Big Ten Football: Just Say No to a Neutral Field Championship Game

Will you be in the Indianapolis area with a few hours to kill Saturday night?

If so, you just could be in luck.  It seems that some corporation that isn't the Big Ten is looking for seat-fillers for a big event in downtown Indianapolis.  All you have to do is wear Green or Red and you can get a seat in a major event (and they even validate parking!) and make an easy 75 bucks.  Easy money, right?

At least that is how it looked for a day.  An intrepid Big Ten fan (not affiliated with either participating championship game school) started the hoax after being disenchanted with the amount he paid for tickets to the game after watching the bottom fall out of the price floor when the game's matchup was set.  

It was simultaneously a widely-linked joke around the Internet and a painful reminder of the sad reality facing the Big Ten championship game.

When the Big Ten first began to flirt with the idea of conference expansion, one of the biggest selling points was the ability of the conference to get its hands on some of that sweet, sweet conference championship game money that everyone else was to be raking in.  

The SEC, the Big XII, the ACC, even the MAC and C-USA all brought two division winners together a week after the regular season to settle the conference champion discussion on the field.  It wasn't always clean, but neither was the old way the Big Ten used to hand out its Rose Bowl bid in the days of split conference titles (Spartan fans nod vigorously at this point).

The conference championship game was to be a step forward for the Big Ten.  It was the one area that the conference wasn't able to rake in money hand-over-fist.  This was to be Jim Delany's swan song, thus allowing him to finally realize his dream of swimming in a giant vault full of gold coins a la Scrooge McDuck-style.

Jim Delany is a great man who has done wonderful things for the Big Ten conference in his time as president.  

The Big Ten may not be enjoying as much success on the field as the SEC or Big XII. The fact remains that, while two BCS conferences are fighting and clawing just to stay intact and the other three are reaching to expand in an effort to better their financial situation, the Big Ten has done a masterful job.

It has blazed a pathway toward conference control of television revenue that has allowed a system of revenue sharing. This benefits all the member schools and creates a league so well endowed and stable that it can dictate the terms of conference realignment itself.  

The Big Ten is the most stable and profitable conference in college football and fans everywhere owe Jim Delany a debt of gratitude.  

The Big East is losing two of its flagship programs, Missouri and Texas A&M are walking away from rivalries that go back many decades, and at some point we could have a conference that counts Boise State, SDSU, UCF, and Rutgers among its membership.  

I'll keep my traditional rivalries between teams with shared histories, thank you very much.

However, at some point we must ask, "Won't somebody think of the children?"  All of those college-aged rapscallions from Madison and East Lansing that will be sitting home on Saturday night watching a game played in a soulless corporate stadium while twelve beautiful and storied college stadiums sit empty.

The Big Ten has a positive relationship with Indianapolis.  The conference's annual basketball championship tournament has been held in the city's own Conseco Field House a number of years since the tournaments inception in the late 90's.  

When the idea of a conference championship game was first floated, it seemed that Indy's own Lucas Oil Field would be prominently involved in the discussion.  It was, and there wasn't all that much discussion.  Lucas Oil Field was announced and everyone let out a collective, "meh, its better than Detroit."

The issue that it doesn't seem the Big Ten took into account is just how different a college football championship game is from a college basketball tournament between twelve teams.

First, everyone is involved in the Big Ten tournament.  College basketball may not be near football in popularity, but there are enough Big Ten basketball junkies spread from Pennsylvania to Iowa that there is a decent pool of people to draw from.

On top of that, the tournament isn't simply an event but a long weekend of action.  There are games spread out for days.

A fan from Iowa City might not get to watch his Hawkeyes past the first round, but a chance to see Michigan State, Wisconsin and Ohio State clash in later rounds makes it less of a wasted trip (besides, Iowa fans have to steal some time to catch a little quality college basketball at some point, am I right?)

Instead, the Big Ten has set a central location for its football championship game that is relatively close to all but still too far to be practical.  It is 330 miles from Madison to Indianapolis and 260 miles from East Lansing to Indy.  

It is even worse from some other Big Ten locales: State College (497 mi), Minneapolis (590 mi), Iowa City (365), and Lincoln (645 mi) are all far enough to warrant buying a plane ticket.  That is a lot of travel for one game when you have a week or two's notice to plan.

On top of these concerns is the fact that the Big Ten is counting on just two fan bases to fill a bland NFL stadium that is hours from either school.  Some fan bases are more equipped to handle that than others.  In fact, tracking ticket prices over the past few weeks shows this.  

In weeks that a prominent Big Ten team was mathematically eliminated, ticket prices dropped as the market was flooded with tickets that were purchased previously by fans from other schools like Penn State, Michigan, and Ohio State.  

The conference cannot escape the fact that logistically it might just be too tough to fill even a smaller stadium in Indianapolis with a couple of weeks' notice.

The neutral site conference championship game isn't always a terrible idea.  The SEC makes it work year in and year out.  One can imagine that a hypothetical matchup between Michigan and Ohio State or Nebraska and Penn State would be enough to fill the modestly sized Lucas Oil Field.  

But what happens if, God forbid, Northwestern, Purdue or Minnesota ever makes the conference championship game?  Can those fan bases mobilize enough support in a week or two?  

Wisconsin couldn't even sell its allotment of 15000 tickets—Wisconsin!

Thus, let me present my plea for sanity.  It is simple: play the game on-campus.

What would be better than the team with the best record in the conference hosting the championship game?  You want reasons?  I can give you reasons:

There would be a built-in market for tickets.  Do you think tickets would go unsold if this game were to be played in East Lansing?  Not a chance!  There are enough students and alumni in the immediate area that the school would fill most of the stadium.  Will Badger fans buy fewer tickets for a game in East Lansing vs. one in Indianapolis?  Doubtful.

There are bigger venues available. Lucas Oil Field has a capacity of 70000 for football.  That is less than the capacity of seven conference teams' stadiums.  More seats mean more tickets sold.  More tickets sold means more money.  If there is one thing the Big Ten likes, it is more money.

There is tradition to consider. Wouldn't you rather see the conference championship game played out in one of the Big Ten's iconic stadiums?  The Big House or the Horseshoe or Happy Valley or Spartan Stadium or Kinnick or Camp Randall.  These places have a game-day atmosphere that Lucas Oil Field couldn't begin to equal.  

There would be a home field advantage. Shouldn't finishing the season with the best conference record overall mean something?  Shouldn't MSU be rewarded for winning seven conference games?

For this and all the other reasons I say let's drop the soulless NFL stadium and move the Big Ten championship game somewhere steeped in tradition, readily accessible to a crowd of rowdy fans.

You may say, "well, the PAC-12 is having just as much trouble selling tickets to its game," and you would be right.  You would also be overlooking the fact that one of the PAC-12's participants is a 6-6 UCLA team with a head coach on his way out the door going into the buzz-saw that is a visit to Autzen Stadium.

It is with no reservations that I say, "Just Say No!" to neutral field games. 

The Big Ten is the best athletic conference in the country for a reason. It is built on years and years of tradition and storied rivalries.  Let's celebrate it by pitting two fine academic and athletic institutions against each other in a Big Ten stadium with just as much history and character.

I promise, the money will still be there.