If there’s one thing we know about all this college conference realignment business, it’s that somebody we don’t expect is behind it. Who might that be? I’m betting on Long Beach State. Hear me out:
Long Beach State has a cool baseball program, and it’s in a big city, and it has nothing else going for it, which is why it lets the baseball team go by a different name than the rest of the school’s sports. Gotta distance those. LBSU can’t get into a big conference. I don’t think LBSU has football. My impression is that LBSU isn’t necessarily a bad school, but it’s not a great one. It’s no UC-Irvine., for instance.
Why would the solution to this be to coax UCLA and USC to join the Big Ten, sparking massive reconfiguring across the college sports landscape and possibly leading to the heat death of the Pac-12? Well, as you might imagine, it has something to do with the NIT.
The biggest story with conference realignment is that there are going to be more teams in the same league in men’s basketball than ever before, which will inevitably lead to more conference games being played than ever before, especially because more conference games lead to more profit (UCLA playing Illinois will generate more advertising revenue than UCLA playing LBSU in a buy game). This, in turn, will lead to more teams in power conferences finishing the season below .500 overall, which will lead to the NIT selection committee not accepting as many teams from power conferences, opening the door to…you guessed it: mid-majors and low-majors, like LBSU, getting more NIT bids.
By this logic, any mid-major or low-major could be behind this. But there’s more:
By specifically targeting the Pac-12 for demolition, the instigator here has completely shuffled the athletic landscape west of and on top of the Continental Divide. Colorado, which I assume is on top of the Divide, is considering heading back to the Big 12. Washington and Oregon are trying desperately to get the Big Ten to let them inside. The Arizona schools are considering conferences in Mexico. The Mountain West could end up taking in refugee schools, specifically in the form of Oregon State and Washington State, but nobody is going to let the Mountain West be a power conference right now. Who’s the top western conference? We don’t know anymore. Better look for the one with the best name. Something like…the Big West?
Well, folks, the Big West exists, and LBSU’s in it. Not only is LBSU in it, but LBSU won it last year in men’s basketball. Add in the baseball thing, and suddenly you’ve got a power player. A power player just up the road from—you guessed it again—Los Angeles, California, where USC and UCLA are located.
Somebody get me the Brian Windhorst clip so I can dub it.
Has Soldier Field Not Suffered Enough?
Chicago wants to keep the Bears.
As Chicago’s somehow-most-woeful franchise prepares for a move to the old horse track property in Arlington Heights, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is reportedly recommending the city consider putting a dome over Soldier Field. To which we say: Poor, poor Soldier Field.
Unless this dome would be big enough to hide the whole stadium, what in the hell are we doing here? And even if it is big enough: At that point, don’t you just tear down Soldier Field?
Chicago’s got a lot of problems right now. The possibility of the Bears leaving is a relatively small one, but it’s also urgent, and it’s not exactly like the city can’t work on it while also trying to solve its violence problem, stop its businesses from fleeing for states not pulling a financial Titanic, and help its already-tragic education system recover from a pandemic that set millions of children back multiple years (ok, good point, they’ve got a lot going on). In other words, it’s fine to be working on it, but if this is your suggestion…why are you spending any resources on this?
Ideas that make sense for the Bears’ stadium situation:
- Blackmail J.B. Pritzker into funding the same stadium the Bears would build in Arlington Heights but in an abandoned or in-the-process-of-being-abandoned industrial area instead, with the same type of mass-manufactured bar-and-restaurant-and-hotel-and-offices setup they’ve got outside, say, Truist Park in the Atlanta suburbs. It’s going to take private investment, because there are not public funds, but if you can put together a proposal that would actually help the city, you can force the Bears to decide whether to be the bad guy.
Ideas that don’t make sense for the Bears’ stadium situation:
- Soldier Field, but indoors.
The sole convincing justification for another Soldier Field renovation is that since the last one, we’ve seen football played at Wrigley Field and now know it can be done, so you could conceivably have the Bears play there for a season as an exciting gimmick, then make something go wrong with the construction so they have to do it again, and then continue to do this until the NFL develops a “mercy killing” mechanism and contracts the Bears after too many 8-8 seasons in a row.
I don’t think that’s what Lori Lightfoot’s office has in mind here.
The Brewers Need the Cubs to Be Better
Last week, the price of tickets to the Cubs/Brewers 4th of July game dropped, on the SeatGeek market, to $4/apiece:
This is, of course, sad. Every baseball team should be able to draw fans on the 4th of July. But the really sad part about it is that this is a game the Brewers might have sold out in 2017. Five years ago, when the Cubs were a competitive team, the Brewers had it great. Now, with the Brewers good and the Cubs bad, the Brewers have it terrible. There’s a non-zero chance the Brewers lobbied Major League Baseball to let them host the Cubs on Independence Day in the hopes somebody might pay to show up. MLB gave them what they wanted, and the market still went close to that time early in the pandemic when people were paying others to take their oil.
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Viewing schedule for today:
2:10 PM EDT: Cubs @ Brewers (MLB TV)
The nice thing about facing Corbin Burnes if you’re the Cubs right now is that you have nothing to lose as long as 1) you don’t get no-hit and 2) you don’t allow ten or more runs. A 9-0 loss to Corbin Burnes? Congrats on helping our draft position, losers. Sorry you can’t get enough people to come to the game to fix your leaking roof.
2:10 PM EDT: Twins @ White Sox (MLB TV, second screen)
Joe Kelly could get in today. If he does, the likeliest outcome is domination. Seriously. He’s due to strike out two and get a weak grounder to end it.
7:00 PM EDT: Cardinals @ Hammers (ESPN)
I’d be way less uncomfortable with the Braves’ name if they didn’t do the Tomahawk Chop. It’s like moving to a town with a restaurant called the Krazy Kids Klub and thinking, “Hey, that seems a little weird, but maybe it’s fine,” and then later walking by and finding out the servers are wearing blackface. Just switch the name to the Hammers, guys. Honor Hank Aaron, stop confirming the stereotype, make me less uncomfortable (ending racism is all about making me less uncomfortable, by the way—that’s the point of doing it).
Anyway, Miles Mikolas is starting and I like Max Fried and I’m a person who will turn on ESPN during a baseball game in an attempt to tell ESPN I want more baseball coverage.
9:40 PM EDT: Giants @ Diamondbacks (MLB TV)
For late-night tonight, the options are either the Dodgers facing José Ureña, who still exists and is now on the Rockies, or this one between Alex Cobb and Merrill Kelly. I’m going with this one. The Diamondbacks are fun, the Giants are getting desperate. Good game.
