So when I heard that the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California were joining the Big Ten Conference, I reacted the same way most of you did: I laughed. Out loud, even.
Then, as reality — a bizarre reality, to be sure, but reality nevertheless — set in, I decided I needed to talk this over with someone knowledgeable about sports: My daughter.
Linda Kay Schultz Impola lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York State with her husband Dave. It’s a mixed marriage of a Cubs fan and a Brewers fan, but I fully approve of the man. Had he been a Cardinals fan, we would have had issues.
Their corner of the world is a beautiful area — even if the town she lives in has a somewhat less-than-beautiful name: Horseheads. (There is a gruesome story told about the origin of the name. I will spare you from it at this time.)
I may have told this story here before, but only once have I had someone around here know where Horseheads is when I mentioned the place. Bluffton Mayor John Whicker used to work for Corning Glass when it had a plant here and Horseheads is near Corning and Elmira and is only 15 miles south of Watkins Glen. I have to get there to see a race sometime, preferably a NASCAR race.
Back to the point: LK, being a firstborn and all, knows that at some point in the future she will be the one appointed by someone, possibly herself, to straighten out a confused sports world. She lists Major League Baseball as her first priority, but says her first task will be to be sure A.J. Pierzynski is never allowed to broadcast another game. (Pierzynski is a former White Sox catcher, which tells you a lot.) She says canceling out Pierzynski is even more important than eliminating MLB’s idiotic blackout rule, which made me scratch my head until I draw blood. That’s an easy task these days, to be sure.
The NCAA is second on her list, after baseball.
I wondered about this UCLA/USC and Big Ten thing and what she was eventually going to do about it. She said it obviously had to do with money — good guess, there — and money speaks.
Then she talked herself in circles. Other conferences have geography issues, she said. The Southeastern Conference should have teams from the Southeast — and then she realized that Missouri is in the SEC. Should Notre Dame be in the Atlantic Coast Conference?
The Big Ten, after all, could be anywhere. The conference is named after a number, not a geographical entity. There is one other major conference (for now) like that — the Big 12. That conference is losing Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC as another geography teacher somewhere breaks out in tears.
Paul Finebaum, who has a talk show about all things SEC, had a rather blunt reaction to the Big Ten’s additions. “I’m just grateful that the leaders of college athletics care so much about the student athletes and their mental well-being that they’re going to put softball players on a plane in California and go to Piscataway for a weekend series with Rutgers,” Finebaum told a broadcast outlet. “That’s where we are. (I’m) trying to take my cynical hat off, which is impossible today in college athletics.”
Good point.
Sometime this summer, LK and I will get together and puzzle this all out. In the end, we will probably decide that they’re all nuts. We will shred the paper we did our calculations on and throw it into the air.
Or, we can just declare then all nuts right now and save a ream of paper. I like that idea better.
daves@news-banner.com
