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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/Auggiewestbound on 2023-08-11 22:31:16.
One thing I’m surprised hasn’t gotten much attention in this whole conversation about Cal and Stanford being left stranded is the importance of their region. And to that effect, I’m surprised the B1G isn’t chomping at the bit to add them.
According to LinkedIn’s alumni data, if you add up the alumni locations for all of the current and future B1G schools, there are 243,000 alumni living in the San Francisco Bay Area. And that’s not just West coast schools; they’re all well represented. Purdue has more than 11,000 Bay Area alums, Michigan has more than 18,000, Wisconsin has nearly 12,000, etc.In fact, the only regions that have more B1G alumni are New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. If it wasn’t for the astoundingly large number of UCLA alumni living in LA, the Bay Area would have better representation as well.
The entire Bay Area’s population is a debatable number depending on which source you reference, but the most commonly used number is 7.7 million people, which comprises the population of the 9 most agreed-up counties that make up the region. That’s considerably smaller than the only metro areas that have more alumni.That means more than 3 percent of the entire Bay Area region’s population went to a B1G school. Not among college graduates, mind you, but the entire region’s population. Randomly group 30 residents together, and you’re statistically likely to encounter alumni from the B1G. In Chicago, home to the B1G headquarters and geographically surrounded by the majority of schools, 4 percent of the population went to a B1G university. In greater New York, the number is 2 percent.
Anecdotally I see this every day. I live in East Oakland, but on my small street I can think of at least four B1G alums (Purdue, USC, Minnesota, Washington). I work in a 25-person office in downtown San Francisco and it’s well represented by B1G (Illinois, Purdue, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Oregon, UCLA).
I would imagine B1G schools would want a pipeline into the Bay Area. They want their graduating high school students, they want their corporate partnerships (especially in tech and finance), and they want engagement with their wealthy alumni base.I get the TV and competitive reasons why Cal and Stanford aren’t on their way to the B1G already. But if university presidents really did make the final decisions on realignment matters, then this would be a done deal.
Here’s a table comparing the Bay Area’s alumni vs New York’s and Chicago’s by the way. I didn’t include LA because it wasn’t even registering as a factor for the midwestern schools until I looked at UCLA and USC’s presence there.
| B1G School | San Francisco Bay Area Alumni | New York Metro Alumni | Greater Chicago Alumni |
|---|---|---|---|
| UCLA | 53,964 | 17,974 | 4,008 |
| USC | 35,256 | 13,873 | 3,765 |
| Michigan | 18,381 | 21,313 | 30,527 |
| Illinois | 17,067 | 11,989 | 125,699 |
| Washington | 15,160 | 8,298 | 2,519 |
| Wisconsin | 11,954 | 16,244 | 30,217 |
| Purdue | 11,409 | 9,514 | 40,482 |
| Oregon | 11,263 | 3,490 | 1,394 |
| Northwestern | 10,335 | 15,777 | 59,413 |
| Penn State | 9,072 | 63,733 | 5,748 |
| Ohio State | 8,307 | 12,787 | 9,887 |
| Maryland | 8,257 | 26,436 | 2,984 |
| Minnesota | 8,085 | 7,090 | 7,453 |
| Michigan State | 7,024 | 10,228 | 20,917 |
| Indiana | 6,550 | 14,154 | 18,190 |
| Rutgers | 5,741 | 163,490 | 2,118 |
| Iowa | 3,251 | 3,840 | 26,648 |
| Nebraska | 2,175 | 2,281 | 3,136 |
| TOTAL | 243,251 | 422,511 | 395,159 |
Maybe this whole exploration is really just my way of saying that this whole realignment thing sucks. And as a CFB fan living in the Bay Area, I want the local college football teams here to thrive. Plus I wouldn’t mind seeing Purdue out here every so often.