The cash cow is going dry

The days of Jackrabbits sacking Nebraska quarterbacks could be numbered.

If you have been closely watching the tea leaves of college football, I guess you could figure this day was coming.

On Tuesday, Wisconsin athletic director and Rose Bowl football coach moonlighter Barry Alvarez said the Big Ten Conference has decided to stop scheduling FCS football games. Closer to home, North Dakota State athletic director Gene Taylor said he knows not every athletic director in the Big Ten is fully aboard.

A lot of teams have a bunch of FCS games scheduled out for the next five seasons or so. You can check out the Missouri Valley's list on the right side of this page or click here.

With the addition of Maryland and Rutgers and the near inevitability of the conference to go to nine or 10 games of Big Ten play, we should not be surprised by this move.

The games are somewhat beneficial for Big Ten teams because they provide an extra home game and a 98 percent chance of winning. What more do you want, Purdue?

But the reality is that outside of die-hard fans of the Wolverines and Hawkeyes and the fans of the FCS schools playing in the game, nobody cares about these games. Everyone is always complaining about how every SEC team plays an inept SWAC team in early November and it's not because people don't like Alabama State, another great institution of higher education in America. It's because Alabama State sucks. (Tavaris Jackson too.)

At the same time, there is a good reason why the games are played from the FCS end. These games are often times a serious way for schools to fund their athletic programs. Savannah State made $860,000 last year to get its proverbial butts kicked at Florida State and Oklahoma State. That can be worth it, if it pays for tennis, soccer and softball. Missouri State has been known to come out well financially from these games and perennial power Northern Iowa played at Iowa and Wisconsin last year to help the bottomline.

If you win, even better. We all know about Appalachian State because of their ability to knock off Michigan in the Big House to open the 2007 season. North Dakota State has regularly won these games but that's not the norm. SDSU's 13-10 loss at Minnesota in 2009 and 17-3 loss at Nebraska in 2010 represents the good in the recent "money games." They don't celebrate the 55-0 rear kicking at Illinois in 2011 and for good reason.

Plus, the games provide some much needed visibility for recruiting and otherwise. South Dakota has played at Central Florida, Air Force and Northwestern in recent years and those three states -- Florida, Colorado and Illinois -- have high school talent that the Coyotes would love to have. The same can be said for when Montana opened the season at Tennessee in 2011. That's tremendous visibility, both nationally and for local recruits to connect the team on the field with the colorful stationary that pops up in their mailboxes every day.

This post at footballscoop.com raises some pretty good points in favor of FCS but I think there's a chance the lower-level schools benefit some from this. Because there will be no incentive to pay D-II or NAIA schools to come play, it could force teams to play other FCS teams, which can only help for competition and selections come playoff time. For SDSU, it might open up more teams that could come up to Brookings for a September game, much like UC Davis last year.

Speaking of the Jackrabbits, they could get some money out of Minnesota if the Gophers and the Big Ten have to buy out their scheduled opponents past 2016, which is believed to be the start date of this new policy. I would rather see the two teams on the field but I guess that can't be the case.

What I do know is this: The large schools usually get what they want and the SEC has some pull. I could see those teams playing FCS opponents going forward because their conference is so good. The Big Ten doesn't always have that particular luxury. They're going to need better non-conference scheduling to make the new playoff system. In that instance, they can't afford to play the Indiana Teachers Colleges of the world.

If the Big Ten is out, that's bad news for the Missouri Valley Football Conference and more importantly, its school's budgets.

Hockey Talk

I won't fool you and tell you that I'm some sort of die-hard hockey fan. I'm somewhere between casual and enthusiastic, if I could place it.

While the Wild have been around since 2000, I never have been to a game. I went to a bunch of Division III Gustavus hockey games in high school, mainly for something to do because eventually you run out of things to do in a little town. I'm follower of two college hockey teams: Minnesota State-Mankato and Minnesota.
I do have some stories, however.

