The Fighting Irish football team hasn’t played the Gophers in Minneapolis since 1937 but that could change within several years. Athletic departments and media throughout the country are speculating about what the Big Ten Conference membership will look like in the near future.
Conference commissioner Jim Delany and others in the Big Ten are considering expanding the 11 team league. Nothing is expected to be announced for awhile but Sports Headliners believes Delany wants an expansion that establishes his conference as by far the most watched and wealthy in the country.
That goal is best achieved with an expansion that increases membership not by two or three schools but with five. Key to expansion and a five team addition is inclusion of storied Notre Dame, still a football independent but a member of the Big East Conference in other sports.
Delany is likely to use all his intelligence and charm to bring Notre Dame into the Big Ten family. He’s probably willing to wait awhile longer on completing the expansion project if it means delivering the grand prize, the Fighting Irish football program along with the school’s other sports teams. Notre Dame brings a national following including its “subway alumni” in New York.
It’s a good guess, though, that Delany won’t wait more than three years for the Irish who have a deep and historic commitment as an independent that schedules a cross section of the nation’s better football teams. It will be Delany’s task to convince Notre Dame leaders that the Fighting Irish is better off in the Big Ten for reasons that include TV revenues.
A 16 team Big Ten will presumably command record TV revenues for a college conference. The league’s huge TV audiences, expected to include New York, Chicago and numerous other top 50 TV markets, could generate so much revenue that Notre Dame might well receive more as a member of the Big Ten than with its own TV football deal.
A Big Ten expansion is a big boost to the Big Ten Network, ABC/ESPN and CBS, the TV entities the league relies on for television exposure and revenues. More eyeballs watching conference games, particularly football and men’s basketball, means increased cable fees for the Big Ten Network, and more advertising revenues in the future for the Big Ten Network and other TV partners.
The Gophers and other members of the Big Ten receive about $22 million each per year from TV revenues and conference monies from sources such as bowl games, according to Gophers athletic director Joel Maturi. Without that $22 million (much of it TV money), the Gophers wouldn’t be able to maintain a total of 25 men’s and women’s sports, nearly all of them financial losers.
Maturi and others who head up athletic departments in the league will want assurances that conference expansion will increase their share of the revenue pie, not lessen it. There doesn’t seem much doubt, though, that Delany, who was visionary enough to help develop the already powerful Big Ten Network, will have the dollars figured out, along with the other details needed to accomplish a successful expansion.