Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I mean if the only point of gymnastics is making/saving money, just cut the program.  At least the conferences were generally geographic.

The weird one to me is basketball.  If you go back and look at schedules from the 80s, team played all of their buy games against regional opponents.  And the small schools played the other small schools around them.

Seems like there is a ton of unnecessary travel in basketball OOC games now.  MSU didn't play a single MAC team this year

Step 1


https://twitter.com/bigten/status/1753470893689311246?s=20

they are going to swallow up FSU, ND, and the few remaining trophy brands that are left and then breakaway and forum a super league. these are the seeds being planted before our eyes right now. and once they do so, the tv money will be even more ludicrous than it is right now. could be looking at $20+ billion tv deal. 20 billion reasons to do so...that's a lotta reasons to do something.

Bad.

Great.

I mean if the only point of gymnastics is making/saving money, just cut the program.  At least the conferences were generally geographic.

The weird one to me is basketball.  If you go back and look at schedules from the 80s, team played all of their buy games against regional opponents.  And the small schools played the other small schools around them.

Seems like there is a ton of unnecessary travel in basketball OOC games now.  MSU didn't play a single MAC team this year

I hear you on gymnastics but I'm not trying to cut everything just limit unnecessary expenditures.  I kinda think that the new expanded B1G will eventually try to at least manage schedules in such a way that say MSU and tOSU play each other a lot more in non-revenue sports than either of them play the PACNW or LA schools.  This is one reason that I think we will eventually end up with some form of pods*.  

As far as BB OOC scheduling, Ohio State did the same stupid thing with their OOC Basketball scheduling.  They had a home game with aTm which is 1/2 of a H&H (we go there next year), a bunch of neutral site games, a home "multi-team-event" game against WMU, and the rest were these:

• Oakland (Michigan)
• Merrimack (Massachusetts)
• Central Michigan
• Miami, Ohio
• New Orleans

At least Ohio State played two MAC schools and one was from Ohio.  Why bother bringing in schools from Massachusetts and Louisiana when you could have just played two more Ohio Schools.  An additional benefit would be that the local schools would probably send more fans.  I can't imagine that a lot of Merrimack alums/fans made the 776mi drive (or more likely flight from Boston to Columbus) from North Andover, Massachusetts to Columbus to watch Ohio State's crappy team slaughter their even crappier team by 24 points.  Listed attendance for that game was 7,929.  I would guess that attendance would have been MUCH better for a game against any of the multitude of Ohio Schools.  

Pods:
My thinking here is that we are going to end up with either 20 or 24 schools.  I'm not sure what we'd do if we ended up with a number that was NOT a multiple of four.  Assuming 20 or 24 then I'm thinking four pods of five or six each.  The Pods would be at least generally geographic.  In revenue sports FB and BB you'd set up your schedule to maximize ratings/money.  In non-revenue sports you'd set up your schedules to lean heavily toward intra rather than inter pod games to keep costs down and facilitate fan travel.  

I'm hoping that these mega-conferences wind up going back on the whole footprint thing and simply incorporate the best programs (which it looks like they are).

I want the B1G to add Pitt so that they can play Penn State every year.  That used to be a big rivalry.  Texas is now back in the fold with A&M, thanks to the SEC's bloat.

Maybe OU and Nebraska can be each other's annual OOC rival.  I hope things shake out that maybe ND-Miami becomes an annual thing.  
We'll see.