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Northwestern Examiner: Northwestern could benefit from Big Ten expansion

May 6, 2009

By Benjamin Miraski

There was a time when I though the game had passed Joe Paterno by. I was wrong.

Say what you will about the often gruff coach – he’s old, he can’t relate to kids, the game has passed him by – but he is usually correct. And by the way, like me, you would be wrong on all three counts.

Never one to hold his tongue, Paterno said last week that he would like to see the Big Ten expand to 12 teams, enabling the also-ran conference to create a championship game and play later into the season. The wizened one said he thought that the extra team and game would allow the Big Ten to stay in the minds of the media (read voters) later and possibly get the conference more shots at the National Title.

It is a tough sell, not only because commissioner Jim Delaney has already turned it down, but because the last leagues to try and make waves through expansion haven’t yet shown that it works.

Yet, when Paterno talks, we should listen. After all he was the first to conceive of an East Coast football conference – it became the Big East, but ironically without Penn State.

Plus, with Penn State the relative newcomer to the Big Ten, Paterno can almost speak from an outsider’s point of view. It is not like the Nittany Lions have a strong tie to the Rose Bowl like the rest of the league seems to have.

No, Penn State and JoePa are just the right messengers to push change onto the league that seems perpetually stuck in the 1950s (Now talk about irony!).

Read the rest of this story at Examiner.com.

Posted May 6, 2009 7:14 PM

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