Big Ten Football Division Alignments

[tinselwolverine]

How about they just leave it alone and UM plays better football and wins the division? Moving one team from the east to the west may help a little, but that is always subject to change. PSU, OSU, MSU, and UM are all decent to good currently. However MSU wasn't last year, UM wasn't in the not so distant past, same with PSU. And I think the majority of us hope that OSU will suck sometime soon. (maybe thats just me)

College football success changes like the wind. Maybe a team has a good decade or so, but you have to play for the ups and downs. It was like that not long ago, and history has a pattern of repeating itself.

Maybe I am wrong and Alabama, OSU, Clemson, and whoever you want to add will be great forever and us lowly UM fans will settle into a Wisconsin type role of football, where we are always decent but can't continuously run with the big dogs. I doubt that happens, but you never know.

So as Champ said, sample size is to small, so leave shit alone and just win the damn division and conference.

Actually, we're only three seasons into the geographic divisions - even less than I thought.

Way too soon to sweat it.

 

[Spartanmack]

No, you're not panicking. Panicking is thinking about throwing out the geographic divisions altogether, and going with the "top two," which again, could create more problems than it solves.

I read one post - I forget who posted it, and it doesn't really matter - that all the conferences should throw out their divisional structures and just also go with the top two...well...

Shouldn't that actually be up to those conferences themselves?

More problematic is the current playoff structure, and that could fixed with something so simple and that makes too much sense that it likely will never be adopted.

Go to an eight team play off. The five conference champions of the power five divisions all qualify - period. Three at large teams then qualify. I'd rather have a BCS like decider for the final three qualifiers - the formula is established at the beginning of the season and adhered to...that's why I like it...throw out subjectivity of the committee - but either way.

Using the same BCS type formula (or the stupid committee), the three highest ranked conference champions host the three at large qualifiers in real actual home games at home, with the highest ranked conference champion hosting the lowest ranked at large qualifier, and so forth. The fourth and fifth ranked conference champions play with the fourth ranked host.

And then we go to the four team playoff utilizing the bowl system, exactly the way it is.

yes, it should be up to each conference, the only problem is they're, or at least the B1G run by a small group of jackasses. Also, like I said before, we shouldn't accept a likely permanent or at least long-term imbalance just because the SEC does and Big 12 used to.

 

[tinselwolverine]

yes, it should be up to each conference, the only problem is they're, or at least the B1G run by a small group of jackasses. Also, like I said before, we shouldn't accept a likely permanent or at least long-term imbalance just because the SEC does and Big 12 used to.

That's a point too.

After three years, Leaders and Legends was able to be thrown out for a complete reshuffle.

So in the face of that, three years afterward, (or four, at the conclusion of this season), the idea that the current divisional alignment is necessarily etched in stone...well...not really...

 

[Gulo Blue]

my suggestion would be to split up OSU and michigan and pair them osu/psu/nebraska or iowa then mich/msu/wisc or something like that then split the others as evenly as possible based on whatever criteria makes most sense. If it will keep folks from throwing tantrums over the the split, you can protect the rivalry b/w mich and osu like they did with the legends division.

Dave Brandon thought this was a good idea too.

 

[Michchamp]

yes, it should be up to each conference, the only problem is they're, or at least the B1G run by a small group of jackasses. Also, like I said before, we shouldn't accept a likely permanent or at least long-term imbalance just because the SEC does and Big 12 used to.

LOL, you say the B1G is run by jackasses, but you just proposed a non-geographic split like they had first proposed and which everyone hated.

 

[lostleader]

i see your point but it's only kind of bad for uofm, osu, psu and a little worse for msu. but is it fair to IU when they field their best team in 20 years (not saying they have this year, but if/when they do) and Iowa or Purdue aren't as good in that same year, yet they have a much better chance of making it to the conference championship than IU?

Sure, I'm primarily concerned with MSU but there are 3 teams that are getting f'd year in and year out.

Just because you have your best team, doesn't mean you should get to cake walk through to the championship by having an easier division. I mean you can rotate teams to different divisions every year, right?

 

[Spartanmack]

Just because you have your best team, doesn't mean you should get to cake walk through to the championship by having an easier division. I mean you can rotate teams to different divisions every year, right?

What's this about a cake walk? I never said anything of the sort. It's about the relative difficulty for teams in the bottom half of either division. There shouldn't be an easier division, or at least not such a massive disparity. Those teams are part of the conference too - it's kinda shitty that it's more difficult for them than it is for lower tier teams in the west.

 

[Spartanmack]

LOL, you say the B1G is run by jackasses, but you just proposed a non-geographic split like they had first proposed and which everyone hated.

LOL, they're not jackasses because of the way the conference was split. they're jackasses because they're money and power hungry slimeballs that don't care about even the illusion of being about/for student athletes or the fans and because they and the NCAA have destroyed decades of tradition chasing money. I think we probably agree on this at least to some degree.

