How The Big Ten Should Have Been Divided

All the talk about how the Big Ten is going to be divided involves splitting apart long time rivals, such as Michigan and Ohio State, Wisconsin and Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, all for the sake of "competitiveness" of the sides.

First any division has no guarantee of equal competition for more than a few years at best. So why not try to keep all of the classic rivalries alive and hope the one side can compete with the other consistently.

I propose this version:

West

Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Illinois and Northwestern

East

Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, Indiana and Purdue

All the other proposals involve splitting up Ohio State and Michigan because they're the "best teams" but there is no reason to believe Michigan will ever recover to the domination they once had.  With the school dealing with its first NCAA problems and looking like a lock to finish in the bottom half of the conference for the third year in a row proves that every program suffers from ups and downs and determining how the conference splits based on anything but geography is a waste of time.

Never before has a conference tried to split apart geographic rivals for the sake of competitiveness for the championship game, just look at the Big 12, no logical argument can say the North is on the same talent level as the South.  Actually the North looks like a mid level conference in comparison to the South.

So why start now when one of the "top" programs is slipping and some of the middle of the road teams are getting stronger as of late.  Lets not split up 100 year rivalries for the sake of evenness that could not be relevant in 5 years.