Samples: Big Ten realignment makes sense
ISL Correspondent
I’m among a lot of college football fans relieved to see the naming changes to the Big Ten conference. Now, we move to the simple, yet effective titles of East and West.
Being a fan of the newest guy in town — that being Nebraska (I’m not counting Rutgers or Maryland until they actually start playing games in conference) — and probably because it’s how my brain is wired, I’m probably more wedded to a geographic alignment than others might be.
Having said that, I think the move makes sense from a rivalry perspective as well. The aforementioned Nebraska can still hook horns with next-door neighbor Iowa and have an annual clash with developing rival Wisconsin in the West. Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State? They can keep their rivalries without missing a year in the East.
And allowances have been made for Indiana and Purdue, split by the new alignment, to play against each other in football each year.
enhance scheduling by adding a ninth conference game beginning in 2016. This will create some challenges to nonconference games already scheduled and we will be working on this issue in the days ahead.”
In all, there will be six division games and two cross-division games in 2014 and 2015. Come 2016, the number of cross-division contests will increase to three.
The aforementioned addition of Rutgers and Maryland has made for an interesting shift in philosophy among Big 10 leaders, or, shall we say, Big Ten commission Jim Delany. When Nebraska was being wooed behind the scenes, the word was all about competitive balance. Geography was mentioned, but ultimately it wasn’t that big a factor in the finished alignment product. Now, though, it’s all about the geography. And this makes a lot of sense. There’s the rivalry aspect, but now there’s also the travel side of things both from a department budget and spectator standpoint.
There are some legitimate short-term concerns about how this impacts the conference’s in-house competitive balance, especially in football. Nebraska and Wisconsin are really the only powerhouses in the West, and you’re not sure what you will get out of teams like Iowa, Northwestern and Purdue. The East, though, is balanced at the top, with Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State at the top of the division. Once Rutgers gets added, it could add itself to the upper echelon of division teams, skewing the competitive balance between divisions even more.
The other big question? How that competitive imbalance may affect the conference’s chances of moving forward in the new playoff system.
The answers obviously won’t come for some time yet. But you can’t argue the thought process behind the changes.
Big Ten directors of athletics met in person or by conference call six times from December to March to discuss a new Big Ten football model, Delany said. The level of cooperation and collaboration was reflective of what we’ve come to expect from this group of administrators who have worked extremely well together on a number of complex matters over the past several years. We are all looking forward to ushering in this new era of Big Ten football.
