The Big Ten has “less than a year to fully prepare" for its four West Coast schools to join the conference, meaning "less than a year to nail down cross-country travel and logistics in all of its sponsored sports,” according to Nicole Auerbach of THE ATHLETIC. The Big Ten had been “working through many of those issues” with USC and UCLA over the past year, so it “can take a lot of the same principles and planning into its preparation for Oregon and Washington." Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti said that the addition of two more West Coast schools “should help some of the travel for those departments’ Olympic sports.” He added that there will be “certain scheduling solutions that work for individual sports but not others.” Auerbach notes the addition of UO and UW came on Aug. 4, but nine days earlier, Petitti had said at Big Ten football media days that he was “not focused on further conference expansion.” When asked this week what changed between that comment and the decision to add the schools, Petitti “pointed to Colorado’s departure from the Pac-12,” a move that became official the evening after his media days appearance. Auerbach notes the Big Ten did “not have a pro rata clause written into its media rights contracts in which additional money was automatically kicked in for additional schools," so UO and UW reportedly will enter the conference “as partial-share members, with an average annual revenue" in the low- to mid-$30M range. A source said that Fox “upped the amount it was willing to pay at Petitti’s request" (THE ATHLETIC, 9/7).
