The plot just keeps on thickening, doesn’t it? It was just over a month ago when the bombshell hit the news that USC and UCLA were planning on leaving the Pac-12 for greener and snowier pastures in the Big Ten in time for the 2024 football season.
Since then, there’s been rumors, predictions, and further speculation on what other programs might jump ship and look to join the Big Ten or SEC, the other conference that broke the news of future expansion with two blue-blood members just last year.
One of those teams that has been mentioned often is the Oregon Ducks, and now it seems, there is some traction, at least initially in the Ducks’ desire to explore making the move to the Big Ten.
According to a report from Action Network HQ’s Brett McMurphy, sources have indicated that Oregon has “initiated preliminary discussions” with the Big Ten to determine whether it is “compatible.”
Oregon has initiated preliminary discussions in Chicago w/Big Ten to determine if Ducks are compatible in the Big Ten, source told @ActionNetworkHQ. Big Ten “not done expanding,” sources told @ActionNetworkHQ last week. https://t.co/DYMZADm17v
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) August 22, 2022
The move would make a lot of sense if the Big Ten is still keeping options open to expand further, as league commissioner Kevin Warren has stated. This is also on the heels of a further report that the conference might be targeting Oregon along with Notre Dame and other Pac-12 schools, Washington, Stanford, and Cal.
The Ducks have turned themselves into a solid program with more eyeballs on it over the last couple of decades. All that Nike money from Phil Knight, a new market in the Pacific Northwest, the results in athletics across multiple sports, and the fact that the school is an AAU member checks a lot of boxes the Big Ten would be interested in.
We’ll see if anything further comes from this, but from what we’ve seen over the last couple of years, where there’s smoke, we usually see a fire start to build.
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