One thing that the article talks about is completely untrue:

"Five months ago, the presidents of the Big Ten schools voted to poach Maryland from the ACC and Rutgers from the Big East. They did not do this because the football or men's basketball teams at Maryland and Rutgers offer a terrible amount of value to a wealthy league already chock full of brand names. The value to the Big Ten lies in the location of those schools, which sit in heavily populated metropolitan areas."


So in the author's opinion, a money grab for getting good football schools is ok, but a money grab for new markets is evil? Child, please.

Besides, he's wrong about why they were added. The Big 10 took Maryland and Rutgers because they are elite research institutions with similar missions to rest of the conference, and they're in the East. Delaney was worried that Penn State would eventually leave if other Eastern schools weren't added. The extra money isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things anyways; it's certainly not worth more than the value of keeping Penn State around.

If you couple paying players with deregulation, the B1G is a disaster waiting to happen:


http://www.athleticscholarships.net/2013...lation.htm


A few excerpts:


But is that fear well-founded? Does the SEC have some monetary advantage that it could exploit against the Big Ten to ramp up spending further and faster?

The answer is yes, but the exact reason is not as simple as looking at revenue numbers. The SEC has some relatively small advantage in terms of overall and football spending, but its biggest advantage is that its athletics departments are actually smaller.

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The biggest difference is in the numbers of sports sponsored. Big Ten schools are each fielding 4–5 more teams than SEC schools (indoor/outdoor track and cross country counted as one team per gender). On the men’s side, the most teams the SEC sponsors is nine, just one above the fewest in the Big Ten. And no SEC department approaches anything like Ohio State and Penn State which have 33 and 25 different programs respectively.

De-emphasize sports - NO

Leave the NCAA so they can do what they want - Yes

oh no, pweeeeeease don't weave us