Jim Delany: Big Ten's Lord Voldemort

Every sport needs a bad guy to keep the fans interested. Just ask Vince McMahon. Wait, don't. He can't hear you, he's on top of a 238-foot-high pile of $100 bills. So take my word for it. Sports are as much about who to root against as who to root for.

College football used to have a plethora of villains. When Steve Spurrier was at the height of his powers he had the two qualities most valued in a villain. He was arrogant and he was right. You never knew what he was going to say next, but you knew it was going to be a slam of one of his rivals. We won't even discuss some of his final scores.

Nowadays, however, everybody's just so doggone nice. (Okay, everybody outside the SEC.) There's one man, though, who might make a good hate sink for football fans. That's him in the picture.

That would be Jim Delany, commissioner of the Big Ten. In the past couple days, while the league held its spring meetings, Delany has shot down Joe Paterno's suggestion that the league would benefit from a 12th team and a championship game. In an interview with ESPN, Delany declared expansion a "back-burner issue" and said it was "not a decision made by football coaches."

Right. What would they know about what's best for Big Ten football?

You shoot down a legend like Paterno at your own risk, but Delany's Lord Voldemort-like powers are such that JoePa quickly retreated from his words, citing Delany's long experience as Big Ten commissioner compared to Paterno's own short-term experience as a conference member. Delany has been the Big Ten commissioner since 1989. Penn State has competed in Big Ten football since 1993. Must've been quite a four-year stretch, hey?

Dissing Paterno is one thing. Dissing the nominal leader of the free world is something else. It's not, however, something Delany is unwilling to do. When asked about President Obama's advocacy of a college football playoff, Delany replied, "He's a scholar and a lawyer and a great politician, but I don't think he really understands the complexity of the issue."

Yes, no matter what is in the President's daily intelligence briefing, and no matter what gets discussed at cabinet meetings, rest easy, my fellow Americans, it's not as complicated as the BCS. The Troubled Asset Relief Program? Less complicated than, say, the Orange Bowl. The Kyoto Treaty? A mere sudoku puzzle next to the BCS Poll formula. Negotiating peace in the Middle East? That's nothing like negotiating a new BCS TV contract. Heck, Delany will probably run for the presidency in 2012 just so he can have a vacation!

The BCS is not complicated at all. Here's everything you need to know about it:

1. The big bowls have money.
2. The big conferences want that money.
3. Neener-neener-neener.

It's that simple.



I am and always will be a fan of Big Ten football, but I'm starting to hope somebody changes the calendar in Delany's office so he realizes it's not 1973 any more. The college football world has turned and left the Big Ten behind, and I'm sick of it. I'm more sick, though, of the fact that I can no longer argue that the Big Ten isn't trailing most of the rest of the BCS conferences. I'm all about second chances, so I hope Delany has some advisers who can tell him he's wrong.

But why should you care? You should care because he's probably the one person most in the way of a college football playoff. He doesn't want one. He doesn't care what you think. He knows no playoff happens unless he agrees to it.

Take heart, though. Voldemort thought he had the upper hand too.