Expansion could hurt Indiana

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With more than enough to keep him busy, Bill Lynch hadn’t spent much time before this week’s conference meetings thinking about the possibility of expansion in the Big Ten.

And now that he’s back from Chicago, the Indiana University football coach will leave that elephant in the room in the hands of commissioner Jim Delany and the Big Ten athletics directors and presidents.

JASON CLARK / Courier & Press Indiana University athletics director Fred Glass, right, shakes hands with Don Fischer of Greenwood, Ind., during Thursday’s IU Athletics Tailgate Tour.

IU football coach Bill Lynch

After all, August is just around the corner and Lynch has a summer conditioning program to implement, a depth chart to update and still plenty of game planning to do for a Sept. 2 home opener with Towson — not a candidate to join the Big Ten, by the way.

Still, expansion at least made for interesting dinner debate earlier this week. It was even good leftover lunch chatter during Thursday’s Greater Evansville Chapter of the IU Alumni Association golf outing at Eagle Valley.

“There was media from all over the country (in Chicago),” said Lynch of the meetings that ended Tuesday. “I guarantee you that was a source of conversation.”

So, of course, was the concept of a Big Ten football championship game — a single event that would add another $15 million payday to the conference coffers each year. But IU athletics director Fred Glass said Thursday that a football title game is just one part of a package deal in the overall expansion discussions.

“I’d say it’s the tail, not the dog,” said Glass, who was also at Eagle Valley along with men’s basketball coach Tom Crean, women’s basketball coach Felisha Legette-Jack and soccer coach Todd Yeagley. “That would be a nice bonus. The reason you do it would be to assure the stability of the conference for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and that’s not going to happen with a championship game.

“We’ll all make some money, but it’s not a big amount compared to our overall revenue from the Big Ten Network and other sources.”

With a title game likely will come divisional play — and the potential for even more inequity in Big Ten scheduling.

If done purely geographically, Indiana could find itself grouped in a division that includes Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan and Michigan State.

That should be enough to have Lynch pulling for Vanderbilt as an expansion candidate, but that’s a migraine for another day.

For now, Lynch believes that divisional play — as a concept — could be a good thing for the Big Ten as a whole.

“I coached in the Mid-American Conference when there was divisional play and it makes it interesting,” said Lynch. “It keeps people involved throughout the season.”

Which gets us back to Lynch’s present challenge of doing everything he can to make sure the Hoosiers are more than a three-quarter threat this season.

He suggested Thursday that fifth-year quarterback Ben Chappell will have adequate protection and enough weapons at wide receiver to put points on the board in a hurry this season. But if the Hoosiers’ best defense is again a good offense, it might not be enough to make much of a difference.

“We were close and that’s not good enough,” Lynch said of last season’s 4-8 record. “But the positive part of being close is our kids believe that we can win, and believe we can win on the road in the Big Ten.

“And those are the things as you build a program that you’ve got to have to get to that point. Everybody wants it to happen overnight, but there are steps along the way.

“I think we took those steps.”

Expansion or not, the Hoosiers need to step it up to another level in a hurry.