Hlas: Fridays now? Enough is never enough for Big Ten

Are you ready for some indignation?

It apparently isn't enough that Big Ten Conference members and the league's office rake in tens of millions of dollars on top of tens of millions from television network deals. Commissioner Jim Delany, headed out the door in 2020, will leave a legacy of a league bloated by greed.

The conference always fancies itself as being high-minded, but showed its true colors (green, gold) this week when it announced it would play six Friday night football games a year on its campus sites, starting next year.

Michigan and Penn State refuse to play along on this deal. They can get away with it. Might makes right.

Ohio State says it will have Friday games, but only on the week of the school's fall break. Iowa and Wisconsin say they'll go along with it, but only on Labor Day weekend and not regularly.

'Never” would have been a better and braver response from everyone, since normal weekday life does occur in Big Ten towns and states on the Friday leading into Labor Day weekend. But the big money the league pulls in from television comes with long strings attached.

Not long ago, the conference wouldn't play November night games because, you know, it gets cold in the northern U.S. in November. But Saturday, Iowa plays the first of two-straight November night spectaculars.

As for Friday nights themselves, the problems are obvious. Fridays are supposed to belong to high school football and high school life. Iowa City's high school teams can play on the Thursday night before Labor Day, one supposes.

But what about the rest of the state's high schools? Are they supposed to surrender Friday night to accommodate a college monarchy's whims, or do they begrudgingly accept people that might have come to their games will instead travel to Iowa City or stay home to watch the Hawkeyes on TV?

The ACC and Pac-12 have 10 or so Friday night games a year, the Big Ten says. So what? Has that really made those conferences more viable or popular? Have you ever been at a dinner party or movie theater on a Friday night and heard someone say 'I really must get home to watch Boston College play North Carolina?”

Just how big is college football when it can hijack the way cities that have major-college teams live their lives on a Friday? That's a rhetorical question.

The University of Iowa and every other major-college athletic department have many more athletic department employees now than they did a generation ago. Yahoo Sports says Michigan's athletic department had 344 employees in the 2015-16 school year, up 26.5 percent from 2011.

Michigan most certainly did not add 26.5 percent more sports or 26.5 percent more athletic scholarships in that time.

Iowa's football program alone now has a director of player development, a director of player personnel, a director of new media, and two football analysts. Those are relatively new positions, similar to what teams at other Power Five schools have added in recent times.

Get bigger, bigger, bigger. Make more, more, more. Take extra TV time slots. Grab a slab of Friday nights. At some point, you could say 'We're doing fine. We'll make tweaks when we must, but we won't do anything that hurts others just to fatten our own calves.”

High school organizations from Nebraska to Maryland aren't happy about this. Friday night was their night, and has been ever since electric light poles became fashionable.

The Big Ten was right to stay out of Fridays when other college conferences didn't. It knows it's in the wrong for changing its mind about it now, and it has decided it doesn't care.

The league says its mission is academic achievement and athletic success. The subtext about squeezing out every last nickel it can along the way is left unsaid.

Comments: (319) 368-8840; mike.hlas@thegazette.com