Oh, it’s on now.

This financial aggression will not stand, man.

The Big Ten Conference’s financial supremacy was on display again Wednesday when the league’s latest federal tax return reported record revenue and the largest single-year compensation figure ever for a conference commissioner.

You can feel the egos seething, can’t you?

The Big Ten, which increased its annual revenue by more than $50 million in 2012, had total revenue that was $42 million more than the Southeastern Conference reported for a fiscal year ending Aug. 31, 2012.

The tax return, provided by the Big Ten Conference in response to a request from USA TODAY Sports, showed commissioner Jim Delany being credited with more than $2.8 million in compensation for the 2011 calendar year.

In case you’re wondering, yeah, that’s about $1.2 million more than Slive received.

Gee, I guess we know what one hot topic in Destin will be now.

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Jim Delany’s new theory

Ever wonder why schools leave conferences?  Jim knows.

Question: Geography, or contiguous states within the conference footprint, has been a must-have with any Big Ten expansion. Why is that so important?

Delany: “You look at those on the outside (of conferences), and things don’t always hold together. Schools on the perimeter haven’t held together. Arkansas was on the perimeter in the Southwest Conference and eventually left for the SEC. Nebraska was on the perimeter in the Big 12 (from the stronghold of state of Texas), Maryland was on the perimeter in the ACC (from the Carolinas). It’s not a coincidence that these things happened…”

Now that is a load of hooey.  Delany, who went to school at North Carolina, knows damned well that Maryland was a founding member of the ACC.  The Terps didn’t wake up one day, say “hey, anybody notice we’re a long way from Tobacco Road?” and decided to up and leave.  Maryland’s decision to jump came as the result of Delany offering a financial lifeline to a school that had epically mismanaged its athletic affairs and was desperate for the cashola.  Nor does Maryland seemed concerned about being further out on the Big Ten’s perimeter than it was from North Carolina.

Or if you’d prefer an example closer to home, Arkansas swapped being on the perimeter of the SWC to being on the perimeter of the SEC.  Heard any news from Fayetteville about the school changing conference affiliations in the last twenty years?  Of course not.  I know it’s a long way from here to the perimeter, but from where I sit, those Hogs don’t look crazy.

Schools are jumping ship for one reason these days, and one reason only – and it’s the same reason that drives pretty much everything in college athletics right now.  Perimeters are fine and dandy as long as the pay is good.

Please proceed, Commissioner.

This should be fun.

An attorney helping to represent former and current college football and men’s basketball players in an anti-trust lawsuit told USA TODAY Sports a U.S. magistrate judge is allowing their legal team to take depositions from a college president and two conference commissioners who had made statements in the case saying that some schools and conferences might exit Division I or the Football Bowl Subdivision because of the financial and legal burden that would result from needing to share revenue with football and men’s basketball players.

Speaking after a hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins on Wednesday in San Francisco, plaintiffs’ attorney Renae Steiner said Cousins allowed depositions of Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone and Fresno State president John Welty.

Big Jim gets to elaborate on the Division III future of the Big Ten.  That should help with recruiting immensely.

That noise you hear in the background is Mike Slive snickering over how Delany let himself get put in this position.

Tuesday morning buffet

Lots of goodies to sample today.

• Seriously, why did it take so long to figure out Tommie Frazier belongs in the College Football Hall of Fame?
• Georgia’s new young alumni ticket deal is off to a fast start… which probably means students had better start showing up at games.
• Rodney Garner, staying in touch.
• Not just no, but “Oh, hell no.”
• Kolton Houston is the subject of next Sunday’s ESPN’s “Between The Lines”.  I hope his situation gets plenty of attention from it.
• One way you know the preseason is really underway – Paul Myerberg’s previews have started.  Hooray!
• President Obama plays to the crowd at Ohio State.
• I wouldn’t count on much, but if you’re interested in Matthew Thomas’ options after announcing he doesn’t want to go to FSU, John Infante has the info.
• Rumor has it that ESPN and the SEC will split the profits from the SEC Network 50/50.
• This, on the other hand, bites.

Destroying the divisions to save the schedules

I know most of the attention that’s gone the Big Ten’s way over its new divisional realignment has come in the form of mockery over abandoning Delany’s stupid “Legends” and “Leaders” nomenclature, but the real story for me as how that league has managed in a fairly short period to blow up some of its traditional rivalries, while preserving others.  It’s a real case study.

To catch you up, the Big Ten announced it’s going to a nine-game conference schedule in a couple of years.  In the meantime, the new conference schedule calls for two cross-divisional games, both of which will be scheduled on a rotating basis.  When the league goes to nine games in 2016, the cross-division schedule will increase to three, but all the games will continue to be scheduled on rotation, except for one rivalry game, between Indiana and Purdue, that will be protected.

The conference managed to protect some longstanding rivalries on an annual basis, like Wisconsin/Minnesota and Michigan/Ohio State, by putting those schools in the same division – so much for trying to grease the skids for that special matchup in the conference championship – but the oldest trophy rivalry is gone, and so are a few others.  (But, hey, welcome back one!)

