Should a fictitious game have been played between the above two-mentioned organizations, the sports page lead might have read:
‘After jumping to what seemed like an insurmountable lead, LLB held on for dear life as the Big Ten rallied from behind with a far-reaching attack that ultimately fell just short of tying the game in a two-score defeat. Despite the loss, fans of the Big Ten are encouraged by reports of the league’s yet unannounced plans to tie LLB’s lead by pouching two more entities in the near future.’
In my years of writing, I have never dabbled into the fictitious end of the pool, but one does not have to be a 300-pounder seeking to make a big splash to be aware that the college sports world certainly is living by the motto “bigger is better.” The ‘haves’ are reaching out with their tv-money tenacles to entice some bigger fish swimming in shallower pools to join them, resulting in some unwanted chaos among those ‘have-nots’ not invited to take part.
It is understood that nothing ever stays the same. Necessity becomes the driving force that allows ‘change’ in, and often, those changes prove to be beneficial. In the sports world, those benefiting from expansion changes are gleeful to be included, but the fallout resulting often takes time to be accepted by the populous.
On other pages of this paper, the story is told of the Bitburg, Germany, Little League team that is reuniting in Williamsport 50 years after its appearance in the 1973 LLBWS. In those days, the event was an eight-team single-elimination five-day event, beginning on Tuesday and ending on Saturday.
Over the years, the popularity of the event requests from Little League volunteer administrators, the arrival of competitive programs, and the influx of TV revenue led to the advent of revised double-elimination and pool-play formats. By 2001, the Little League World Series doubled in size to include 16 teams, with Volunteer Stadium being added to the World Series complex.
Little League officials heralded the move as an opportunity for more children around the world to experience the World Series. Then, in 2022, they took a bigger step by adding four more teams to the current 20-team World Series format. The organization’s website explains:
“The last expansion was more than 20 years ago when the Little League Baseball World Series moved to 16 teams in 2001. As we continue to try and find ways to improve the Little League experience for children around the world, we have found that there’s room to grow and provide more Little Leaguers each year with the opportunity of a lifetime. For more than eight decades, Little League has celebrated our history while also looking toward the future.”
While Little League Baseball was born in 1939, the Big Ten Conference was founded in 1896, with its birth certificate naming it the “Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives.” The league consisted of founding members: Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, Wisconsin and Chicago.
Chicago dropped its football program in 1939 and eventually dropped its membership in 1946. The conference later added Indiana, Ohio State, Michigan State, and Iowa and appropriately lived by its moniker “Big Ten.” For decades, it lived happily thereafter as a successful mid-western-based organization.
Then, the $$$ came calling with Penn State joining the group in 1995. Nebraska followed suit in 2011, and East Coast universities Maryland and Rutgers came along in 2014. Despite claiming themselves as institutions of higher learning, mathematics was somewhat forgotten as the now 14-school league still had the Big Ten monogrammed on their jerseys.
As Paul Harvey famously stated, ‘The rest is history.”
The recent actions taken by the Big Ten + four has completely outgrown its mid-western roots by dipping its growing coffers into the Pacific Ocean with the announcement that PAC-10 Conference members UCLA, USA, Oregon, and Washington will be touring the plain-state flatlands in 2024.
Don’t jump to any rational conclusions that a ‘Big Eighteen’ may be coming your way. It seems entirely likely that the good old Big Ten will double itself to twenty teams not too far down the road.
Television money has been the biggest reason why so much conference expansion chaos is taking place. To a lesser degree, it has been a contributing factor as to the invitations extended to the 20 teams arriving in our community this week. The Little League change is allowing for more kids to experience the World Series and more baseball for us to enjoy.
The Big Ten expansion, and that of the Big 12, is not seen in the same light for Oregon State, Washington State, Stanford, and California, who now find themselves the ‘little four’ of what once was the PAC-12.
