Big Ten moves Football Media Days to Las Vegas

The Big Ten and its 18 teams are well beyond Midwestern origins now.

The conference has teams from Los Angeles (USC, UCLA) to Seattle (Washington) to New Jersey (Rutgers) and Maryland. The latest move, fitting with their national and international ambitions and attempts to welcome their four newest West Coast members, is taking their Football Media Days to Las Vegas this July.

The conference’s football media days will again be three days long, this time from July 22 to 24 at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Vegas. (The event was in Indianapolis last year.) BTN will provide full coverage of all three days.

Each program usually brings its head coach and three players, so plenty of interesting and quotable people should be in attendance. The conference features the last two national champions in Michigan and Ohio State, plus three other teams that made the College Football Playoff alongside the Buckeyes last season: Oregon, Penn State, and Indiana.

A notable element of this year’s event that’s not yet known is what the CFP will look like going forward. That’s been a hot topic of discussion at meetings this week in New Orleans between Big Ten and SEC athletic directors, with those conferences in control of the changes thanks to a memorandum of understanding signed last spring.

It comes with potential expansion to 14 or 16 teams, potentially four guaranteed slots and significantly enhanced revenue for each of those conferences (a real bone of contention for many others), possibly a ninth conference game for SEC teams (the Big Ten already plays nine), and a 10th game from a SEC-Big Ten scheduling interlock. Nothing there seems significantly resolved yet, but there will likely be a lot to ask Big Ten figures about in July.

The overall move of the media days from Indianapolis to Las Vegas this year is interesting alone on several levels. On the one hand, it’s a nod at somewhat reducing the travel burden for the West Coast schools, which have the longest trips in season. It’s also a nod to making the new schools feel as included as the long-time ones (and, on that front, it’s worth noting that Oregon and Washington are only getting media shares starting around half of what the others get and are only doing so thanks to extra money from Fox).

But it is also a further sign of how the Big Ten is looking to grow beyond the traditional view of it as a Midwestern-focused conference. A media day’s location is only a small part of that, but it’s part of a significantly larger picture. We’ll see if the move winds up attracting more and different media outlets than those who have traditionally covered the league’s media days.