Was Delany able to keep a straight face when he made the comment about the "first 18 years"?  Does anyone out there think this current thing is going to last for more than a few years?  (Yes, I know grant of rights in the ACC and all.  That just means that the SEC, the Big Ten, ESPN and Texas are going to have to pay off the ACC when they start poaching more teams.)

Oh my god that intro was completely perfect and hilarious. You don't always hit the mark with that sort of humor (though it's always appreciated), but you really did there. 

is going to increase the odds of a terrible team reaching the Big Ten title game.

The SEC title game history is full of teams who reached Atlanta(or Birmingham) who simply played a softer conference schedule.  Not because they were actually better than everyone in their division.

So can someone explain how the parity-based scheduling does anything other than screw the teams most deserving of making the championship game?  MSU fans must be drooling over the words, "you’ll see Wisconsin, Nebraska and Iowa playing a lot of competition against Penn State, Ohio State and Michigan."

I'm not crazy about parity based scheduling. It's a great theory until that one season Michigan State/Penn State winds up in the championship game because parity-based scheduling matched it up with Purdue and Illinois, when each M and OSU lost a game to Nebraska/Wisconsin/Iowa okay not Iowa. 

I realize that can happen with standard scheduling as well, but at least those are planned in advance. I'm not crazy about parity-based scheduling in the NFL, as it leads to that come-out-of-nowhere playoff qualifier that gets torched by 40 in the Wild Card round (at least it used to before the entire NFL essentially became as good as everyone else).

Also, does this mean the "Land Grant Trophy" is going to be a thing again?

Any way to get more Mayim Bialik in people's lives is a good thing

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We didn't play Iowa and Northwestern every year anyway, so no big loss. In the "everyone else is going to rotate off 2 or 3 times while PSU only does so once" format, it seemed like certain teams fell off more than others. And adding Penn State every year is a pretty fair trade when we start winning again and driving their fans nuts. Ah, good times.

And I had forgotten the "move MSU to the end of the season talk"....a cold reminder. Brrrr.

Hypothesis, not theory.

For those Michigan alums and fans living on the East Coast, this is a big deal (something Brian is consistently satirical about in his narratives).  It's taxing getting to Ann Arbor for a game, although having Penn State in the neighborhood since 1993 helps out.  Now that Rutgers and Maryland have been added to the conference, seeing the Wolverines in person for football, basketball, etc., became that much easier.

When was the last time Michigan football travelled to the northeast or mid-Atlantic for a regular season football game?  The Wolverines played at Syracuse in 1999 and before that, UM travelled to Beantown to play Boston College in 1995.  Michigan will be playing Connecticut later this year as payback for UConn being the stadium dedication opponent in 2010.  So that's almost 14 years between appearances.

But with Maryland and Rutgers regularly on the schedule, it's probable that Michigan will be playing those two teams on their home turf in alternating seasons.  Who knows?  It might be on their home stadiums or even at the bigger pro venues in the Washington DC, Baltimore and New York City areas.   Personally, I like the idea that Michgan's geographic footprint in terms of conference play now goes from Nebraska to the Atlantic Ocean.

I'm excited for the change.  Annual games with Ohio State, Michigan State and now Penn State coupled with a steady dose of Nebraska or Wisconsin along with I anticipate will be a series of pretty good home-and-home games with at least one top flight non-conference opponent per year means the overall schedule is going to probably be better going forward.  We'll see what David Brandon can do with the OOC schedule--if he can line up teams like LSU or Texas A&M or Tennessee from the SEC or Oklahoma or Texas from the Big XII, then that'll be a definite upgrade.

I'm  not a fan of the on-purpose scheduling imbalance.  It pretty much puts a dagger in the heart of decent non-conference scheduling for the big name teams.  Yeah, you'll get more OSU vs Nebraska, but you'll also get more OSU vs. Akron to balance it out.  It also probably isn't going to work very well.  Schedules have to be made years in advance.  Five years from now, whose to say if Wisconsin will be where they are now, or back to where they were before Barry Alvarez? If and when Illinois finally puts together a legitimate Top 20 team, they are going to have a cakewalk to the CCG, because the schedule will be made up assuming that they are shit.  And good luck filling up stadiums in Minneapolis, Evanston, and Ross Aide from now on. 

The Big Ten:  Giving Delaware What-For Since 2014!™

I also laughed at the "18 years" part.  Then again, it's hard to take anything Jim Delany says seriously.  However, I'm sure that he was able to keep a straight face, given the other things he's said.  POSIT: Jim Delany is actually a robot sent by aliens to soften human resistance to the upcoming invasion by destroying our most beloved pastimes and causing us to mistrust even the most basic communication from other people.  When we're all deep in the molybdenum mines of China digging up precious ore for our new overlords, it's all going to be on him.  ;-)

(ed: earlier poster was right; "theory" was wrong :-) ).

And I wish that we had done something to preserve the Brown Jug game.  It's one of the few remaining traditions in the game that reminds us of its roots.  And don't tell me that it's not important anymore.  There's a restaurant in Ann Arbor named after it for Chrissakes, and at the end of the day, our schedule is going to be calibrated in a manner that Minnesota is replaced with a team of equal caliber (in a game that has less charm).

They would be a great addition to the conference, a Rivalry for Sparty ( green S vs  green S), and the Deleware market could be added to the Big 14/10 market. (\s)

How will this work if we're also supposed to see everyone from the other division at least once every four years?  Rotate one or two cross division games and make the remaining one  based on who has been good lately?  Still seems like there's some mystery to how all this is going to work.  

Also, if we are picking opponents from one year to the next as opposed to rotating, it seems like it might set up a situation where we have to face a team on the road in consecutive meetings, even if those meetings are a couple seasons apart.  For example, say we're at Nebraska one year... they rotate off the following year, but are put back on for the following season because both teams have done well.  Problem is, our other two crossover games are scheduled at home.  We can't have three cross-division home games, so the Big 10 puts us back in Lincoln again.  

I mean, I'd like to give the conference more credit than that, but that was before I had heard that purposeful imbalance was part of this equation.  I should have known after they actually got it right on H/A split that they'd go and do something like this.

Looking forward to MSU and NW making random late-season runs to the fringe of the conference championships because they missed the top teams in the other division, then failing on the last weekend and hearing (at least MSU) fans complain that the system is rigged against them.

and we add a couple more east coast teams in "major media markets" to make Jim Delaney happy, then Indiana shifts to the west, and that division is pretty much the old Big Ten minus Michigan and Ohio, what with MSU in the 50s and PSU in the 90s being johnny-come-lately's.