I thought it was a solid article. Lots of good points but I disagree with two of them.
1. In this day and age of television geographic considerations for traveling to away games has ZERO influence on these decisions. Almost all decisions now revolve around television. Example: 11am games are almost universally hated among fans that actually attend the games in person but it doesn't matter because the scheduling is based on television. How many fans will travel from Wisconsin to Maryland or Rutgers means nothing.
It's not just for visiting or traveling fans. This is sh!itty for any home crowd fans across the board. Tough to get fans excited about more 11 am game times than 2:30 and night games combined. If you're a perennial winner, yes, fans will show up. If you're a MN (or even a Wisc or Iowa), fans and students don't have as much time to tailgate, create an atmosphere, or even take advantage of peak day time temperature. What frosts me the most is that lower tier programs like ours will continue to have the crummy 11 am times while the better ones get the better slots on either BTN or ESPN. More night games. Better chance at creating atmosphere. But hey, we get some money to spend on coaches and facilities (to which the better programs will have more, keeping their access to better coaches and facilities than ours).
2. Along with BTN television market expansion I think most people are overlooking another consideration: recruiting. Expanding into markets with large populations and thus large amounts of high school talent will ensure that these high school recruits are seeing more B1G games on tv and the hope is more will attend B1G schools and, in turn, raise the level of talent. It ends up being 2 new recruiting markets for B1G teams. Expanding into Kansas on the other hand does very little for recruiting because 1) there aren't as many D1 football players coming out of Kansas and 2) B1G teams are already recruiting those few D1 players in that market.
This will, again, barely affect us in a positive way. We as a conference will be an addition to the viewership in those regions, not replacing fans seeing ACC/Big East/SEC schools on tv. So yes, we get extra eyes. But again, who benefits the most? The current upper tier programs, not us (or Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Northwestern, etc). If we were serious about recruiting being a target, I think we would have gone after a school in TX, Georgia, Florida, South/North Carolina, or something like that. While Maryland and NJ may have a decent amount of talent, it's nothing compared to the south. Where schools like Michigan, OSU, etc etc are already recruiting - check out their rankings over the past few years...
