I haven't had a chance to listen yet but are we thinking there might be a few instances where a team goes out to LA and plays Thursday or Friday and Sunday?  I gotta believe they'll try to work that in any time they can.  Same with the LA schools coming east of the Mississippi - play at Maryland on a Friday night then play at Penn State on Sunday afternoon and try to get back to LA by midnight.

@spartan-warrior That’s part of what we talked about. But it will certainly be much easier for a team to fly out to LA and play one or both teams once than the LA teams flying out for multiple road trips. 

You have to imagine they will try to schedule smartly and allow for more efficient travel. 

@elarson284568176374567 I haven't had a chance to listen yet either as it's first in my queue here today, BUT... "Scheduling smarter" is something that the Big Ten conference doesn't seem to understand. Maybe adding these two schools wakes them up to that fact. Overall, I think both schools are plus-adds in basketball. They both have made deep NCAA runs recently. They both have had some high draft picks. Maybe this opens the door to talent out west that never would have even looked this way. When Mick Cronin was at Cincinnati, he drew lots of praise for his style of play from analysts who said that it would probably fit in the Big Ten and I agree. He is a good coach and seems to know how to build and maintain a program so the consistency should be there.

Posted by: @elarson284568176374567

@spartan-warrior That’s part of what we talked about. But it will certainly be much easier for a team to fly out to LA and play one or both teams once than the LA teams flying out for multiple road trips. 

You have to imagine they will try to schedule smartly and allow for more efficient travel. 

I am also hoping for the "schedule smartly" approach.  I remember the days when Big Ten games were Thursdays & Saturdays and schedules were essentially in pairs.  So, when a team visited Ann Arbor on a Thursday, they'd then visit East Lansing on a Saturday and vice versa.  Meanwhile, if MSU played at Wisconsin on a Thursday, they'd then go to Minnesota on Saturday.  This tended to minimize travel and maximize time in the classroom.  Of course, TV changed all that.  Games can be any day of the week and travel seems to zigzag with no thought towards efficiency (and, of course, the student part of student-athlete was thrown out the window with it).  

Adding California, one would have to hope that "schedule smartly" will now return.  The travel will be brutal enough on the two CA schools, imagine if they don't factor in efficiency for their travel?  It'd be exponentially more brutal for them.  Meanwhile, I sure hope that MSU's visit to USC isn't de-coupled from a visit to UCLA, meaning two west coast trips.  That'd be just stupid and an all-out trouncing of the notion of student-athlete (with 98.8% of the NCAA basketball players needing to rely on that 'student' part for their long-term livelihood).