Early Big Ten Tournament Just A Symptom Of A Bigger Issue

With the Big Ten Tournament set to tip off a week earlier than usual, it seems like a great opportunity to revisit the decisions that brought the league to this point.

The conference held its 2017 tournament at Washington D.C.’s Verizon Center to help cement its push for the mid-Atlantic region, following the addition of Maryland as a member.

This year, it’s in Madison Square Garden in New York to help the denizens of the Big Apple remember that Rutgers is a thing.

However, the Garden was already booked for the traditional conference tournament week by the Big East Tournament, which has been held there every year since 1983. So this year, the Big Ten is playing Opening Act to the really big show, starring DePaul.

The first Big Ten Tournament game hasn’t tipped off at the corner of 31st and 8th yet, and the decision to throw the entire year’s schedule off by a week is already being acknowledged as a mistake. The main reason is that it forced the league’s teams to play bunches of regular games in tighter-than-normal windows.

For example, Ohio State had to play six games in the span of two weeks back in January, playing at home, flying to New Jersey, flying to Illinois, and then flying back to New York before returning home for the final two. The last game of that exhausting stretch was a home loss to Penn State, which ultimately cost the Bucks a share of the league title.

This week, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said the condensed schedule, “Wasn’t good. Wasn’t healthy.”

The impact on the regular season is now known, and was a big negative. The impact on the postseason to come is still up in the air.

Michigan State coach Tom Izzo, who probably has bigger issues on his mind at the moment, first expressed concerns about the timing of this week’s tournament all the way back in 2014.

“Nobody wants that much time off,” he said at the time. “It could be two weeks, because you could play (in the league tournament) and get beat on a Thursday.”

This was a problem that was foreseeable four years ago, but Delany boldly plowed ahead. That is Legendary behavior by a Leader. It remains to be seen how much his league’s teams will have to pay for the mistake in March.

In the big picture, though, the premature postseason is just a symptom of the much bigger, also extremely foreseeable issue.

When Rutgers was announced as the newest member of the Big Ten conference in November 2012, the move was met with a mixture of anger, incredulity, and laughter. Rutgers was the birthplace of college football, but between that inaugural game in 1869 and a brief flash of competence during the Greg Schiano era, there was a solid century and a quarter that wobbled between irrelevance and humiliation.

In November 2012, the Scarlet Knights were in the middle of their sixth 8+ win season in seven years. They had just 11 in the previous 137 years. That, Delany decided, was the moment to strike. If you’ve ever wondered who could possibly listen to the cable TV ads that talk about how gold or commemorative plates or Pogs are at record highs and how that means it’s the time to buy…

Since joining the Big Ten, Rutgers’ high-water mark was a 3-5 conference record in season that ended with a bowl game in Detroit. And then things plunged over a cliff.

They’re 4-22 in league play since, and while Chris Ash seems to have at least restored a pulse to the program, they were still outscored 166-27 by OSU, Michigan, Michigan State, and Penn State in 2017. That actually represented an improvement over 2016, when those four teams beat Rutgers by a combined score of 224-0. That’s two seasons against divisional rivals with a cumulative score of 390-27.

By any objective measure, the Scarlet Knights have shown that they don’t belong in the same league as the top end of the Big Ten, both literally and figuratively.

However, the on-field product wasn’t the reason that teams in New Jersey and Minnesota now share a conference. The Scarlet Knights also brought their state’s roughly 2.5 million cable TV households into the league’s “footprint” and theoretically helped bring New York City closer to the league’s orbit.

At the press conference introducing Rutgers, Delany said, “We weren’t seeking the New York market, we were seeking a great institution located in an adjacent state with a prosperous academic and athletic approach. It wasn’t a TV play.”

That’s good, because the cable TV model has shifted dramatically since 2012, threatening to render the old “cable households” metric a thing of the past.

So let’s take Delany at his word, and measure the addition by Rutgers’ prosperous athletic approach.

Things could be going… more prosperously… for Scarlet Knight football in the Big Ten, but Chris Ash’s team is a huge success by the standards of the school’s other programs.

This is now the fourth season for Rutgers University fielding teams in 14 sports recognized by the Big Ten conference. In their most recent season of competition, exactly one finished with a record of .500 or better in league play. One. Three finished their years with zero conference wins. Is that good? Is that healthy?

In fairness, there are a few programs that have excelled in the past, but struggled more recently. Women’s basketball, for instance, enjoyed a stay as a national power in the early 2000s, but hasn’t made the Sweet 16 this decade. The men’s soccer team was briefly a national contender in the early 1990s when Alexi Lalas played there, but hasn’t won a Big Ten game in its last two seasons. The men’s basketball team actually made the Final Four once, in 1976, but have won exactly two NCAA Tournament games since and haven’t even made it into the field since 1991. The football team went undefeated in 1976 against the modern equivalent of an FCS schedule and then managed just four winning seasons in 24 years from 1981-2004.

Madison Square Garden isn’t a fit for the Big Ten Tournament. It’s hundreds of miles away from virtually every league campus, and 1,000 or more away from three. Playing the conference championship a week early may have compromised the league’s regular season championship, and could impact teams’ success in the NCAA Tournament. Attendance will almost certainly be well below the turnout in traditional destinations within the actual conference footprint like Indianapolis and Chicago. But Delany wanted a big opening on Broadway, so break a leg, guys.

Ultimately, the impact of this week’s bad choice won’t linger past the end of the season. The decision to add an athletic department that’s subpar from top to bottom likely will.

Here is how Rutgers’ various programs finished their most recent season in conference play, ranked by winning percentage.

Women’s soccer: 6-2-3 (.681)

Women’s basketball: 7-9 (.438)

Men’s Lacrosse: 2-3 (.400)

Field Hockey: 3-5 (.375)

Women’s lacrosse: 2-4 (.333)

Football: 3-6 (.333)

Wrestling: 3-6 (.333)

Baseball: 7-16 (.304)

Softball: 5-18 (.217)

Men’s basketball: 3-15 (.200)

Women’s tennis: 2-9 (.182)

Women’s Gymnastics: 0-5 (.000)

Men’s soccer: 0-8 (.000)

Women’s volleyball: 0-20 (.000)

The Scarlet Knights don’t field teams in men’s tennis or ice hockey.