I'll start out with this comment by Lafayette Bear, from another thread:
Cal, and every other school, desperately needs the additional revenue that these larger conferences, conference championship games, occasional Thursday and Friday night games, and other newfangled features of CFB bring with them. Without this new revenue, we are cutting a whole lot of non-revenue producing sports.
As long as we can continue to play 'Furd, SC and UCLA each year, I can live with whatever new arrangement Larry Scott comes up with. (I would also hope, and expect, that future participation in a Rose Bowl is at least a theoretical possibility under the new arrangement.)
Essentially, the anti-expansion arguments that I've heard basically boil down to the following: With expansion, we either have to give up the LA rivalries, or accept a tougher schedule than everyone else, which makes the Rose Bowl even more of a pipe dream than it was before.
I think there's some truth to that. However, without the additional revenue expansion is expected to provide, I don't expect Cal to be competitive in football anyway, unless we dump a bunch of non-revenue sports and funnel the money back to the gridiron. I think one of the terms of conference expansion should be to boost the minimum number of sports conference schools have to provide, both men's and women's, so that new revenue doesn't go solely to the football arms race, and our attempt to meet the spirit of Title IX doesn't create a competitive football disadvantage.
Bottom line, the genie is never going back in the bottle. Alumni who miss the nostalgia of hearing the band during time outs, and having the Old Pac 8 battle for the right to go to Pasadena, sorry, that ship has sailed.
Cal, and every other school, desperately needs the additional revenue that these larger conferences, conference championship games, occasional Thursday and Friday night games, and other newfangled features of CFB bring with them. Without this new revenue, we are cutting a whole lot of non-revenue producing sports.
As long as we can continue to play 'Furd, SC and UCLA each year, I can live with whatever new arrangement Larry Scott comes up with. (I would also hope, and expect, that future participation in a Rose Bowl is at least a theoretical possibility under the new arrangement.)
Essentially, the anti-expansion arguments that I've heard basically boil down to the following: With expansion, we either have to give up the LA rivalries, or accept a tougher schedule than everyone else, which makes the Rose Bowl even more of a pipe dream than it was before.
I think there's some truth to that. However, without the additional revenue expansion is expected to provide, I don't expect Cal to be competitive in football anyway, unless we dump a bunch of non-revenue sports and funnel the money back to the gridiron. I think one of the terms of conference expansion should be to boost the minimum number of sports conference schools have to provide, both men's and women's, so that new revenue doesn't go solely to the football arms race, and our attempt to meet the spirit of Title IX doesn't create a competitive football disadvantage.
Bottom line, the genie is never going back in the bottle. Alumni who miss the nostalgia of hearing the band during time outs, and having the Old Pac 8 battle for the right to go to Pasadena, sorry, that ship has sailed.