In about 10 days, the nation’s college sports media will descend on Chicago for the Big Ten’s football media days. No doubt the focus of attention will be on the league’s 12th member, Nebraska, and on the commissioner’s podium.
What is Jim Delany, widely considered the most powerful man in college football, thinking about his continuing quest to make the Big Ten a league of its own? How about making it in the Big Apple?
The Big Ten commissioner, a South Orange native and North Carolina graduate, knows full well the value of the D.C.-to-Boston corridor, whose epicenter is New York.
“Anyone who forgets that forgets at their peril,” Delany told The Post in a telephone interview. “It’s the center, it has been the center of media activity for a hundred years. It’s the center of financial activity and it has been that way for 150 years. To me it’s sort of where a lot of things start in the county.”
And in terms of college football, the East Coast is where the sports expansion could find its end game.
Delaney would not talk specifically about expansion, but he reiterated the league’s initial stance in December 2009 of studying the issue over a 12-to-18 month period. A college football presence in the metropolitan area remains very high.
“For us it’s important,” Delany said. “We haven’t been there except through Penn State. Our teams play in the Garden. They play in the Meadowlands. They play teams out East. They play in the NIT. They play in the ACC.
“I consider the East Coast to be as important to us as the West Coast is even though the West Coast has got the Rose Bowl and the Big Ten-Pac-10 relationship,” Delany added. “And it’s so because of the recruitment of students, the recruitment of athletes, the size and scope of the markets. I hope it becomes more important.”
Coincidence or not, the Big East — which has come to absorb expansion tremors the way Californians shrug off earthquakes that register at the low end of the Richter scale — will host its media days at the same time as the Big Ten. The ACC’s media days are Monday and Tuesday.
Those leagues contain programs of most appeal in addition to Notre Dame, an independent, and Missouri of the Big 12 because of their markets. When the Big 12 imposed a mid-June deadline on its members to decide whether to stay or go, it forced the Big Ten and Nebraska to move up the timetable.
But the Big Ten’s clock still is ticking, and FBS schools in the Boston (Boston College), New York (Rutgers and Syracuse) and Washington, D.C. (Maryland) markets prime properties. Should the Big East lose two members and/or the ACC lose Maryland, a charter member that is cash-strapped, it could reshape the Eastern seaboard.
Delany remembers the days when Fordham, the Ivy League and the service academies were the toast of college football. But as professional sports grew in popularity, college sports faded in New York. Delany said he wasn’t certain if the New York market would support the sport the way it is in L.A. or Chicago, but he knows a middle-of-the-pack program won’t appeal to New Yorkers, who get the inaugural Pinstripe Bowl to be played in Yankee Stadium this December.
“We’ll see how some of the other bowl games, which may not be top tier, produce,” Delany said. “My sense about that bowl was, ‘It’s great to be in New York but you better come with your ‘A’ game . . . because I don’t think the New York market really responds to anything but the ‘A’ game.”