T1B

Dinsdale wrote:If it was played the last week of the season, leading immediately to a rematch in the CCG, that would kinda suck, too.

PSUFAN wrote:Another perspective - it's good to be freed of the Big 10's inclination to treat The Game as the de facto CCG...and to referee as such. A more truly competitive conference, with a fucking CHAMPIONSHIP GAME and no more "shared" titles, is a good thing for most people.

If The Game is all that, then it will be fine. A good rivalry doesn't need a whole conference to prop it up.

M Club wrote:

Dinsdale wrote:If it was played the last week of the season, leading immediately to a rematch in the CCG, that would kinda suck, too.

which is why they should be placed in the same divisions.

IndyFrisco wrote:but it is disheartening nonetheless that our beloved sport has come to this. Money first.

M Club wrote:so how long do you all give it before it's just some shitty game that's more of a nuisance than an actual rivalry? 90% of THE GAME is that both teams spend the entire season preparing for it (the other 10% is all that grease in an ohioan's rat tail). now it's just some week 5 bs where both teams are still working out their kinks. oh well, we always lose, so i suppose michigan now gets two months every year to redeem the season somehow, whereas before that was the end of things.

aside from the fact we suck right now, splitting the two teams to try and get them in the ccg and then moving the game earlier in the season is a complete fucking joke. presumably we'll get better one day, but now we're both stuck pissing our inter-divisional games away on each other while nebraska and penn state will spend theirs on indiana or purdue or whomever, so basically this move makes it easier for them to get in the ccg, which negates the reasoning of "ooh, umich/osu rematch!!!!" gay.

Indy wrote:BTPCFB, while still my favorite of all sports, has caved into the business side of it. I hate to give legs to poptart's opinions, but it is disheartening nonetheless that our beloved sport has come to this. Money first. The rest will come.

Truman wrote:The whole Board? Naw, I pretty much confined my puke to your post.

Was it you, or was it a pitiful, screaming little girl standing in a puddle of her own warm piss that hijacked your password and posted:

“so how long do you all give it before it's just some shitty game that's more of a nuisance than an actual rivalry,” and that your game with tOSU is “just some week 5 bs where both teams are still working out their kinks.”

Can’t speak for Longhorn- and SoonerFan, but I’d like to think that they could schedule the RRS in the middle of an Outback parking lot at high noon on Groundhog’s Day and the outcome of that game is still gonna matter to those folks.

BTW, I never said your team sucked. I suggested that your team should STOP sucking. Sorry that nuance escaped you. At least we agree on Kansas….

Papa Willie wrote: Now you've got a guy who's trying to implement a system that goes against EVERYTHING that Michigan and the rest of the Big 10 has ever stood for - big fat white boys running up the middle and playing smash-mouth football. Michigan CAN'T ever become a run & poot type team like RR wants them to be.

Y'all need to get back to your roots.

PSUFAN wrote:Like I said - The Game is a big deal already, and it will remain so. It will be a big deal even after the conference has to change how it does things. The conference has historically operated under the assumption that there are only two teams that contend for supremacy, and they do so in The Game, and no other conference teams can dare stage a game after The Game.

Officiating - while PSU has been screwed a couple of times in games with tOSU and uM, that's not what I'm referring to. I'm referring to games like the uM/Illinois game in 2000, a blatant screw job from top to bottom. it's not only PSU - ask the other conference teams if an official seemed reluctant to pull a flag or make a call that might keep one of The Two out of The Game.

Many realities of the modern game are anathema to the Old Guard...replay, weekly national television coverage, night games...but since these things have a direct bearing on revenue, the ADs and Presidents will let them pass.

Truman wrote:Last I checked, The XII has played host to a Big Game each year mid-season in Dallas that pretty much decided the Conference

Truman wrote:[


As for your bitch that Big Rid might get over as a result of the Big Eleven's enlightened scheduling…

Get over yourself. OU, Texas, AND Mizzou laughs at you.

Big Rid’s a fraud.

Two must-read posts: Ramzy at Bucknuts on whoredom and Doctor Saturday on the sheer lack of sense.

