all distinct possibilities, and who knows what Penn State will look like this year. Three of those five are on the road, so, I think it's safe to say that the streak will come to an end. It's also safe to say that a couple other streaks and records that only fans care about will come to an end, given how high Tressel set the bar. I doubt that the Buckeyes experience the same sort of catastrophic tabula rasa-ing that Michigan got in its transition from Lloyd to RR, but there will be some bumps in the road. How many bumps there'll end up being will be the difference between say, another 6-win season and an 8 or 9 win year in Year 1 under Meyer.

Just here to negate all that retrospective doom and gloom, you guys

Show me the money. In light of the Great Band Fiasco of 2012, you're probably wondering a bit about Michigan's finances and, by extension, how much cash money we netted from the Sugar Bowl. Well, here you go: 

After expenses were taken out and the Big Ten absorbed the cost of the university's unsold tickets, Michigan brought in $78,916 in profit from its trip to New Orleans, according to records received by WolverineNation as part of a Freedom of Information request.

The headline doesn't include all pertinent information (not that it can be expected to), but, either way, your visceral reaction of "pfft, that's it" might not be completely wrong. I still don't think it's unreasonable to wonder why the "guys in blazers" that everybody euphemistically refers to get paid so much to do so little. Bowl directors and general hangers on remind me of Turtle from Entourage in that they are completely useless vis-a-vis their role in the entire operation. This is bad because anything that reminds me of Entourage or a character from it is probably a pretty terrible thing. 

Naturally, everybody in the Big Ten who is anybody thinks that semi-final home games would be a bad idea. They would make money, which I thought was what this was all about, but I guess they would also preclude generally anonymous B1G administrators from having ritzy times in warm weather bowl locales for a few days. Emphasis mine: 

Michigan spent $423,574 to transport the 379 people comprising the team and staff to New Orleans for the game, $297,183 for the 319 members of the band and cheerleading squads and $16,470 to transport 31 members of the school's "official party," which Ablauf wrote comprised "non-athletic department personnel: Regents, president and university officials."

Jim Delany is Vincent Chase if the latter had an entourage that enjoyed exquisite cheese spreads and maintained an average age of no less than 60. Okay, obviously I'm joking a little bit here (it's not like $16,000 and change is all that much in the grand scheme of things anyway), but there's probably a little truth to the point that these guys have a personal stake in this.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the other main takeaway from all of this for you, the fan: things are a lot more expensive than you think. Those transportation, food, and lodging costs are kind of staggering. It's not right for Brandon to Machiavelli his way into getting people to pay for the band, but, can you blame him?

DB: slowly making me back away from the "let's laugh at the hate-everything-DB-does-people" table. I have moved on from the fact that we will likely never get the chance to see a team from below the Mason-Dixon line come up to the frigid North to play the game of football. Football, you see, is a delicate game that can always be played under the most pleasant of conditions. The willingness to "roll over," ostensibly for the sake of compromise, is irritating; however, much of the ire against Delany et al is admittedly better directed at the other participants in this playoff debate, simply because they have strength in numbers with respect to this particular issue.

Still, Dave...come on, man. I mean, sometimes I wonder if the Big Ten brass are representing, you know, the Big Ten's interests, what with the comments regarding the "unfairness" of getting teams from warm parts of the country (see: everywhere that isn't the B1G, apparently) to play up north in December/January, and now this.

Not only did DB not support a playoff at all (it's not like he has a choice now), he didn't even feign support for campus site semi-finals and now he's saying that he's against even having neutral site games in the Midwest: 

"The one thing that kind of gets left out of this discussion that maybe ought to get some weight are the kids," he said Friday during WTKA's Mott Takeover. "Now, I know a lot of people don't really care about that part, but I do, and if you polled our players and said, 'If you played a really tough, successful, long regular season, the award you're going to get is to travel to Ford Field or Lucas Oil Stadium,' they would look at you and say, 'Huh?'

I just don't know what to say anymore. I've been far less critical of DB than most people, but this is starting to get absurd. If Brandon has done some even somewhat scientific polling of Michigan players on this issue of "travel convenience/de facto home field advantage vs. going somewhere warm and awesome like Orlando WOO" then I'd love to see it. I doubt that happens, because bringing up "the kids" is a good way of making any critics tantamount to "oh, so you hate the kids huh?"I am not at all saying that DB (and others) don't care about the players, it's just that saying these decisions are being made because of what the players want is maybe a little disingenuous. Maybe I'm being overly cynical.

