Division Alignment is the Biggest Dilemma for the Big Ten

Not long after the creation of the Big 12, I predicted that unless the league were to change its divisions, it would see great disparity in football quality, which would lead to growing dissension that could rupture the conference.

Virtually all people who read my warnings assumed I was crazy. After all, they were looking at the Big 12 North, with then top 10 teams Nebraska and Kansas State and recent national champion Colorado.

But the big picture told the tale. Regardless of what is happening now , if one division is much richer in areas like football history, football successes over the previous two decades, average attendance, TV drawing power relative to record (for example, a 10-2 Kansas team would always have much less national TV drawing power than a 10-2 Texas team), athletics department wealth, and quality recruits in the division's states, that division will steadily gain at the expense of the other division.

That is exactly what we saw happen in the Big 12. The reason the ACC did not divide north/south was to prevent that very scenario.

The Big Ten must deal with a problem in designating divisions that no other expanded conference has faced: the plethora of named trophy games. How many of those must be maintained as annual games?

Answering that question will help determine whether the Big Ten plays eight or nine conference games and whether each school has one or two permanent cross-division rivals. Answering it also will play a key role in deciding the divisions.

There is one given regarding the Big Ten: it is defined by only one game far more than any other conference. That game is the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry.

The Big Ten will not move that game from the last weekend of the regular season, nor will it want the possibility of it being played on succeeding Saturdays.

Ohio State and Michigan will be in the same division.

So the Big Ten has three options: simple east/west, basically east/west with one swap, and zipper.

The most obvious split is geographic. That would mean these divisions:

East: Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Indiana, Purdue

West: Northwestern, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska

That is the most logical, but its risk is that the East will become dominant. It would have the conference's defining game, three of its four programs with great football history, its three largest attendance schools, and its two best states for recruiting.

That Big Ten West clearly would seem an afterthought to most general fans, but it would not be as inferior to the East as the Big 12 North was to the South. The reasons the West would be more viable than was the Big 12 North are: Wisconsin and its 80,000 per game and successes over the previous two decades, Iowa and its steady competitiveness and 70,000 per game, and the state of Illinois.

Better balance between the two divisions could be achieved by swapping Penn State for Northwestern. That would mean that the "west" would have: two of the four biggest name programs in the Big Ten, three of the top five in attendance, and the second most important Big Ten state for recruiting. 

The risk in those divisions would be that the "east" probably would be seen by most general fans as nothing more than a set-up for the Ohio State-Michigan game, while the "west" would be seen as the decidedly deeper division.

Penn State would object to playing all the westernmost schools annually, but could be pacified by having Ohio State as an annual cross-division rival. Even so, Penn State would stick out like a sore thumb, making it even more obvious that it is an eastern outsider in a midwestern league.

The third option is the zipper, which is how the ACC divisions came to be. The league would be divided into three geographic groupings of four schools. Then, each group of four would be split in half. Each division then would have two teams from each of the three geographic groupings.

For the Big Ten, the zipper approach would yield divisions like this:

Penn State, Michigan State, Indiana, Purdue, Iowa (or Wisconsin), Nebraska

Ohio State, Michigan, Northwestern, Illinois, Wisconsin (or Iowa), Minnesota

Each school could then have an annual cross-divisional rival from among its original geographic grouping, such as this:

Penn State-Ohio State

Michigan State-Michigan

Indiana-Illinois

Purdue-Northwestern

Iowa-Wisconsin

Nebraska-Minnesota

If the Big Ten plans to expand to 14, the zipper approach might prove best. It would allow the conference to then add two schools from the same conference without feeling a need to reconfigure divisions based on geography.

Of course, if the Big Ten were to become a 14 member conference by adding, say, Missouri and Kansas, it could re-work East/West divisions by shipping Northwestern to the East, thus creating nicely balanced geographic divisions.

But then the Big Ten that has far more than ten members also would have a school with western in its name that is in its East division.