When it was announced that UCLA and USC would be leaving the Pac-12 and joining the Big Ten, one of the first obstacles that came to mind was travel for the student-athletes and academics.
It’s one thing for Rutgers Football to travel once out to Los Angeles, but what about other sports that might have to do it twice in a week? There has to be some sort of balance that can work not only for the athletic part of it, but classes and exams as well.
“Academics is incredibly important to me, to my family, to what I do on a daily basis. It's something I take very seriously. So because of that, I always think through the opportunities. We now have schools that reach from New Jersey to Los Angeles. What are the different cultural elements in each one of those environments, not only in the cities, but with their alumni, that we could even fortify our educational relationship with our student-athletes.
“We have two years now to plan. We have built a Big Ten kind of readiness committee that we'll activate here to start working with USC and UCLA to get ideas as far as what we can do. We have two of our universities at Northwestern and Nebraska going to Dublin to play a football game. How many young students -- forget about sports, but in college -- have an opportunity to travel to Dublin? I look at it as not a negative, I look at it as a positive from an academic standpoint.
“And what we'll do is we'll work through these next two years from a scheduling component to make sure that we create the environment that's most healthy and holistic for our student-athletes, which is one of the reasons I've started the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee to be able to listen to them to say what's important.”
The Big Ten is also in the process of putting together a new media rights deal. Adding two prominent schools like USC and UCLA and a media market (No. 2 behind New York), will only up the price and up the revenue for the conference and in its institutions.
“Even regardless of the size of the deal, the thing that I'm most excited about during these negotiations have been the creativity that we'll be able to deliver to our fans and to our student-athletes and to our families. I always talk about my focus every day is to make sure we deliver content to our fans from age 5 to 105 because people consume content differently. We have nearly 7 million alumni around the world. So I'm very conscientious from the media partners standpoint, not to focus on the money, although we will be blessed financially, but how we can deliver content in a way that's never been delivered in college athletics ever before, which is critically important from that standpoint.
“Yes, USC and UCLA will come in as full members. We think that's important for various reasons. They bring a lot of value to our relationship. They bring a lot of panache to our relationship, and we look forward to welcoming them into the Big Ten family here in 2024. There's a lot of work to be done between now and then. Thank you for your question.”
In two years, games could run all day long from morning to night. They’ll also be timeslots of content available in four times zones.
“It could drive future expansion, but one of the things you said -- again, back to what I said earlier -- I always ask why and why not. I think sometimes later time zones on the West Coast, people looked at it as a negative, and I always looked at it as a positive. So for us in the Big Ten to be -- we're in four time zones, we will be in 2024: East, Central, Mountain, and West. So now we'll be able to provide content all the way from the morning into the night and lead into some really incredible programming.
“So I think the value of being across four time zones for multiple reasons is really important. We haven't finalized the financial impact, and ironically this probably will shock you, the numbers and finances associated with it are typically the last thing that I kind of consider and analyze. It's important for me from a business standpoint, but from a decision-making process standpoint, always look at all the other reasons why because, if all the other reasons make sense, the finances will take care of themselves.
“So I'm looking forward to building a brand to be fortified and strong from Los Angeles to New Jersey and everywhere in between. So it will be an exciting time, busy time for these next two years.”
Expansion has always been on the mind of Warren, who hails from Phoenix, and adding new members to the league was something he’s wanted to since he was hired in 2019.
“Even before I accepted the job, even in my materials I prepared to accept the job, expansion was in there. And I think we had to be forward thinking as far as what we needed to do. …One of the things that caught my eye when I was interviewing for this job back in 2019, I studied every one of the universities across the country. One of the things that jumped out about USC, UCLA, and even the market of Los Angeles, we have -- they're the largest section of Big Ten alumni, other than in the Midwest, is in Los Angeles. And there's so many opportunities that exist across the country.
“So a lot of work that we've done on any expansion, potential expansion we've done, we've done it multiple years ago, and we're always in a perpetual state of analyzing the goodness of fit for any institutions that would come into the Big Ten Conference.”
Follow Chris Nalwasky on Twitter @ChrisNalwasky.
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