General superconference thoughts. Stuart Mandel talks about, among other things, why a conference champions only playoff model would negatively impact the importance of the regular season. I don't necessarily disagree with his arguments, but I'm of a mind that superconferences are going to happen. As nonsensical and unnatural as the concept may seem when you look at a map, it's actually a much tidier plan, especially when juxtaposed with what is being discussed within the context of the current conference by conference landscape. As long as the Big East and ACC exist, they will have to be considered in a non-superconference playoff.

A few stray thoughts related to my post from the other day on the issue. It's easy to become enamored with the symmetry of the superconference model: 4 conferences, 16 teams each, 4 playoff spots that require teams to do one simple thing, i.e. win their conference. Very clean and very simple. What's that Alabama, you didn't win your division or your conference? NO SOUP FOR YOU.

In a sense, this setup would mimic the NCAAB tournament model in a roundabout way. I know this sounds like a bad thing, because, after all, everyone complains about how vastly unimportant the college basketball is compared to the Big Dance. The Final Four is not comprised of the "best" teams each and every year, but rather the teams that made it through their respective regions. In this sense, the college football regular season would essentially become the first four rounds of the Big Dance, with the 4 team playoff of course mirroring the Final Four.

Yes, lawsuits will rain down from the sky if this happens. Also, someone mentioned this on MGoBlog the other day (I can't remember who or where it was, but if I find it I'll update), but there really isn't a centralized entity or any pervasive force that's pushing realignment to happen, let alone pushing each of the four conferences to exactly 16 teams. The more that I think about this point, the more that I wonder whether or not even teams even exist to fill out the rest of the Big Ten (Notre Dame, Rutgers...and? Maybe Virginia Tech if they don't land elsewhere?), and even the Pac 12.

The SEC, however, is already at 14. The Big 12, if the completely reliable rumblings are to be believed, might be getting ready to go on an expansion spree that is positively Supermarket Sweep-esque. What would force the B1G and Pac 12 to expand if both the SEC and Big 12 got to 16? Does the Big 12 event want 16, or is it just looking to add teams so that its figurative EKG machine stops flat-lining every so often, something that was a daily torment for the conference not too long ago? You know, kind of like stocking up on water jugs and batteries, just in case*. I don't really have answers to these questions, but when you throw out the inevitability that is "lawyers from have-not schools running around all nimbly bimbly," the whole non-conference games becoming obsolete thing, and the ongoing cognitive dissonance of "this is about the kids" while forcing said kids to travel outrageous distances for conference games...well.

Maybe superconferences aren't such a great idea after all. Symmetry is nice, though.

*Yes, the Big 12 is Dale Gribble. Yes, I am a fan of 1990s television.

More? I don't have much to say about this, but I will say this: whenever the apocalypse comes to pass, I'm pretty certain that Gene Smith will still somehow be the AD at OSU when all is said and done. It's like Smith has spent the entire time since Tressel's departure saying questionable things and then going "hey everybody look over there!"...and then everybody does, and here we are over a year later and he's still the AD and nobody has seemed to notice.

Jim Delany doesn't want to talk about it, because discussing one's finances is tacky and unbecoming of a Big Ten Man. Some good recruiting buzz from UMHoops on Michigan's point guard of the future (and others). Via Michigan Today, a look at Jim Abbott's recently released memoir, Imperfect: An Improbable Life

A Not Unexpected Occurrence

College football is an ecosystem unto itself; it expands and expands until it cannot anymore, often doing so at irregular and asymmetrical intervals--on the surface, at least--and seemingly without rhyme or reason or any sort of guiding hand. Teams try their hand and fail. Others, over time, improve their fitness and survive, live on, and prosper until someone else surpasses them or a catastrophe occurs (tough hand, dinosaurs). Then, conditions change once again, and the evolutionary adaptations that were once existential kevlar vests become useless. If Darwin were alive today and enjoyed watching sports, I have no doubt that he would find the most thematic overlap between his subject matter and sport within the realm of college football. 

Charles Darwin, the first college football fan

This is all to say that the next big thing is coming, and by that I mean the somewhat dread notion of the "superconference." As the realignment craze began with Nebraska's defection and carried onward throughout the last two years, the concept of superconferences was always there, lingering in the background like an unpleasant memory or the realization that it's Sunday and you should probably do some laundry, man. The whole thing seemed tacky, the college football equivalent of replacing every 5-star restaurant in America with a bloated monstrosity Golden Corral. It seemed inevitable, but inevitability does not have to precede acceptance. 


