Couch: Nobody wins as the bully Big Ten expands again and the Pac-12 dies

The Big Ten has become unlikable. Untrustworthy. A bully. It pillaged the Pac-12 a year ago and then, this past week, as the Pac-12 collapsed — as a century of tradition went up in smoke, as thousands of student-athletes in dozens of sports saw the experience they signed up for in peril — the Big Ten stepped in and offered refuge … to the Pac-12’s strongest members.

So unlikable.

Perhaps that’s how you win in today’s college athletics landscape. But what transpired late last week didn’t feel like winning.

Oregon and Washington are joining the Big Ten in 2024, following USC and UCLA, which left the Pac-12 for the Big Ten last summer and will also begin playing in the Midwest regularly next year.

Meanwhile, two of the most renowned academic institutions in the country, Stanford and Cal, twist in the wind along with Oregon State and Washington State, who are likely doomed to a life as mid-majors.

Those four are the big losers in all of this. But nobody won, other than perhaps the Big 12, which survived its own crises a year ago and, Friday, added three reluctant new members from the Pac-12, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah.

Oregon and Washington didn’t really win, either, even if they see this as necessary for stability and linear TV exposure. They join a league in the Big Ten that’s out of their footprint. They’ll lose rivalries their fans cared about. Their athletes will be on five-hour flights just about every other week. They’ll get a full share of the Big Ten’s next media rights deal, but reportedly only 50% of this one, starting at $30 million annually and growing $1 million a year annually until 2030. It's more than the reported $23 million each year they might have gotten from the Pac-12's proposed deal with Apple TV, which is not insignificant, but also not enough to think there is no chance they'll grow to regret this move. They’ll have a more difficult path to College Football Playoff, a tougher time achieving the sort of success that actually matters to their fans.

Nor was this a win for the Big Ten and its member schools — like Michigan State, whose path to the football playoff just got that much more difficult. If you’re MSU, you don’t need every team in your conference to be Ohio State and USC, Oregon and Washington. It helps to have a few Cals, too, a few more Purdues. When it was just USC and UCLA joining the league, when the total number of teams was 16, what was coming felt more exciting than cumbersome, the league still teetering on the edge of being a size you can get your arms around. The Big Ten still felt like it could be an actual conference, a community of schools. Now they’ve crossed a line into being a bloated association. And they're probably not done expanding.

There will be new and exciting matchups, for sure, some of which will bring in massive ratings for Fox, CBS and NBC. I wonder if “exciting” will last. If playing Oregon will be worth losing the frequency of familiar Big Ten rivalries and traditions that were once the foundation of college football.

I wonder how we’ll feel when college football gives way to college basketball season, when there are no more home-and-home series with Purdue and Indiana and Michigan. You play them once a year.

There are, without question, positives about the new media rights deal for athletic departments like MSU’s. The $60 million or more annually coming from TV partners is real money that can add to the experience of student-athletes. Adding USC and UCLA helped secure the scope of that deal. So if MSU winds up with a volleyball or gymnastics practice facility, or baseball and softball fields that don’t flood, if the Spartans are able to keep successful coaches in their non-revenue sports and fund those programs to a competitive level … some of this is worth it.

And that’s where it gets sticky, how we should feel about all of this. Taking USC and UCLA ultimately killed the Pac-12. Just not immediately. Because without those two schools, the league struggled to secure a competitive media rights contract. The harsh reality of West Coast college sports is there’s less fan interest. The fan culture is baked differently in the heart of Big Ten and SEC country. But as TV brands, the LA schools — USC especially — have oomph.

And, from the Big Ten's perspective, adding USC and UCLA bolstered its worth to media partners. And lessened the Pac-12's value.

Still, if Oregon and Washington had stayed put, the Pac-12 could have survived. And the Ducks and Huskies had nothing to do with the Big Ten’s lavish media rights deal. If anything, Oregon and Washington will take a bite out of everyone’s cut, though I can’t imagine that’s where this lands.

Bottom line: The Big Ten didn’t have to do this. Any of this meddling. But especially the additions of Oregon and Washington. This was needless and rushed, even if the league had previously vetted its newest two members. Why now? Why not see how 16 teams works and feels and then reassess? Why not try to support the Pac-12, your Rose Bowl partner for 75 years, in its hour of need? How is cannibalization good business? How does it at all align with your principles?

This is a Big Ten conference that two years ago swore its allegiance to the Pac-12 with a public handshake “alliance”. Then 10 months later took two of the Pac-12's members. This is a league with administrators and coaches and presidents that are concerned about athletes jumping between schools and making decisions only for the money. These are folks who claim to be concerned first and foremost with the well-being of student-athletes. Oregon State’s athletes are people, too, right? Do the kids at Cal not matter?

There are lots of good, well-intended people throughout the Big Ten — and plenty I'm sure who aren't thrilled with the latest developments — but nobody in the Big Ten gets to be the moral authority on anything for awhile.

Major college sports will survive this instability and carnage in the Pac-12 — the first power conference to disappear since the old version of the Big East — because what drives college athletics is a fierce love for one’s alma mater.

Your love for your school is unwavering, even when you don’t love what’s going on around it. You'll support MSU against anyone, in any iteration of the Big Ten.

MSU is one of the lucky ones. Part of a league that gives the Spartans all sorts of advantages. But also part of a league that, right now, is hard to like.

MORE GRAHAM COUCH: From Chris Webber to Nick Saban, a look at the biggest what-ifs in Michigan State football and basketball history

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Nobody wins as the bully Big Ten expands again with Oregon, Washington