I'm not an insider, not even close. I love College sports and I love my Gophers & Mountaineers, and that's it. I know nobody and nobody knows me.
I'm not even sure I want to write this post. And don't ask why I'm writing it in a Big 12 message board, because my answer would be simply I don't know where else I would put this delicate information. I come to this Big 12 message board because I love watching Big 12 football and I learn a lot about what people are thinking about in regards to Big Time college sport expansion.
But I got into a conversation with I guy who I have not seen since 2006. I saw him accidentally last night at Maxwell Bar in Downtown Minneapolis. Actually, its not quite downtown, but close enough.
This guy works at Cornell University, and he has been since he was done wrestling in 1987. I went to school with him back in the early 1980's. Our conversation went from family to sports within about 3 minutes of meeting each again for the first time in 8 years. I wish I had a device which could have recorded our conversation so I could play back to you guys what he said to me last night.
Here it is, what I could remember.
President Skorton of Cornell is leaving Cornell University sometime in 2015. Skorton worked at Iowa before he became the President of Cornell. I think he was the President of Iowa, but I'm not sure, I don't remember all the details. But Skorton was a Hawkeye before he went to Cornell. Skorton and Delany have been talking about the possibility of moving some of Cornell's Olympic sports into the Big 10. According to this guys story Cornell would start with moving their lacrosse teams, Men & Women's, before they would move any of the other sports teams to the Big 10. He mentioned wrestling would happen before Hockey, if the transition of the lacrosse teams into the Big 10 went in a positive direction. I doubted his information and asked him why would the Big 10 want to add Cornell and how could he know of any of this information. This guy told me that Delany wants more live sport events for his network and Cornell can fulfill what Delany wants as a Big 10 partial member. On the Cornell side it would mean lots more money and it would provide a bigger carrot for Cornell to encourage their rich boosters down the road. The question is, according to this guys story, can Skorton make this happen before he leaves the University next year. The kicker to this story is that if this happens, if Cornell joins the Big 10 in Lacrosse, we will know about it before the end of this summer, summer of 2014.
I asked again why does he know this stuff, and he answered back, "because my old Wrestling Coach told me 2 weeks ago discussions were going on between Cornell and the Big 10".
I don't know who his Coach was at Cornell, and I didn't ask, I decided to just let it go.
I'm not sure what to think of his story. I tried to look up what leagues Cornell was in besides the Ivy League in D1 sports, and it seems that they are involved with quite a few different leagues from what I could tell.
No mentioned of basketball from this guy and I didn't ask. I guess was too much in shock. He just mentioned Lacrosse, Wrestling & Hockey, at least from what I could remember.
I'm not an insider, but I sure felt like one last night for about 15 minutes.
I'm still not sure what or how to think about this possibility.
http://mbd.scout.com/mb.aspx?s=159&f=4582&t=12863167