I'm not posting this in the hope that it will change anything. Since Dave Brandon came out in favor of moving the Michigan-Ohio State game to midseason there's been tremendous fan pushback, with opinion running about 10-to-1 against. It obviously doesn't matter, because the men in suits are ramping up the meaningless PR doublespeak to alarming levels:

…the reason the Big Ten is great is because of our fans. We had five and a half million fans come to games [in 2009]. Whether it’s the Rose Bowl or Ohio State-Michigan, we welcome that, and there’s an awful lot of discussion of, generally speaking, how our fans feel about what we do. We're not fan-insensitive, we're fan-receptive and are only interested in doing what is going to grow our fan base.

Whenever someone starts talking about how great the fans are, the fans are about to get it in uncomfortable places, especially when that's the first thing they talk about in the face of obvious, massive opposition. Meanwhile, the SID is trying to calm people over email by saying for Michigan and Ohio State to meet for the conference title they will "have to play their way into the championship game." If it was a trial balloon people would be walking it back by now after the reaction it's received. The thing is far enough along that Barry Alvarez is flat-out stating that Iowa and Wisconsin will be split up. It's actually happening.

So this doesn't matter. But here's why Michigan and Ohio State's athletic directors should be out in the streets rounding up pitchfork-toting mobs instead of rolling over like Indiana:

The financial benefits are almost literally zero. Dan Wetzel cites a TV executive claiming that at maximum, the vague possibility of Michigan and Ohio State meeting in a Big Ten championship game once a decade might be worth two million dollars a year ("it might be half that," he adds). Even taking the most optimistic number, the end result for Michigan is another 150k per year (the conference takes a share). Assuming an average of seven home games a year, Michigan could earn that by raising ticket prices twenty cents. Meanwhile, every other Big Ten team sees the same increase in their bottom line.

Twenty cents!

Michigan and Ohio State will almost never meet. The Plain Dealer looked back at the league since Penn State's addition and concluded that in the last sixteen years, a Michigan-Ohio State championship game would have happened all of three times.

In the future you can expect that to be far less frequent. Michigan will be guaranteed that 1) they play an outstanding Ohio State team and 2) three of the other five teams in their division do not. If the matchup is going to occur it's going to be the same for Ohio State. The loser of that game is going to have to overcome that deficit against teams that have a much easier schedule. The addition of Nebraska adds another historic power to the league. "Once a decade" is not hyperbole. It's a reasonable estimate.

As a result, you are turning M-OSU from something that will always have stakes to something you hope to do over. This is Delany's reasoning:

"If Duke and North Carolina were historically the two strongest programs and only one could play for the right to be in the NCAA tournament, would you want them playing in the season-ending game so one is in and one is out?" he asked. "Or would you want them to play and have it count in the standings and then they possibly could meet for the right to be in the NCAA or the Rose Bowl?

"We've had those debates. It's a good one. The question is whether you want to confine a game that's one of the greatest rivalries of all time to a divisional game."

Yes. Because the loser of that game is doomed and knows it. Moving it to midseason just makes it a particularly high hurdle that might not mean much—that the conference explicitly hopes doesn't mean much—at the end of the year, when the two teams can do it again, except indoors in Indianapolis. Doctor Saturday:

Keep the game what it's always been, the ritualistic culmination of an entire season in a single, freezing orgy of centuries-old hate that cannot be overturned or redeemed for at least another 365 days. In good years, the division championship (hence a shot at the conference championship) will be on the line, preserving the familiar winner-take-all/loser-go-home intensity that made "The Game" what it is in the first place.

You are doing something your fans hate. The kids don't get paid, the stadium doesn't have advertising, the idea that there is a Michigan Thing that it is possible not to "get" in a way that it is not possible Jim Schwartz does not "get" the Lions Thing: these are the things that separate college football from minor league baseball. For decades Michigan's season has had a certain shape defined by the great Satan at the end of it.

