To hell with football tradition

it’s the great $$$ realignment!

The b&w Philco is warming up in preparation for tonight’s Packers exhibition game, mainly to see if Jordan Love is as bad as we think he is. Number One Son and this team owner will switch during commercial breaks to watch Brewers baseball. Fish are jumping 🎵 and the living is easy 🎶.

Still think it’s too early for football but excited about coach Luke Fickell’s UW Badgers. They open in three weeks right here in Madison against Buffalo — the Buffalo Bulls of the Mid-American Conference, not the Bills of the NFL’s American Football Conference. 

Which is this blogger’s clumsy entré into the bewildering world of college football conference realignment. Not since the fall of the Soviet Union has there been more realignment. (Won’t count the time we jumped the curb in the Ford SportTrac.)

Maybe it’s the Groundskeeper’s sclerotic arteries. We do not want to play USC or UCLA unless it’s January 1 in the Rose Bowl.

At least the 2023 Badger football schedule looks like what we grew up with: Iowa, Illinois, and Northwestern, Minnesota, Purdue, Indiana, and Ohio State. We play Nebraska, too. The Corndodgers were once a Big 12 team that played the likes of Texas and Oklahoma, who have since bolted to the South Eastern Conference. But at least Nebraska grows corn and gets cold in the winter. The Badgers also play Rutgers, who ought to be playing Colgate or Cornell, not Wisconsin.

As Tevye the dairyman says, “TRADITION!”

→ The Big Ten was receiving pushback on its expansion efforts from multiple athletic directors within the conference, according to four league sources. — The Athletic, NY Times.

It’s ‘Moneyball’ college style

We pity the PAC-12, which will soon become the PAC-4. As a writer for the NY Times writes, they have been stripped for parts. Maybe they say the hell with it and split into two divisions: two teams north, two teams south. Playoff for the championship.

Two of those remaining schools, Stanford and UC-Berkeley, might want to join the Ivy League, even though that august conference is a division lower, much less a Power Five. (Or will it be the Power 4½?) Both academically distinguished schools reside in metro San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose. Can’t believe the avaricious BIG, SEC, and Big 12 aren’t circling overhead to pick at the bones in that big media market. 

That leaves poor Oregon State and Washington State (we play them September 9 in a place called Pullman), now bereft of their in-state conference rivals, who are joining the BIG … 10 — 16 — 18. (For the first couple years in the new conference, Oregon and Washington will receive $30 million/year, roughly half what Wisconsin gets, compared to $23 million in the PAC 12.)

Blaska’s Bottom Line: The two States schools might apply for membership in the Mountain West or, hellz bellz, piggyback on Volodymyr Zelensky’s bid to join NATO. An attack on one is an attack on all. 

Should the BIG conference be renamed the BIG$ ???