Matthew Walther, editor of the Lamp magazine, has a piece today in the New York Times expressing his dismay at the recent addition of the University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles to the Big Ten Conference.
He has some fairly legitimate grievances, chief among them the financial aspect of the move:
Adding schools with large fan bases in remote parts of the country means more television money. This is a familiar gambit. The Big Ten welcomed Maryland and Rutgers as its 13th and 14th members a decade ago in the hope of bringing its cable network to television packages in the Washington and New York metropolitan areas.
Sports is and has always been a business, and thankfully so, because it allows people with extreme talent to earn serious amounts of money for the great joy they bring to residents of the places they represent and sense of community they foster. Additionally, it produces jobs in which people who are not as talented as the world-class athletes can earn a living. That said, it is better when the business aspect of the game stays off the field.
Unfortuantely, we’ve already seen some business on the field in professional sports, and recent NCAA rules changes about branding and sponsorships have opened college sports up to the problem somewhat. Anything that detracts from players’ commitment to their teams can negatively affect the game; the intersection of the business and athletic aspects of sports is no different. The addition of USC and UCLA makes the pathetic West division of the Big Ten more competitive, which will be good for the sport. But that could soon wear off, even as the amount of money the conference will get makes the executives apathetic about the downsides.
Walther also makes an interesting point about the cultural implications of the conference, writing:
Rivalries often involved implicit, class-based rooting interests: urban versus rural, research versus land grant, upper-middle-class professionals and the exurban working classes versus middle-class suburbia. These games were played for ancient, often absurd trophies such as the Old Brass Spittoon, which goes to the winner of the annual Indiana-Michigan State game.
Even as the conferences slowly evolved and occasionally welcomed additional members, they retained distinct personalities that seemed to have the force of terroir-based European Union food designations — the cornfed Big Ten, where all the quarterbacks are named Brian; the aristocratic SEC; the rootin’ tootin’ Big 12; the Pac-12 and its Hollywood mystique.
As Walther correctly points out, there are obvious cultural differences both within and between the conferences. In the Big Ten, the Michigan Wolverines, representing the top public research university in country, compete each year in a rivalry game against (and usually defeat) the Spartans of Michigan State, the “little brother” land-grant university.
Though the Wolverines’ and Spartans’ fan bases dislike each other, they can agree that they are distinct from (and distinctly better than) the coastal elitists in the PAC-12. The Big Ten schools who stand for the Midwestern values of hard work, determination, and an enthusiasm unknown to mankind may be able to teach the hoity-toity schools on the west coast. We can bring them out of their comfortable states with 70-degree Decembers and into the frozen tundra of the Big House, giving their teams some grit.
That, or maybe they’ll corrupt us. Who’s to say? Either way, I look forward to seeing Michigan beat both USC and UCLA.
Go Blue!