This is where the disconnect between the suits and the fans is greatest. Beating Ohio State isn't about winning the Big Ten, it's about beating Ohio State, just like the Egg Bowl is about beating that other team in Mississippi or the Civil War is about beating that other team in Oregon or any billion other year-end rivalry games that have been played since the Great Depression. M-OSU is the super-sized version of the old-fashioned rivalries based on pure hate. It's not Miami-Florida State, a game entirely dependent on the teams being national contenders for it to even sell out, but the Big Ten is treating it like the country's fakest rivalry game anyway.

It so happens that a lot of the time OSU and Michigan do decide the Big Ten, but did anyone want to beat OSU less in the mid-90s when Michigan limped into the game with 3 or 4 losses every year? Or last year? No. Would it matter less as an October game to be followed by three or four more? Necessarily yes. Is that the worst thing in the world? Yes.

I have no tolerance for anyone too dense to grasp this, much less see it as a potentially good thing, as Dave at Maize N Brew does. I said his post on the matter was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen a Michigan fan write and it remains so. Orson's post on the matter is also the dumbest thing I've ever seen him write. The reason college football matters in a way the NFL does not is the idea it has that some things are not worth selling. Once the date of the Michigan-Ohio State game goes the only thing left is the labor of the players.

I'll still be there. I don't have a choice, really, but the special kind of misery I'll experience when Michigan plays Ohio State at 8 PM in October and Special K blasts "Lose Yourself" during a critical review will make me feel like an exploited sap, not a member of a community in which my opinions matter. They clearly don't. This will matter in the same way erosion does.

AND NOW: A BUNCH OF UNAFFILIATED FOLK SHARE THEIR OPINIONS

Jerry Hinnen:

Speaking as an Auburn fan on Big 10 moving M/OSU to midseason: If they'd tried that w/ the Iron Bowl I'd have burned SEC HQ to the ground

Doctor Saturday:

Because I have a soul, I've already firmly aligned myself with the "armageddon" crowd, made up of those of us who can't stand the thought of one side telling the other in mid-October, "We'll see you again when it really matters." Which probably means I've aligned myself with the losing side. Whatever the motivations of its less influential champions, the prospect of a Buckeye-Wolverine split only has traction among people who matter because the people who matter see a buck in it: If one Ohio State-Michigan game is good, two Ohio State-Michigan games must be even better, and I'm sure they have the ratings projections and accompanying ad rates to prove it. The rivalry has already defined and shaped the national perception of the Big Ten for the last 50 years; just think of the possibility of the rivalry-as-championship game as "expanding the brand."

Mike Rothstein:

Saving this game at the end is the culmination of a season-long crescendo.

Michigan-Indiana at the end of the year, for example, doesn’t offer the same cachet.

And it never will.

Stewart Mandel:

Are you kidding me? It's been played the last week of the season all but once since 1935, and it's the league's single most important franchise. You would think conference leaders would go to any length to protect it. …

Sometimes leaders make decisions without properly thinking through the issues. This one sounds like a case of over-thinking. Do the right thing, Mr. Delany, Mr. Brandon and Mr. Smith, lest the ghosts of Woody and Bo haunt you in your sleep.

John Taylor:

Be warned, Big Ten: you move The Game, you will rip the heart and suck the soul out of the single greatest property the conference owns. And for what, a few more advertising dollars every few years when they do happen to stumble into a title showdown? One that will, incidentally, likely be contested in a sterile, domed, neutral location as opposed to yet another reason that The Game is what it is -- The Big House and The Shoe.

So… yeah. Join the Facebook page. Maybe it will help. It won't, actually, but maybe you'll feel better about it.

M Club wrote:oh sorry, dumbfuck, i figured i was allowed a measure of sarcasm. i actually think the game will stop mattering all together save its relevance to the standings because it's no longer played at season's end.

osu will always be our biggest rival, but part of the reason it's considered one of cfb's best rivalries is both teams play at season's end, when the entire season is usually on the line for one of them. removing that element from the equation hurts the rivalry no matter what bs well-the-RRS-does-it-this-way posturing you throw you there.

H4ever wrote:Last I checked, Mizzou tends to piss down their collective legs like the bunch of sissy-lala's they are....even during their "good" years. You fucks ever won anything?

