Syracuse fans have spent nearly twenty years mourning the Big East.
The ACC has never completely felt like home. And whenever the next round of conference realignment gets discussed, it’s easy to look north and west and wonder: Wouldn’t Syracuse be better off in the Big Ten?
This may never be a reality. Syracuse’s local market isn’t enough to move the needle, Rutgers took the NYC footprint, and football still lags. But maybe if it becomes two super conferences and SU is hoping to get chosen, this would become a question.
Financially? Almost certainly.
But a fascinating new report raises another question: Would the Big Ten actually be that much better for Syracuse fans?
Awful Announcing detailed a growing television problem for the Big Ten despite the conference winning three consecutive national championships and collecting enormous media-rights checks.
The SEC is increasingly dominating the Big Ten where fans can actually see the difference: television audiences.
Fox’s Big Noon Saturday averaged 6.3 million viewers per week in 2025. ABC’s afternoon and primetime windows were both around 8 million. Big Noon had been college football’s most-watched window from 2021-23.
Why the reversal?
The report argues the Big Ten is too dependent on Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State to create national interest. The SEC has a much deeper collection of programs capable of generating huge audiences.
There’s also the television experience.
The Big Ten is scattered across Fox, CBS and NBC. ESPN has essentially turned SEC Saturdays into an all-day event on ESPN and ABC, where viewers can move from one major matchup into another with familiar teams, rivalries and personalities.
And this is where Syracuse fans should pay attention.
Take away the money for a moment. What exactly would SU be chasing in the Big Ten?
Penn State would be fantastic. Michigan and Ohio State coming to the Dome would be events.
But Rutgers? Maryland? Northwestern? Purdue? Minnesota?
Is Syracuse-Rutgers inherently more meaningful than Syracuse-Pitt? Would USC-Syracuse create more emotional investment than Virginia Tech-Syracuse simply because the Big Ten logo is painted on the field?
The Big Ten’s expansion has created matchups like USC-Rutgers while stretching a supposedly Midwestern conference from New Jersey to Los Angeles. Awful Announcing notes that those games aren’t necessarily generating the audiences its television partners envisioned.
That doesn’t mean Syracuse should reject a hypothetical Big Ten invitation. The financial implications would make such an opportunity enormously important.
But realignment has taught college sports fans to confuse conference wealth with conference identity.
And identity is exactly what Syracuse lost when the Big East disappeared.
Georgetown mattered. UConn mattered. Villanova mattered. St. John’s mattered. Pitt mattered. Those games didn’t need a television executive explaining why they were important.
The SEC still possesses an enormous amount of that. Alabama-Auburn. Georgia-Florida. Texas-Oklahoma. ESPN then packages those rivalries and fan bases into a television product that feels enormous every Saturday.
The Big Ten has tremendous rivalries, too. But expansion has also given it UCLA-Minnesota and USC-Rutgers.
That’s inventory.
It isn’t necessarily identity.
Maybe Syracuse’s problem isn’t simply that it’s stuck in the ACC while the cool kids collect bigger checks in the Big Ten.
Maybe there is no conference left that can give Syracuse fans what they actually want back.
The Big Ten could give Syracuse more money, enormous brands and perhaps a more natural geographic fit in portions of its schedule.
But it can’t recreate the Big East.
And these television numbers are another reminder that being the richest conference doesn’t automatically make you the most compelling one.
Syracuse doesn’t need a richer version of the ACC. It needs games that make being a Syracuse fan feel like something again.
