In the wake of the B1G hitting pause on the $2.4B private equity deal, which commissioner Tony Petitti was planning to push through despite not having unanimous support from all 18 schools before the investors hit the brakes, The Athletic's Stewart Mandel has written an article ($) titled, "The Big Ten got too big, and fighting ensued. What’s next for a conference losing its identity?" Here's a snippet:

The Big Ten’s TV rights jumped from about $250 million a year in 2014 to a $440 million average from 2017-23 to a staggering $1 billion average for the current deal, which runs from 2023-2030.

But that windfall was not without consequences: Michigan State fans forced to stay up until 2:30 a.m. (ET) to watch the Spartans play a football game in Pacific time. UCLA basketball fans trading Las Vegas for Indianapolis for conference tournament weekend. Maryland volleyball players flying cross-country to play a Thursday night match.

The conference no longer has a cohesive identity like its “It Just Means More” SEC counterpart, mostly because the schools no longer have much in common. No one tuning into the Week 9 UCLA-Indiana game on Fox thought to themselves, “Now this is Big Ten football!”

The conference’s new vibe is light-years different from the Big Ten’s longtime picture of dogged unity. It was the first conference to devise a grant of rights, back in 1988, preventing Ohio State and Michigan from ever pulling a Texas- and Oklahoma-level defection. Since then, the schools have shared conference-generated revenue and a portion of their own ticket sales equally, even though Ohio State and Michigan bake far more of the pie than Northwestern and Purdue.

Now, the league is on the verge of a new era that conjures the type of instability that has long plagued other conferences. Ask the early-2010s Big 12 how making special concessions to two of its members played out. Ask most of the present-day ACC what it’s like to sit in a room while a few schools threaten to leave them behind.

Ironically, Big Ten schools — when there were fewer of them, at least — got along better when they weren’t as good at football.

I appreciated that two common denominators were 1) each B1G school was located in a state that bordered at least one other B1G state, and 2) it crossed only two time zones. I didn't see why it needed to become a coast-to-coast conference, why it needed to save USC and UCLA first, and then Oregon and Washington. It's hard to get excited about playing the west coast schools. Conversely, the SEC is tight and compact, what the B1G used to be; it's also willing to be patient and bid its time on the expansion front. Kevin Warren and Petitti have made poor decisions--cancelling the 2020 season.", adding the PAC-12, Petitti's controversial 4-4-2-2-1 concept plan for the CFP, and now the botched PE deal--that have seemingly fractured the B1G's unity. Just as a coach can kill a team's culture (Brian Kelly), so too can a bad commissioner destroy a conference's.

Is the B1G on a downhill slope? Or are its ills something time can cure? Or is this all much ado about nothing?