seriously USC and UCLA to the Big 10 is by far the dumbest move of all of this, right? I'm trying to think if anything has been close to that silly.
Yes and no. Financially, the Big 10 deal will be almost double of what the Pac 12 would have been with them, probably 40%, so that's a lot of money they can't turn down.
However, since the proliferation of huge money in college sports, I think there is only so much these athletic departments can do with the money. All of these athletic departments can afford all the scholarships they're allowed, they can all pay coaches what they want and constantly build and renovate facilities. We've absolutely gotten to the point where this money stuff is only about keeping up with the Joneses. What good is having all that money when you don't have regional rivals and your non football athletes have to spend all that time on airplanes and missing class, an even further degradation of the student athlete experience.
I also think that these deals are going to start to have a chilling effect on donations, especially for USC and UCLA. They are stripping the emotion out of college sports, and that's what it's supposed to be all about, because it certainly isn't the actual on field/court/ice product.
