 |
giacomo
General User
Member Since: 11/20/2007
Post Count: 2,688
Status: Offline
|
|
|
| Bob Greene editorial on Big !0 expansion in today's WSJ |
|
|
Posted: 8/30/2023 12:07:21 PM |
| |
Once upon an American time, a Midwestern kid could reel off the names as easily as the alphabet: Duffy Daugherty, Forest Evashevski, Bennie Oosterbaan, Woody Hayes, Ray Eliot, Jack Mollenkopf, Phil Dickens, Milt Bruhn, Ara Parseghian, Murray Warmath.
They were the head coaches of the football teams in the Big Ten—Michigan State, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio State, Illinois, Purdue, Indiana, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Minnesota. The names of the coaches varied slightly depending on the year or decade (the above list is from 1958). But a kid in the Midwest still knew them and their teams as if they were neighbors, because in a sense they were. The Big Ten wasn’t only part of the Midwest—symbolically, the Big Ten defined the Midwest.
This week the 14 teams in the athletic conference that still calls itself the Big Ten will begin their 2023 seasons. As early as next fall, the Big Ten will consist of 18 (count ’em) teams, stretching from California and Oregon on the Pacific Coast to New Jersey and Maryland on the Atlantic. Much of this—all right, all of it—has to do with money and television rights.
But whatever the Big Ten is gaining in revenue, it is giving up something priceless: a sense of place. The Midwest, to people on the coasts, may long have been condescendingly considered flyover territory, but those coastal residents grudgingly had to admit that homegrown Big Ten football was very good. And that the teams in the conference didn’t need validation from the allegedly more prestigious corners of the country.
Back when it was only 10, the conference’s geographic boundaries extended no farther than Minneapolis-St. Paul to the north and west (yes, Minneapolis is west of Iowa City), Columbus, Ohio, to the east, and Bloomington, Ind., to the south. When Penn State was admitted to the conference in 1990 (and the 11-team league first insisted on defying math to keep the name Big Ten), it felt odd, but not dramatically so; Pennsylvania borders Ohio.
When Maryland and Rutgers joined in 2014, things started to feel off balance, like a backfield with 13 running backs. Nebraska, in the Great Plains, felt like part of the family when it joined in 2011.
But the announcements that University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, Washington and Oregon will soon be part of the Big Ten has forever wiped out what made the conference unique. The loss will be of something that seemed axiomatic: a proud feeling of proprietorship among Midwesterners. The Midwest might not have Hollywood, Wall Street or the network television headquarters, but it had, and fervidly embraced, the Big Ten, a conference that somehow felt as if it lived at the end of every block.
If, since the days of Oosterbaan and Evashevski, America had expanded at the same rate the Big Ten has, the U.S. would have gone from 48 states to 86. The new, coast-to-coast, 18-team Big Ten may never again be purely Midwestern, but as a league from nowhere and everywhere it will without question turn out to be staggeringly lucrative. It might as well be a hedge fund.
Mr. Greene’s books include “Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen.”
|
|
|
|