I've been to three Mavericks games, including one against the Sioux where I learned two things: 1. My high school business/computers teacher went to UND and is a big hockey fan. Didn't know that until I saw him there and 2. College kids will always have one go-to cheer. In this case it was "F--- The Sioux," and we basically heard that relentlessly for three periods. St. Cloud's is explained below.

In what was probably the best college sporting event I've ever been to, I was a witness to the Gophers topping the Mavericks in the first round of the 2008 WCHA playoffs in Game 3, a 3-2 double-overtime win for Minnesota. I was more-or-less amazed with the basic plot of the game and how it unfolded. MSU was No. 11 in the country and finished fourth in the conference, good for a home best-of-three series prior to the Final Five in St. Paul. Of all the teams to host, they got the Gophers. I don't remember a lot of the specifics other than that each game went to overtime (Games 1 and 3 went to 2OT) and that Alex Kangas was the Gophers goalie. (It feels like between Kangas and Kent Patterson they were goalies for 10 years combined.)

I come from a part of the state that has high school hockey and there are some ardent followers but none of the teams are really that good. The team my school is associated with has nine letters in its acronym. Nine. I don't know of many backyard rinks in Le Sueur County. It's mostly basketball and wrestling country because hockey is expensive and there are fewer indoor rinks.

However, it's hard not to catch some of the college hockey action for many reasons. The state hockey tournament is on television for four days and has each round covered, so all of the good players are covered well from 10th grade on. There's five D-I schools in Minnesota and all of them pick away at the leftover talent that the Gophers don't want/need. Almost every Gopher game is on TV. The Final Five is a lot of fun.

In the last post, I mentioned that I would wax poetic about the Western Collegiate Hockey Conference and its final year as we know it and that time has finally come. The conference is probably as competitive as ever, with the two aforementioned teams, North Dakota and Nebraska-Omaha within striking distance of the regular season title. Even Mankato has a good chance of finishing in the top half and having a home playoff series. Now is a bad time for the conference to call it quits.

It's going away because of conference realignment in college hockey and amazingly, it's not tied to football. Instead, it's the other main culprits: television and Jim Delany, Big Ten commissioner.

With the Big Ten Network needing programming on Friday and Saturday nights and Penn State getting Mr. Moneybags to donate nine figures to start men's and women's hockey for Nittany Nation, the Big Ten had the resources to get going with a hockey league. They feel there's a lot of money there. I'm not that sure. (Playing as an independent, PSU hasn't been bad this year. There's some promise there.) Minnesota, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, Ohio State and Wisconsin makes for a conference steep in tradition and enough for an annual automatic bid.

The rest of the WCHA is being shaken up as well. Let's go to the chart. The above is 2012-13, the bottom is 2013-14.

Top to bottom, the NCHC will have the best teams. The Big Ten has the potential to be a multi-bid league and they should get two each year but it's not impossible to see it being a one-bid league if a bunch of teams struggle. That's one man's thought.

The new WCHA will be sort of cobbled together but I think it could allow Bemidji and Mankato to rise to the top. If the NCHC ever expanded and the Beavers and Mavericks can create some space, they could be candidates to move up and the Minnesota outstate teams would be connected again. That's a dream scenario and the Mavericks have to improve their arena. That's a must.

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As for the actual series I went to, I found it to be quite fun. The National Hockey Center is a good facility and it's in the process of being renovated, which will widen the concourses, add seats and suites and justify their conference move because at first, the NCHC didn't want St. Cloud. In fact, the seats we occupied on Saturday night won't exist next year; they will be swollowed up by added suite space at the top of the arena.

