As we covered over the weekend, two of our favorite State Senators - State Senator Matt Murphy and State Senator Mike Connelly - have introduce legistlation that would begin to unearth - for the State of Illinois - how hard it would be to get Illinois State University or Southern Illinois University into the Big Ten.
Our piece can be found here on the Truth Team.
Well...one of our 'brothers-in-arms' OneMan has a response to the news up over on his blog.
From his post:
Only three schools in the state play Div I-BCS football and two of them are already in the Big 10 and the third NIU would have to spend millions just to upgrade the football stadium. For any of the other schools to join the conference they would also have to spend millions to upgrade their football stadiums as well as upgrade their programs to Div I-BCS programs and that would cost millions of dollars.
If you want to upgrade the academics of a state school, I am all for that. Odds are by the time the process would bear fruit it would be long after either of my kids would be done with college. But using an athletic conference as some sort of smoke screen.
If you want more in state smart kids to go to state schools, upgrade the state schools, get tuition under control. That is going to help, if a kid is going to a school just because it is in a specific athletic conference, the kid isn't that smart to begin with.