LOL, I don't recall the previous split being worse than this one or particularly bad geographically. Recall, Nebraska and psu were the only team that hadn't been in the B1G for decades so why would geography even matter for anyone else? they traveled to the other 9 teams for decades and every team except Nebraska had already been traveling to psu since 1993. LOL

LOL, the primary reason the divisions were changed was due to the addition of RU and MD, at which point geography became more of a concern, but it's still not THAT big of a deal. And if that didn't happen, we'd probably still have the Leaders and Legends and nobody would bitch about psu having to go to Lincoln every now and then.

LOL, is this really that bad geographically? B1G North MSU, uofm, NW, Wisc, Minn, Iowa, NU B1G South osu, psu, Ill, IU, Pur, RU, MD. I guess Ill has it a little tough with an east coast trip every year, but that's not so bad. It's not perfect, but the imbalance is much less and it's concentrated more in the middle/bottom as opposed to having massive imbalance at the top like we have now.

 

[Gulo Blue]

Screw balance. Put Michigan, Notre Dame, Texas, Nebraska, Ohio State, Alabama, Oklahoma, Penn State, Tennessee, USC, Georgia, and LSU in a conference, no divisions, make them play round robin. Every week would be amazing.

 

[MSUMatt28]

To sum up a lot of the points being made.


I agree Nebraska returning to their prior level probably isn't happening. They are not able to recruit out of Texas now the way they could when they were in the Big 12. Hopefully they can at least be a consistent 8-9 win team though once they get the right coach in there again.


In any possible reconfiguration splitting up UM and OSU shouldn't happen. Not sure how most UM fans feel about it, but I'd imagine the year-end rivalry game still needs to happen. So then you could have UM-OSU WITH EVERYTHING ON THE L... oh, they're playing again next week for the Big Ten title anyway (yes I know it didn't happen in the Leader-Legend world but if it did, I'd think it pretty darn anti-climatic).


So all that really leaves is shipping PSU out west which is a raw deal for them, or Leaders-Legends Round II. But I don't know. Franklin has PSU humming now, but even in the final 15 years or so of the Paterno era their really good years were pretty sporadic. There was a lot of so-so and downright bad seasons mixed in.


I am not sure fairness figures into any of this and I don't necessarily think it should. With the way it is right now you've got quite a few a good games during the season that gets the Big Ten grabbing some national attention. That is good in a lot of ways vs if those teams were only playing every other year. Where it becomes an issue is if you start ending up with lopsided championship games (when presumably even more eyes are watching) because the West can't even produce 1 team capable of competing. And on that we will have to wait and see. People keeping waiting for Wisconsin to return to some level of mediocrity, but we are going on 30 years since Alvarez got in there and it still hasn't happened.

 

[Michchamp]

if Nebraska hires a good coach, they'll be solid again. maybe not ever again as dominant as the Osborne era, but good enough so that the West doesn't just consist of Wisconsin, and occasionally Iowa.

lots of speculation Scott Frost goes back to his alma mater after this season.

 

[Spartanmack]

To sum up a lot of the points being made.


I agree Nebraska returning to their prior level probably isn't happening. They are not able to recruit out of Texas now the way they could when they were in the Big 12. Hopefully they can at least be a consistent 8-9 win team though once they get the right coach in there again.


In any possible reconfiguration splitting up UM and OSU shouldn't happen. Not sure how most UM fans feel about it, but I'd imagine the year-end rivalry game still needs to happen. So then you could have UM-OSU WITH EVERYTHING ON THE L... oh, they're playing again next week for the Big Ten title anyway (yes I know it didn't happen in the Leader-Legend world but if it did, I'd think it pretty darn anti-climatic).


So all that really leaves is shipping PSU out west which is a raw deal for them, or Leaders-Legends Round II. But I don't know. Franklin has PSU humming now, but even in the final 15 years or so of the Paterno era their really good years were pretty sporadic. There was a lot of so-so and downright bad seasons mixed in.


I am not sure fairness figures into any of this and I don't necessarily think it should. With the way it is right now you've got quite a few a good games during the season that gets the Big Ten grabbing some national attention. That is good in a lot of ways vs if those teams were only playing every other year. Where it becomes an issue is if you start ending up with lopsided championship games (when presumably even more eyes are watching) because the West can't even produce 1 team capable of competing. And on that we will have to wait and see. People keeping waiting for Wisconsin to return to some level of mediocrity, but we are going on 30 years since Alvarez got in there and it still hasn't happened.

they've been pretty mediocre for awhile. their schedule is always soft and they've benefited tremendously from the split. sure they won 3 bowl games but they barely beat Western Mich last year, a 5 loss USC team and a 5 loss Aubern team. They've beaten osu just once in 10 years. look at their record from 2005 to 2009, it's pretty awful. They were .500 in conference in 2012. The only ranked team they beat in 2016 was MSU and we weren't ranked for long. If wisconsin was in the B1G East, they'd be out of the conversation by October every year.