The Big Ten has quietly dethroned the SEC in four surprising ways. These include superior recent College Football Playoff advancement, narrowing the geographic recruiting gap, securing dominant multi-network media rights, and accelerating premium offensive and defensive line development. For nearly two decades, Southeastern Conference programs collected national championships and served as the sport’s undisputed cultural center. However, shifting financial infrastructures, …
Once again, the B1G and the Pac-12 have moved in lock-step. This time in the two conferences’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both the B1G and Pac-12 powers-that-be made the very difficult decision to take a big (no pun intended) financial hit in order to err, if they err at all, on the side of their student-athletes’ safety. No fall …
There is the Pac-12 which is THE Conference of Champions and then there is what is happening in college football around the country! Here is the latest… SOUTHEAST / ACC Virginia Cavaliers head coach, Mike London, has arguably one of the most unique non-coaching employment histories of any Power 5 Conference coach. In a story which continues to be shared …
Mike Merrell’s Three-and-Out When the College Football Playoff Committee announced its first list of teams belonging in the final four, it seemed that the Confederacy had won the Civil War and banned everything north (and west) of the Mason-Dixon Line. Fortunately, by the time the vote counted for anything more than a weekly dose of drama, the committee had come …
“…it has been my longstanding belief that The Big Ten’s schools would forgo the revenues in those circumstances and instead take steps to downsize the scope, breadth and activity of their athletic programs…” – Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, on how his member universities would react in the event that college athletes were eligible to be paid. It was the …