The more people who live in the Big Ten’s footprint, the more households will be paying their cable operators an extra dollar a month or so to carry the Big Ten network. Hence the logic of adding Rutgers and Maryland. While the athletic traditions of both schools are, respectively, mediocre and terrible, they geographically encompass large, populous regions whose cable television subscribers will, for the most part involuntarily, be paying the Big Ten conference a chunk of their cable television bills.
Then he gets it very, very wrong:
In 1994, the first superconference came into being: the Big 12, combining the best remnants of the old Southwest Conference with the Big Eight. The new league would be like the old ones, but more competitive and exciting. It would be, above all, lucrative. … The Big 12, of course, was a total failure.
First off, the SEC had 12 teams and a playoff before the Big 12 did, and it’s doing rather well right now. Secondly, the Big 12 is and has been lucrative, but fell behind the Big Ten’s license-to-print-money lucrative. Thirdly, the Big 12 had to come into existence because neither the Big Eight nor the Southwest Conference* would be viable in the changing college athletics landscape.
Whatever failure there is was brought on by greed and envy from Nebraska and/or Texas and/or Texas A&M, not by the inherent existence of the conference. I don’t believe that changing Nebraska-Oklahoma to two years out of every four became so horrible that the Cornhuskers would jump ship altogether for that reason. Nebraska and A&M didn’t have problems with unequal revenue sharing when they were getting the bigger pieces of the pie. To call the conference a “total failure” is ridiculous.
*In 1994, the SWC had already lost Arkansas to the SEC and was still coping with effects of the SMU death penalty and postseason/TV bans on various other teams.