While this has always been something that you don't need to be Nostradamus to have presaged, it seems that the media is slowly starting to hint at college football's eventual transition into the superconference age. Tom Fornelli of CBS asks the question outright: "Is college football moving toward four superconferences?" Therein, he links to a piece from the Dallas Morning News, in which a source from the Big 12 said the following (on the heels of the recently inked Big 12-SEC agreement): 

I really can't believe I'm saying this," one Big 12 school source said. "We might be moving to four superconferences -- and the Big 12 would be one of those.

Its sort of amusing to see everyone involved in this little game of chess feigning disbelief at this potential outcome, but the fact that people--like this Big 12 source--are being explicit about this says that this is almost definitely going to happen. I would imagine that this is only the beginning of the media talking about superconferences authoritatively rather than in pointlessly secretive, hushed tones. Come on, College Football, we all hear you whispering bad things about Eastern Michigan in the corner. You clearly don't embrace the process. 


The aforementioned source of course goes out of his way to mention that yes, the Big 12 will be one of these superconferences. Naturally, someone's going to be left out. In the interest of brevity, the ACC and the Big East are likely going to be tossed to the dustbin of history, having failed to, by way of evolution, develop the correctly shaded plumage or the most fearsome set of teeth. 

The ACC and the Big East; going the way of the dodo

Florida State has handled its potential move poorly, to be sure, but I can't imagine that they don't end up in the Big 12: 1) because they're FSU, and the Big 12 will want them and b) the 'Noles are fighting for survival here. This isn't about whether or not they can afford to leave the ACC, or if it is advantageous in the here and now; if they don't bounce, they're done. By the way, this makes the Big 12's survival even more evolutionarily impressive. Catalyzed by unadulterated survivalist instinct, the Big 12 conference has lifted itself from its nearly made bed of extinction; Darwin nods in approval. 

Similarly, schools like Clemson and Georgia Tech could very easily find homes in the SEC (thus bringing that league to 16). Paul Myerberg of Pre-Snap Read does a little thought experiment regarding this hypothetical domino effect. This all seems less and less hypothetical by the day: 

Here’s another fear: This new partnership is just the first domino to fall. The chasm between the four new leaders – Pac-12, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC – and the rest of the F.B.S. provides another impetus for Florida State and Boise State to bolt to the Big 12. The SEC moves to 16 teams, taking Clemson and Louisville; suspend your disbelief in this scenario.

The Pac-12 moves to 16 teams. The Big Ten adds Notre Dame Rutgers and others to get to 16 teams. The SEC is at 16. The Big 12 gets to 16 teams. These 64 teams become college football. The remaining 60 teams are filler, fluff. They become the new F.C.S. – the new have-nots, minus the playoff.

To continue the Shakespearean bent of that post: therein lies the rub. Although haves and have-nots obviously clearly exist right now, it has become increasingly difficult to realize and reconcile with the fact that schools like UT-San Antonio, UMass, Georgia State, and many others, are joining the FBS ranks. In lay economic terms, this is like falling in love with plastic money. In ecological terms, this is blatant overpopulation. In middle school science class terms: within the diverse ecological community that is college football, there is currently a glut of snowshoe hares compared with not too many lynxes. Can you guess what happens next? 


The problem with all of this is that while I find the superconferences strange and probably even distasteful and/or deleterious to the game of college football, I have also complained about the multitude of FBS teams and FBS teams-to-be that simply have no business competing at that level as things currently stand. I know that it's a convenient statement to make for me, a Michigan fan, but that's just the way it is. I fear that the age of the superconference could both not make the conundrum that is crowning a champion any easier or more equitable while simultaneously continuing to NFL-ize and dilute the sport that we love. In short, superconferences sound like an economically and/or evolutionarily sound idea on paper, but I worry that it might end up representing the worst of both worlds. 


Maybe teams would play more conference games in the Superconference Era, and maybe the cupcake games against the have-nots would consequently get phased out as these teams will have essentially become meaningless non-participants occupying lower rungs of the food chain. Still, think of all the things that will be lost. College football is far from perfect, but it will be losing a lot of heart and sensibility if this is the evolutionary path the game is pursuing on a macroscopic level. Casualties are expected--this is evolution, after all--but these new conferences, more ponderous associations or federations then "conferences," will be based upon administrative, not regional or cultural lines. There are, of course, many instances of this specific brand of folly littered through the course of history like so many glaring lights in the distance gone unheeded.