The atmosphere was roughly split 70/30 between Husky and Gopher fans. One guy behind me told me to sit down after I was cheering a Gopher goal in the Saturday game; I ignored him. As my friend David said, "St. Cloud's fans act like they know what they're talking about but they usually never do." Exhibit A occurred during the Gophers' 4-2 Friday win. There was one man behind me who was cheering for Minnesota and then a couple other guys who sounded like they had gotten their fill before the game. When it came to rooting for St. Cloud, they would yell at the players, mainly because they had a lot of shots that missed the net, asking "YOU'VE GOT TO HIT THE NET! HOW HARD IS IT TO HIT THE NET?!?" Mind you, they're not asking for goals. Just to put it on the net.

FYI, Hockey nets are six feet by four feet.

Some other thoughts:

• St. Cloud's students relentlessly cheered "Sieve" at the Gophers' Adam Wilcox but they did it even before he allowed a goal. To me, you shouldn't be able to use the cheer until you score on the guy.
• I don't know enough about hockey penalties, so I didn't do much complaining about calls. I did not see Ted Valentine at the series.
• I laugh every time a person does the "Chuck-a-puck" and fails to throw it over the glass. Bonus points if it hits someone in the crowd. 
• After the first St. Cloud goal against Minnesota Friday, the fans threw very small gophers onto the ice. That's not just a Coyote-Jackrabbit thing, then. They did check the jackets and bags both nights upon entering.

Good times, I say. 

A B1G Debacle

Why, Jim Delany?

People already believe you, the commissioner of the Big Ten, are an idiot, based on your steadfast beliefs to hold the Rose Bowl and its geriatric leaders to a Big Ten/Pac 12 pairing every year, standing in the way of a playoff for years. It was your idiotic idea to name the football divisions after two non-descript, non-proper nouns and then top that by naming each individual conference award after not one but two former conference stars (Hello, Thompson-Randle El Freshman of the Year Award). You combined letters and numbers in your logo for no real reason.

But you've topped it now.

You're going to add Maryland for athletics to the Big Ten, the major conference I have the largest rooting interest in.

And you're going to ruin it.

Have you watched Maryland recently? They're operated by the biggest headcase in college football, Randy Edsall. That's saying something when you consider Lane Kiffin is still running USC and Bo Pelini has found success at Nebraska. At least, Ralph Fridgen was a decent person and he was run out of town.

You're going to add Rutgers, which is terrible at football and basketball, as well. Greg Schiano left for the Buccaneers, remember?

Well, at least they're an academic school.

Oh, that's right. The Big Ten gave up on academic laurels long ago. 

Yes, I understand you can make $250 million a year on a new TV deal because there's TV sets in Washington D.C., Baltimore and New York City. That's nice. But how does this make the Big Ten better on the field? These are, at best, 7-5 and 8-4 football teams.

Think of all of the other patsies that are already in the conference in a regular year: Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue and Penn State will soon be in this bunch.

It's currently being said that Maryland and Rutgers will have the 12th and 14th largest athletic budgets in the conference, respectively. In other words, third-to-last and dead last. Ohio State spends more than both schools combined in a single year.

Tell me how Maryland and Rutgers will be able to compete and how they will be better when it comes to winning football games. Tell me it's not about the money, like so many athletic administrators do.

In the arms race with the SEC and Big 12 and Pac 12, does adding the Terrapins and the Scarlet Knights make the Big Ten better? I can firmly say no.

I don't much care for conference expansion. I thought West Virginia being in a conference that was actually in the east made sense. But the only expansion that would have made sense in the Big Ten would be Notre Dame and after 20 years of flirting, the Irish went to the ACC with a sweetheart deal. (I can't blame Delany there. The ACC is desperate so they had to make that particular football deal where the Irish get to eat their cake for the considerable future.) Notre Dame is in the footprint and potentially someone else (Missouri, Cincinnati) would have made geographic sense.

But you blew it, Delany. 

Television is changing the game for college athletics, just like the flashy boxes did for the NFL. Argubly, Delany set the table for the Pac 12 Network and the debacle that is the Longhorn Network when he created the Big Ten Network and despite that success, it's becoming a slippery slope.

They say college sports aren't out to make money but how can it not be.

The actions continue to speak otherwise.