grapie wrote: It just guarantees that members other than Michigan and OSU will schedule home patsies with the remaining games. MSU and Purdue should keeps us on the schedule, but that's about it.

The only way they could keep us is if they played a 7-5 home-away schedule with 9 conferece games.  That would leave them 1 road game every 2 years to schedule a home-home series with a team like Notre Dame.  That would also mean that ND is the only rivalry game anyone could play.  The other 2 games each year would be home only patsies.  Therefore, if the BIG adopts 9 or 10 conference games, then I don't think we play them anymore.

To be clar, 10 conference games is tough.  That would force everyone on the BIG to play 7-5 home away schedule and all five road games are taken up by conference play.  Therefore, no out of conference rivalry games.  Every game played out of conference would be, by default, a home-only crap team.

WhiskeyFoxtrot wrote:

To be clar, 10 conference games is tough.  That would force everyone on the BIG to play 7-5 home away schedule and all five road games are taken up by conference play.  Therefore, no out of conference rivalry games.  Every game played out of conference would be, by default, a home-only crap team.

Sounds about right for the B1G

Genert wrote:

WhiskeyFoxtrot wrote:

To be clar, 10 conference games is tough.  That would force everyone on the BIG to play 7-5 home away schedule and all five road games are taken up by conference play.  Therefore, no out of conference rivalry games.  Every game played out of conference would be, by default, a home-only crap team.

Sounds about right for the B1G

Even with only 9 league games, each BT team is unlikely to ever play more than 1 major OOC foe, leaving 2 assumed cupcakes for Home games (say, a 1AA and a MAC). 

The BT is not like, say, FSU or Miami or Clemson or more than a few other ACC schools that try to play tough OOC slates (FSU last year got screwed by having WVU drop the game last minute - just as UNC as had Tennessee and Colorado and Minnesota and others drop games over the past decade). 

That being the case, I don't see Purdue and Mich St wanting more from ND than perhaps sharing 1 slot, Purdue for 2 years followed by Mich St for 2 years. After all, just as ND needs more exposure in the South, so do almost all BT teams in order to try to land recruits from the South.

So, Purdue is going to need room to try to play SEC teams and ACC teams in the South and TX teams, and if it plays ND annually on top of 9 BT games, it has almost no room to do so and hope to have a winning record.

WoadBlue wrote:

Genert wrote:

WhiskeyFoxtrot wrote:

To be clar, 10 conference games is tough.  That would force everyone on the BIG to play 7-5 home away schedule and all five road games are taken up by conference play.  Therefore, no out of conference rivalry games.  Every game played out of conference would be, by default, a home-only crap team.

Sounds about right for the B1G

Even with only 9 league games, each BT team is unlikely to ever play more than 1 major OOC foe, leaving 2 assumed cupcakes for Home games (say, a 1AA and a MAC). 

The BT is not like, say, FSU or Miami or Clemson or more than a few other ACC schools that try to play tough OOC slates (FSU last year got screwed by having WVU drop the game last minute - just as UNC as had Tennessee and Colorado and Minnesota and others drop games over the past decade). 

That being the case, I don't see Purdue and Mich St wanting more from ND than perhaps sharing 1 slot, Purdue for 2 years followed by Mich St for 2 years. After all, just as ND needs more exposure in the South, so do almost all BT teams in order to try to land recruits from the South.

So, Purdue is going to need room to try to play SEC teams and ACC teams in the South and TX teams, and if it plays ND annually on top of 9 BT games, it has almost no room to do so and hope to have a winning record.

With a 9 game conference slate, the Big 10 isn't ulikely to play more than 1 OOC, they are UNABLE to.  With a 7-5 home/road schedule, a BIG team will have 10 road games every 2 years with wchich to schedule home and home series.  Conference series will be, by definition, home-home series.  So in 2 years, conference play will eat up 9 out of 10 road games for a team, leaving them 1 road with which to schedule exactly 1 OOC home home series. 

With the talk of the BIG going to an 8-4 home-road format, they can have at most 8 conference games per year, because they only have 8 road games every 2 years to support 8 home-home series. An 8-4 schedule format would mean the BIG would play conference play, and then each team would play 4 home only crap teams.  This sounds very, very unrealistic to me.