I’m not saying there are any big lessons to be learned here.  There’s no way to please everyone as you go from a round-robin arrangement to a cross-divisional one.  And Delany has chosen the particularly messy course of division re-jiggering with this last round, as opposed to what the SEC did.  But it could have been worse.

Which has me wondering – could the SEC do something similar that would work?

You’d have to put the two Mississippi schools in the same division, maybe along with Arkansas, TAMU and Missouri, none of which have any historical rivalries with SEC teams, but do at least have geographic cohesiveness and some historical common ties.  The reason you’d have to do that on one side is because you’d have to put Alabama in the same division with its two oldest rivals, Auburn and Tennessee, which in turn would require Georgia’s presence for Auburn and then Florida would have to be a part of it for the Cocktail Party.  Vanderbilt would go along with Tennessee and that puts you at six teams.

That leaves Kentucky, LSU and South Carolina left to sort out in the mix.  I’ll leave you to take that where each needs to go, but the bottom line is that by moving the two Alabama schools eastwards, the conference could save a bunch of rivalry games and still get the benefit of rotating the cross-divisional ones.  It sure makes staying with an eight-game conference schedule more palatable.

Jim Delany is not a happy man today.

ACC is prepared to announce a grant of media rights agreement has been reached.  That cuts off the financial incentive for another conference to chase a current ACC school.

In other words, if a school decides to leave the ACC for, oh, say, the Big Ten, then its media revenues go to the ACC – and not to the school – for the length of the Grant of Media Rights agreement. Translation: you’re not leaving the league.

Even worse for Delany?  Note the number of schools that are parties to the agreement.  Then consider that the ACC is officially a 14-team conference (for football, anyway).  You do the math on what that means.

***********************************************************************************

UPDATE:  Official announcement here.

Jim Delany, director of programming

Barry Alvarez says the Big Ten will be going to a nine-game conference football schedule in a couple of years.  That will mean an unbalanced home schedule every year for half of its teams, which isn’t ideal – the conference pondered going to a ten-game schedule – but what can you do when you need to feed the beast?

The beast being the Big Ten Network, that is.

“To improve our league football-wise, we all agree as directors and driven by our commissioner (Jim Delany) that our non-conference schedule has to get better,” Alvarez said. “[Delany] is going to the table to re-negotiate TV contracts and we have to improve that inventory. Our non-conference schedule is not strong at all.”

The math is inevitable.  There’s just more money in TV than anywhere else.  They’ll need to tweak the postseason selection process so that none of the big conferences get burned by the committee for generating more product for their homegrown networks strengthening their regular season schedules.  Something tells me Delany will get that worked out sooner or later.

And you can figure Mike Slive is watching closely.

Thursday morning buffet

Come and get it.

• Bill Snyder says college football “was in a bad place”, then goes on to claim that the sport can self-correct.  That makes him half-right.
• “Recruiting is still all about relationships.”  Some relationships make me want to fwow up, I guess.
• The 2012 Charting Project takes a look at fourth down plays.
• Vandalism at Williams-Brice!
• Today’s wait, what? moment comes from Auburn WR Sammie Coates, who claims “… we’ve got the best wide receivers group, I think, around.”
• Sammie, here’s what a good receiving corps looks like.
• Mike Leach says the conferences are all the same, except for one thing about the SEC.
• Mark Sanford uses football as an excuse to trespass on his ex-wife’s property.
• For an undefeated team, Ohio State was kind of meh in conference play last season.  (Of course, you could say the entire conference was kind of meh in conference play last season.)

Another grayshirt story

I know it doesn’t involve a high-profile recruit and the kid is totally on board with the move, but I have to say I’m a bit surprised Tide Nation isn’t all over this:

… the football team picked up a grayshirt commitment from Naples (FL) Barron Collier defensive lineman Brady Pallante. As a grayshirt commit, Pallante will pay his way through school during the 2014-15 scholastic year—during which time he cannot participate in team activities—before joining the team on full scholarship for the 2015 season. If it makes it easier, just consider him the first commitment for the 2015 class, and one who’ll get a head start on the academic side of things.

It’s all on the up and up, so I don’t have a problem with it.  But then again, I’m not a fanatic on the subject.

Lesson learned.

For a guy whose career as a football coach is in tatters, whose actions took his school into a probationary period in which it’s still suffering, Jim Tressel is remarkably at peace with Tatgate.

Although it might have ultimately cost Tressel his coaching career — he also received a five-year show-cause penalty in the NCAA’s sanctions, which would result in penalties for any NCAA school that hires him as coach within that time window — he did not express regret for failing to report his players’ violations.

“If my fault is on the loyalty side, I’ll take it,” Tressel said.

Tressel said OSU’s violations were a result of “personal decisions” made by his players.

“Sometimes they’re the right decisions, and sometimes they’re the wrong,” Tressel said.

Not that the distinction matters, evidently.  ’Cause he’s a loyal guy.

Jesus, think that “show cause” penalty was justified?  An AD would have to be a certified moron to hire Tressel to run a football program again.  Ever.