H4ever wrote:As for OU and Texas laughing...OU got beat and Texas should have but not for the phantom second being stuck back on the clock. Mizzou laughing? I laughed....

H4ever wrote:"Big Rid/fraud" is going to wipe their cocks all over the Big 12's drapes this year. Pelini might even fly to Columbia on a Tuesday just to upperdeck a toilet in a hotel room.....like he did last year in the visitor's locker room.

Truman wrote: A “rival”, as defined it in THESE parts, is one where you root for the other school to:

M Club wrote:...you're not qualified to speak on this matter.

Truman wrote:

H4ever wrote:Last I checked, Mizzou tends to piss down their collective legs like the bunch of sissy-lala's they are....even during their "good" years. You fucks ever won anything?

Nope. And neither have you. Just a couple of North Division titles two-out-of-the-last-three years, which ain’t shit. But it’s more than Big Rid can say lately. And at least we can beat Iowa State at home. BTW, Big Rid in Lincoln is our BITCH.

H4ever wrote:As for OU and Texas laughing...OU got beat and Texas should have but not for the phantom second being stuck back on the clock. Mizzou laughing? I laughed....

Sounds to me more like you cried.

Bode you, I guess for getting over on an OU squad that graduated half its BCS team and had its star quarterback in re-hab when you played them. As for Tejas: Scoreboard, Loser.

BTW, that li'l bitch take is like MizzouFan saying that Big Rid would have been drowned-and-sunk in Columbia if that pet rhinoceros of yours hadn’t stepped on Gabbert’s ankle.

Bottom line: Score more points, you whiny Fuck.

H4ever wrote:"Big Rid/fraud" is going to wipe their cocks all over the Big 12's drapes this year. Pelini might even fly to Columbia on a Tuesday just to upperdeck a toilet in a hotel room.....like he did last year in the visitor's locker room.

Sounds like a plan. You Losers are welcome to wipe all cum off all the cocks you want while Mizzou figures out how to finally beat OU or Texas in Dallas this December. Regardless, no difference for you or Big Rid this year or any other: 2nd in the XII North; 2nd in the Big Ten West. Same shit, different season. Just the way it is, Loser. Get used to it.

Truman wrote: From YOUR level?

Way to kick your own ass, pussy.

H4ever wrote: OU in the CCG will be Nebraska's toughest game this year.
.

H4ever wrote:Leave it to Mizzou fan to go back THREE, count them THREE years when trying to claim 'bode over one of the titans of cfb. You're like a late 90's K-Suck fan on a three day, nyquil mixed with crack bender. Loser? Get a crystal trophy...just one...ya knuckle-draggin' used mobile home salesman.

H4ever wrote:Mizzou will get butcher-raped in Lincoln. Gabbert will get picked at least 3 times as he runs for his life up against another great D-line that won't drop off much from last year (some think it will be even better) which will make life hell considering he will be scrambling and then try to throw against a great secondary.

H4ever wrote:Tejas? Good team...that will get fucking embarrassed in Lincoln. OU in the CCG will be Nebraska's toughest game this year.

H4ever wrote:I don't predict Missouri to win any kind of title on the football field (shocker) until they end up in the MAC or Mountain West or some other non-BCS, shit conference when the Big 12 folds. It's their destiny...and nobody cares. Hope ya like crusty drapes, Preston.

M Club wrote:

Truman wrote: From YOUR level?

Way to kick your own ass, pussy.

my own ass? you should probably wait till mizzou becomes nouveau riche before acting the part. these are the halcyon days of mizzou football and you have seven or eight wins a year to show for it. we'll recover and you'll still be the same floundering, pussy program no one gives a shit about. go choke on your irrelevance.

Truman wrote:…All of which does nothing to dispel the fact that you are a whiny little cunt lamenting the fact that they moved your beloved annual thrashing to mid-season.

You lost SEVEN fucking games in conference last season AND to App State the year before.

Tell me again why you’re talking to me?

Michigan is a rolling bag of fuck.