Big Ten Football: Are Hoke and Meyer Returning Us to 'Big Two, Little Ten?'

National Signing Day is only a week-and-a-half away, and most of the hay is in the barn across the Big Ten Conference. Unlike the speculation of the past 12 months, the class rankings for the 2012 recruiting class is coming into serious focus now.

What those rankings reveal could be bad news for the Big Ten, which has striven for competitive balance to elevate their football conference to the SEC level. More specifically, it could be bad news for everyone but Michigan and Ohio State.

The hiring of Urban Meyer has reaped immediate benefits in two short months, as Meyer has flipped many players back to OSU after they went somewhere else in the wake of the Jim Tressel and Terrelle Pryor scandals. Meyer's class has risen all the way into the top five of many of the major recruiting rankings: for example, Ohio State has the No. 3 national class according to Yahoo! Sports.

But Brady Hoke is not being outdone up in Ann Arbor. Michigan has put together a second strong class under Hoke, this one reaching new heights and a No. 5 national class ranking on Yahoo! Sports.  Michigan is loading up on the offensive and defensive lines and looks to replenish the big holes left by Rich Rodriguez in short order.

Although Ohio and Michigan do have small handfuls of elite recruits, the big states for recruiting are Texas, California, Florida and SEC country. For a team in the Big Ten to be ranked in the recruiting mix with the likes of Southern schools from these states shows just how strong these classes really are.

Not counting Oregon as a West Coast team, the only two other teams located north of SEC country are Notre Dame at No. 12 and Virginia Tech at No. 22. The next Big Ten schools rank even lower than that, led by No. 30 Purdue (yes, Purdue), No. 36 Nebraska, No. 37 Wisconsin, No. 40 Iowa, No. 44 Penn State and No. 46 Michigan State.

While it is nice to see eight Big Ten schools hanging in the Top 50 heading into the home stretch, the disparity between Ohio State and Michigan and Purdue is a chasm that could reset the balance of power in the conference. Of Purdue's 25 commitments, there are no 5-star recruits and only two 4-star recruits.

Meanwhile, the Buckeyes and the Wolverines have each bagged a pair of 5-star recruits and a boatload of 4-star recruits (13 for OSU, nine for UM). Even with some inevitable misses, there are too many elite players left in these classes because the percentage of 4- and 5-star recruits is so high.

Which means, if this trend continues (and there's no reason to expect it will not considering this is just the beginning of the Meyer and Hoke reigns), the Big Ten is headed back to where the conference was for the vast majority of its history: the Big Two and the Little Remainder (10 now).

Although Ohio State cannot play in the Big Ten Championship this season, do not be surprised if a rematch of "The Game" becomes the norm in Indianapolis considering how drastic the differences will become thanks to recruiting classes of this caliber.

To put it another way, imagine if Alabama had moved to the Big Ten instead of Nebraska. Is there any doubt Nick Saban would fail to dominate the conference with his recruiting prowess and coaching expertise? Yet that is the stark reality that the other ten Big Ten programs face if Meyer and Hoke prove to be as good at coaching as they are at recruiting.

Since Penn State joined the conference and Wisconsin and Iowa came to prominence, it seemed highly unlikely that the conference would ever go back to being dominated by Michigan and Ohio State. However, Urban Meyer and Brady Hoke are bringing the rivalry back to The Game and the Big Two back to the Big Ten.

Good luck to everyone else. It's going to be a long second installment of the Ten Years' War...