Shipley: Delany has created the Big Ten monster, can Warren tame him?

The Big Ten will one day erect a kind of monument in the honor of Jim Delany; statue, building or obelisk, it will have been won by the man who took control of a university athletics conference and turned it into a media empire with tendrils. extending from Nebraska to the New Jersey coast.
In 30 years, Delany has been appointed commissioner and transformed the Big Ten conference so fundamentally and irrevocably that it's hard to imagine that there is a place where Kevin Warren can go. The Vikings Chief Operating Officer will officially replace Delany by 2020, and Delany's scouts will have already explored the border he has yet to conquer.
The new Gophers Athletes Village will serve as a sanctuary for Delany. The $ 166 million collection of training rooms, weight rooms, locker rooms, recreation rooms and study rooms is testament to the prosperity of the program, including John Wooden, Knute Rockne and Eddie Robinson had never dreamed. It could be argued that 336,000 square feet of erroneous priorities, but it will definitely impress recruits.
The university is proud to tell us that the athletes' village is privately funded, but that does not tell the whole story. If the Gophers had not received more than $ 50 million a year from their television contracts with Big Ten, these donors would have paid for bus trips, Ace bandages and electricity bills instead of basketball courts. -ball and catering services open to 750 students.
It may not be opulent across the Ohio State, Alabama or Texas, where players have television in their lockers, but that's enough. Thanks to Delany's vision and drive, every Big Ten athletic department – each one of them has 14 "- has the chance to win something big and lucrative – they all have a place at the table. Yes, even Rutgers.
Delany is as responsible for the state of university sport as anyone else, and even though he can and should cry the state of great sports athletes, one must also accept the fact that Delany has not only seen the future, he created it – and every Big Ten school with him.
Since he took over from Wayne Duke in 1989, Delany has been at the origin of a myriad of projects that have made the Big Ten conference the most powerful conference in the country since the creation of the Big Ten network, the first of its kind, until the enlargement of the number of its members. All of these ideas were not acceptable – the incursion of the ice hockey conference was deplorable – but most were a resounding success.
Under the leadership of Delany, the Big Ten started to participate in series conference tournaments and added a football league match between two division winners. He played a key role in the creation of the Playoff Football College and the so-called Power Five conference group that share (a little) the benefits with their athletes.
The Big Ten revenue sharing is the envy of all athletic consortiums, conventions, clubs and cliques from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. Alabama and Southern Cal may have won more conferences and national championships since the dissolution of The Beatles, but Minnesota is receiving more money from the television.
Consider that the conference was founded in 1896, the year of the creation of Thomas A. Edison Inc. Led by one of the great visionary inventors of the world, Edison Inc., a patent holder for the phonograph, a movie camera and a light bulb, ceased operations in 1985. The Big Ten survives with contemporaries Allianz Life, Libman Company and Tootsie Roll.
In fact, the conference has never been so strong or uncontrollable. Does Warren continue to feed the beast created by Delany or tame him? In both cases, he has some work to do.