Canzano: Big Ten Football Media Days kicks off

My column from Indianapolis.

Big Ten Media Days are being held at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

INDIANAPOLIS — I looked out my hotel room window on Tuesday morning and saw the oddest thing in downtown Indianapolis. On the lawn below at Celebration Plaza someone had set up a massive inflatable Oregon Duck.

There was a film crew on the grass, presumably shooting some kind of marketing video for the Big Ten Conference. The Duck was later spotted floating in the White River.

The NCAA headquarters are across the street. A half mile away, Lucas Oil Stadium waited, where the 18-team conference kicked off a 72-hour media blitz being called “Big Ten Football Media Days.”

Speaking of strange sightings, the logos of the Big Ten were arranged alphabetically on the stadium signage — putting “Oregon” smack between Penn State and Ohio State on the walls. That’s new. The same goes for the mannequins that lined the stadium hallways showing off each of the school’s 2024 uniforms.

This is not the Big Ten I got to know in the late 1990s. I was a beat reporter then, covering Purdue football and Indiana basketball for a newspaper in northeastern Indiana. My life consisted of Drew Brees, Bobby Knight, and a snow shovel. The Big Ten had only 11 teams back then. People liked to joke about the absurdity of that. Penn State was a newcomer. And what I remember most about the conference was the long drives between Big Ten cities.

Also, I remember it being cold.

Tuesday’s high is 86 degrees. In the winter of 1998, I left the same hotel and went for a jog around the plaza one morning. It was 5 degrees. My face stung. My eyelids froze and turned into potato chips. My lungs cried out: “WHAT in the…??!?” I made it only two blocks before I turned around and jogged back to the hotel, wondering why in the world I wasn’t running somewhere warmer.

The Oregon, Washington, UCLA, and USC football teams won’t live in the midwest. They’ll just visit occasionally from September to December and hope to win a bunch of games, make piles of money, and get solid footing.

When I walked into Lucas Oil Stadium on Tuesday, I was struck by how much has changed for those four schools in a year. The Pac-12’s annual football media event was held in a Las Vegas casino nightclub and lasted only a day. But when your conference consists of 18 teams, you need an NFL stadium and three days to get the same job done.

Some quick takeaways:

• Commissioner Tony Petitti revealed the Big Ten’s position on further expansion, saying: “We’re focused on the 18 right now. We’re comfortable where we are.”

• Petitti and I are scheduled for a 1-on-1 interview late on Tuesday. I plan on asking him about the conference tiebreakers and whether the greater good of college athletics is being served by all that has happened. Also, I want to know what it was like to grow up as the son of a New York City cop.

• Everyone here thinks the College Football Playoff is about to explode in popularity, generating untold revenue and high ratings. One Big Ten executive told me: “We think it’s going to be the biggest thing around.”

• I bumped into television broadcasters Ashley Adamson, Guy Haberman, and Yogi Roth on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium. That trio all previously worked for the Pac-12 Network. They’re all now working for the Big Ten Network this season. Said Adamson: “It’s like some kind of bizarro world, isn’t it?”

• Wisconsin and Purdue were the first two schools on the stage. Oregon will play them both on the road next season. I wonder how many Ducks fans will make those trips, in part, because they’re new places to see a game.

• USC and UCLA will attend on Day 2 (Wednesday) of the event. Washington and Oregon will take the stage on Day 3 (Thursday). Ducks’ coach Dan Lanning and Huskies’ coach Jedd Fisch will be on stage. So will Jonathan Smith, who is a Day 2 participant since he’s now at Michigan State.

• I enjoyed my first tour of the Big Ten all those years ago. The conference schools throw a great tailgate. The biggest stadiums are cathedrals. Big Ten fans have been on board for generations. But that entire time I felt like a visitor. I was just passing through. Tuesday had a finality about it. The Ducks aren’t visitors. Neither are the Huskies. They’re going to live here for a while, maybe longer.

A lot is going on in college football. Nobody thinks realignment is done. The lawsuits are being settled. There’s a swirl of uncertainty about roster sizes, whether athletes will soon officially become employees, and how many teams have a chance to win a national title. There’s a lot to unpack, for sure. But I suspect once the football kicks off next season, at least for a while, we’ll get to remember why we fell in love with the sport in the first place.

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