Penn State Sports Magazine
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9 6 A U G U S T 2 0 2 2 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M E D I T O R I A L MATT HERB MATT.HERB@ON3.COM M any years ago, back when the Uni- versity Park Airport was smaller and the roads into State College narrower than they are today, Joe Paterno was asked at a press conference whether Penn State had made a wise move by abandoning its Eastern rivals to join the Big Ten, a conference whose closest member at the time was 325 miles away. Paterno responded by arguing that the skeptics were being shortsighted. Conjuring up a utopian future in which a massive transportation grid moved people across the country quickly and efficiently by rail, he predicted that travel between the Midwest and the East Coast would be more convenient in the years to come. "Someday there are going to be high- speed trains coming through State Col- lege," he contended. "Yeah," replied a reporter in the front of the room, "but will they stop?" Even Paterno had to laugh. Three decades later, we've yet to break ground on any of those rail lines that the coach envisioned. Bullet trains aren't going to be crisscrossing the country anytime soon, if ever, and State College remains the Big Ten's smallest and least- accessible outpost, a leafy academic Shangri-La tucked away in a quiet cen- tral Pennsylvania valley. And yet, Paterno was prophetic when he dismissed geography as an impedi- ment to conference expansion. We re- cently found out how just unimportant it really is with the blockbuster news that USC and UCLA will be joining the Big Ten in 2024. Even Paterno would likely have been stunned to see the coast-to-coast growth that has occurred in the past de- cade. UCLA is less than 7 miles from the Santa Monica Pier. Rutgers is about 35 miles from the Jersey Shore. The Big Ten will soon be a continent-spanning con- ference in the most literal sense of those words, and it might not even be finished adding West Coast schools. Could Or- egon be next? Washington? Cal? If the Ducks and/or Huskies were to join, it would give the Big Ten a foothold in one of the few parts of the country where it doesn't have a presence, the Pacific Northwest. It would create the enticing possibility of Penn State and its fans traveling to Eugene or the Huskies visiting Beaver Stadium, a place they've never been. Maybe someday we'll get a Big Ten Championship Game played in St. Louis, the Gateway to the West, pitting the winner of the Lewis Division against the winner of the Clark Division. Or maybe, after the novelty wears off, we'll just get a succession of games between teams that, while historically successful, don't actually have much in common with each other. That's the other side to these sprawl- ing, borderless conferences. At some point, you lose the qualities that over the years have made conferences great. You don't have the geographic proxim- ity that spawns rivalries. You also don't have a long history of antagonism that energizes players and fans alike, and in a league with 16 or more teams, you prob- ably aren't going to develop it, because you won't be playing those far-flung op- ponents all that often. Even with the Big Ten's present con- figuration, there are opponents that Penn State doesn't know well. Take this year's White Out foe, Min- nesota. The very first game the Nittany Lions ever played as Big Ten members was against the Gophers, with PSU win- ning 38-20 on Sept. 4, 1993. Since then, those two teams have played each other just 14 more times. Ask not for whom the Governor's Victory Bell tolls, because it doesn't toll for anyone all that often. It used to be that the compactness of the major conferences was an asset, not a liability. You fought for regional supremacy against opponents that you knew nearly as well as you knew yourself. Then you went to a bowl game and faced an equivalent opponent from some other part of the country. That's not entirely the case anymore, and in retrospect, Penn State's merger with the Big Ten looks like a key step along the way toward our current era in which the imperative is to create an ever- widening sphere of influence in the hope of landing more-lucrative media rights deals. Maybe USC and UCLA will be great additions. Maybe the Big Ten's move to raid the Pac-12 will be vindicated even though those two schools are located 1,500 miles from their nearest confer- ence neighbor in Lincoln, Neb. It certainly makes financial sense. The league's upcoming TV contract is expected to be worth more than $1 bil- lion. You can also understand why the Big Ten felt it needed to make a countermove after the SEC snatched up Texas and Oklahoma last summer. The question is whether the latest wave of expansion will make for a more exciting college sports environment or dilute the conferences' essence to the point that they don't actually feel like conferences anymore. Let's hope it's the former, because this train doesn't appear to be slowing down. ■ Saquon Barkley totaled 306 all-purpose yards when Penn State faced USC in the 2017 Rose Bowl. The Trojans won 52-49, and they lead the all-time series against PSU 6-4. PHOTO BY STEVE MANUEL Penn State's Addition Was A Harbinger Of Big Ten Growth VARSITY VIEWS