They say hindsight is 20-20, but sometimes so is foresight.
I’m not sure the Big Ten has ever made a more shamelessly idiotic decision than playing its basketball tournament in Madison Square Garden this week.
This has nothing to do with the stupid timing and the condensed regular-season schedule. In fact, a fortnight of rest before the NCAA tournament might do the league’s dance-bound teams some good.
No, it has everything to do with the unbelievable but unsurprising arrogance of the Big Ten thinking it could overtake the Big Apple. Here’s the truth: The tourney will register there less than an off-Broadway production of Mamma Mia, and of all of the league’s brazen money plays — adding Rutgers and Maryland, Friday night football, etc. — force-feeding its product into a pro sports market 500 miles away from its nearest Midwest school takes the cake.
What’s the old saying? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. League commissioner Jim Delany is a visionary, no doubt, and through the success of the Big Ten Network he has built the nation’s richest conference. But he sure is testing its fans here, his play to expand the league’s footprint — yuck — and annex a disinterested market alienating the supporters who matter most.
I just don’t get the payoff.
As I’ve written before, the Big Ten’s Gotham gamble makes sense in theory — a foothold in the country’s biggest media market allows the league to try to leverage premium monthly fees from millions of cable and satellite subscribers — but less so in practice. Rutgers generates next to no eyeballs, and even with so many displaced Big Ten alums, only 11 percent of New York City residents identify themselves as avid college football fans, according to Scarborough research. Compare that to the Toledo market, where a study by The Media Audit revealed that 71.3 percent of residents regularly follow college football.
“There's a skewed perspective of college sports in the New York marketplace,” Lee Berke, a New York-based sports media consultant who advises more 30 pro and college teams, told me not long ago. “The reality is that if you take a look at television ratings for sports properties in New York, by far it's the local teams that drive the agenda, and that's the pro teams. They dominate the headlines, the back pages of the tabloids year-round. There's certain instances where college basketball can grab attention for a while. You look at St. John's in the 80s, UConn ... but the reality is it’s still a pro sports town.”
Which begs the question: If the Big Ten plays in Madison Square Garden and no one is around to see it, does it make a sound?
First Published February 28, 2018, 3:00 p.m.
