Marketing idiocy

No offense to marketing people, because hey, that's what they pay you to do, right?

The Big Ten named its divisions. Legends and Leaders.

Yeah.

Dumbest change ever. MGoBlog suggests that we call them East and West. I'm with Brian.

East	West
Illinois	Iowa
Indiana	Michigan
Ohio State	Michigan State
Penn State	Minnesota
Purdue	Nebraska
Wisconsin	Northwestern

WTF NFW FFFFFFFFFFF

The Big Ten adds Penn State to expand into Pennsylvania, PSU remains strong in football for the most part, other conferences add in panicky fashion (ask the Big East or the Big 12-2 or the WAC how expansion worked for them?), and people think Jim Delany is a genius.

The Big Ten creates its own network, goes toe-to-toe with some of the biggest jackasses in the corporate world, stares them down, and establishes itself as the conference to beat in terms of TV revenue. (No, really. When schools like Northwestern and IU get more money than schools like Notre Dame, USC, and Texas, all of which have deals tailored to benefit them, the Big Ten is doing something right.) Delany is a god.

The Big Ten talks about expanding again, sending pretty much every conference into a panic: they see how much the Big Ten gets now, they add some hypothetical numbers based on adding Notre Dame or Texas or Nebraska or all three, and suddenly every school is up for grabs. But the Big Ten just looks around carefully, allows Nebraska to enter, and waits as other conferences fail miserably. (Utah and Colorado to the Pac-10, w. No other major conference expansion. The Big 12-2 insists nothing is wrong here, move along, nothing to see. w.) Delany invented college football.

And then discussion of divisional play popped up, and suddenly we realized that all those other moves were just luck. Despite the fact that the ACC traveled down this exact road years ago, splitting up the Florida State-Miami rivalry because it would, of course, "dominate" the conference, only to discover that those teams have met exactly zero times in the championship game, the Big Ten is apparently insisting on the same foolishness.

Michigan and Ohio State should be in separate divisions. Stupid enough – there are clear geographic divisions right now, and even if that creates an imbalance, there are other setups that still maintain almost all major rivalries – but now there is talk that the teams will not play during the final regular-season week because HORRORS they might someday play in the conference championship HORRORS which might supposedly affect television revenue HORRORS.

So a bunch of know-nothings with their heads so far up their asses Escher would be unable to draw the resulting bodies have decided to shit all over tradition because, well, we wouldn't understand because we're just fans. Even though prominent people who actually understand what the hell they're talking about have clearly explained why this is so stupid, it's going to happen anyway. We all know this. TV always wins because TV always brings the money. (After all, that's why the Big Ten can decide not to invite Texas. The Big Ten has the money.)

This is why baseball games are over three hours long and Impotent Commissioner Selig can't figure out how to fix it. This is why you miss the kickoff of your 4:15 game, or worse yet, you miss the finish of your 1:00 game. This is why people don't watch the NBA any more. (Well, other than the complete lack of interest the sport generates on its own, its inability to enforce rules, etc. etc.) Television decides something and everyone else submits.

Commissioner Delany, you damn well better come up with something good after this. If your legacy is "The man who ruined the OSU-UM rivalry", you'd best retire somewhere out of the Big Ten footprint ... which may very well rule out Texas. Hope you like Florida.

Linkasaurus

Pat Forde points out yet another massive flaw in the BCS, although he isn't as harsh about it as I would be: coaches don't even fill out their own ballots. Of course this shouldn't be a surprise, and really wouldn't matter anyway – coaches have no way of accurately estimating the change in relative strength of 20+ teams they couldn't watch on Saturday because they were, you know, coaching (remember you don't have all week to fill out your ballot) – but it's still an indication of how deluded BCS backers are. And remember that this is the part of the formula that gains more weight when the "title" game isn't fought down to the wire, because of course it's the computers that are wrong.

Jim Delany doesn't think the Big Ten has to worry about recent, um, lack of performance. In the original article on AnnArbor.com, Delany also points out (quite accurately) that many of these bowls are, for all practical purposes, road games for the Big Ten, and in that context, sure, struggling a little bit is to be expected. Then again, if this came from someone other than a man who may be singlehandedly preventing a I-A playoff system, you could put something more into it. After all, wouldn't it be easier for the Big Ten to regain national stature if Penn State beat, say, Alabama, Florida, and USC to win a real national title?

Way back when I had time on my hands (before the innernets), I wrote a little baseball sim for Full Impact, an old, old spreadsheet for the Mac. It generated line scores, estimating runs per inning, hits, and errors based on frequencies I gathered from a season's worth of box scores from the Sporting News. Years later, someone took the same concept and ran with it, creating an actual model to predict the chances of scoring X runs in an inning given Y runs scored per game. Very cool, and most likely you all have just fallen sound asleep.

Apparently owners are spending too much money on players. Not in baseball (this time), but rather in soccer. UEFA, Europe's governing body for soccer, is concerned that more teams will seek to emulate Manchester City and Real Madrid, spending as much as they can to sign as many top players as they think they can get without worrying about the future. I suppose their concerns are warranted: too much debt can force a club to list its valuable players to pay off the debt, and in some cases it can even cost the club points in the standings. See, for example, last year's League Two standings, where four clubs, including the two relegated clubs, were penalized for being in various stages of insolvency. (Consider that the club earning the stiffest penalty, Luton Town, played in the Championship in 05-06 and has since been relegated three times, now playing in Conference National.) So clubs are made to force consequences for terrible management, unlike here, where they simply go into bankruptcy or get pity money from the league or sometimes even give their players apologies instead of paychecks.