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The Indiana Daily Student

sports

Conference expansions could hurt the Hoosiers

Maryland quarterback CJ Brown throws a pass during IU's game against the Terrapins on Saturday at Memorial Stadium.

There was a time when the “Ten” in Big Ten meant something.

That’s clearly no longer the case, with the conference having 14 teams ranging from Nebraska out west to Rutgers and Maryland all the way on the East Coast.

While the conference was originally created to represent the major Division I schools in the Midwest, it’s added three teams in the past four years in what’s becoming a national trend of athletic conference expansion.

Along with the Big Ten, conferences such as the Pac-12, Atlantic Coast Conference, South Eastern Conference and Big 12 have all added teams since 2010.

The new structure might not make the most sense, with schools like Butler University joining the Big East and Louisville joining the ACC, but it’s not difficult to understand why they’d make the move.

The expansions absolutely make the conferences more powerful with their already lucrative TV deals and standalone networks, which in turn means more money for the schools ?involved.

A Journal and Courier report estimated that the Big Ten schools stand to make up to $44.5 million during the 2017-18 school year.

It also means more chances for recruiting, as the larger conferences ?foster better competition and more national recognition for both the schools and the athletes involved with larger conferences.

With that said, this expansion might not be the best for every school in the long run.

Traditional Big Ten basketball and football powerhouses like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio State and Michigan State will continue to succeed like they do every year, but other schools could be buried.

Just look at the Hoosiers’ last football game against Maryland.

The Terrapins, usually a middling school in football and basketball, shellacked IU last Saturday, 37-15.

That’s a bad loss for the Hoosiers.

And not only is it bad in the short term, it could show a problem for schools like IU and Purdue, who haven’t been competitive in their conferences in a long time.

If more schools continue to join these conferences, teams like IU football could get lost in the shuffle and become less competitive on a year-to-year basis. The team already struggles to make bowl games, and it’s hard to see it getting any easier with potentially better schools coming to the ?conference.

Granted, it doesn’t help that the Hoosiers drop games to small, out-of-conference schools like Bowling Green. Games like those should be automatic wins. But still, it’s hard to ignore the fact that a bigger conference has the potential to mean nothing but more losing for traditionally weak teams in a particular sport.

It could mean those traditionally weaker schools move to smaller conferences for certain sports or they join other conferences for all sports ?altogether.

It also means “mid-majors” like Boise State could be pushed out of national relevance as their conference schedules prove too weak to warrant any kind of postseason presence on the national stage.

Either way, the college athletics scene is obviously in a state of flux, and the next few years are going to be telling in how it all shakes out.

And for schools like IU, they’re going to be ?crucial.

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