"The Game" Fiasco: How the B10 Office can save face.

...this is a terrible idea. This will never ever happen.

No offense, but for the players, who wants their senior day to be against Eastern?

for me to poop on.

It would be a shame to have a setup where Michigan and Ohio State could not play each other for the Big 10 title.

Is it just me, or does this sound really really arrogant? Would a Michigan vs Penn State or an Ohio State vs Nebraska matchup ruin the conference? Or heck, what about a MSU vs Iowa matchup? Michigan vs Ohio State might be the biggest single rivalry, but to think this is all planned out for a re-match is a little nuts.

You may not have noticed, but the Final Word was posted on this subject a few hours ago.

Just because it's easy for fans/players to get pumped for a tomato can to start the season - the season hasn't started yet! yay football! you know? But the last game of the season, nobody is going to be excited for that, and they shouldn't be - they just beat/lost to their rival.

I like where you're head's at, trying to figure out a way to make lemonade and all. But I don't think this proposal is a very good idea.

Absent Raback coming out and saying anything to the contrary, I'm going to say that the Game will be played the first week of the football season. 

Discuss and Decide.

than to have to switch gears for another team, then switch back.

As someone who is irked by the very existence of The Game (the hyped rivalry not the rapper) and all it represents, it really needs to be saved just for tradition's sake.

The biggest lesson of the Big 12 and ACC division splits is to keep the rivals together in sensible divisions and don't try to manufacture a championship matchup, we're going to not make rivalries the highest priority and try to manufacture a OSU-M championship game?

Can Tom Osbourne explain to his new peers what happened to the Oklahoma-Nebraska game and how that wasn't good? And how trying to guess competitive balance is a pretty inexact science taught at Colorado and Kansas State? One problem I see with the since PSU joined data is that you've had at least two pretty improbable things happening during that time.

1.) Michigan's historic reign of winning seasons encompasses most of it. Anybody think any school in the 85-scholarships, everyone's on TV era breaks that?

2.)Joe Pa's reign at Penn State. The average good school would have had to make a hire or three in 17 years since they joined the Big 10, with all the pitfalls that entails. Excellent Big East coaches or promoting assistants who get big bowl wins after Saban leaves might have done Penn State in for a 4-5 period at some point under the normal run of things. 

Maybe the compromise would be to say, the geographic ones are the divisions for the next 8 years, we can revisit them if they prove to be uncompetitive.

If they don't want to play them in back to back weeks drop the bye week, move the game back to before thanksgiving. Finsh the season like usual and give the bye before the championship game.

When all is said and done, Michigan and OSU should stay in the same division.  As I've posted elsewhere, if Michigan and OSU are in separate divisions, one or the other will have a loss.  If they have a loss, the chances of getting to the championship game diminish significantly so we're solving a problem that at most is going to happen once a decade.  The better course is to just bite the bullet and recognize the game has been slightly diminished and the teams are going to be playing for a chance to go the conference championship rather than a BCS bowl bid. 

There would be plenty of tomato cans available to schedule for the end of season non-conference slot, most of whom would have finished their own regular seasons and would welcome the extra paycheck.

I think finding scheduling partners for this would be infinitely more difficult than you're leading on. It's already apparent that many teams, even the so-called mid-majors, are growing more hesitant to schedule away games without a return visit. Yes, you can still convince a tomato can to come and take a whoopin'. But 1) to do it at the end of the season, 2) in a cold stadium (assuming you want a home OOC game), and 3) for all 12 teams in the conference? Good luck. This is partly why we've ended up with uninspiring D1-AA (FCS) teams on our schedule for the last two years. And when we schedule an inspiring one, we get The Horror.

Of course, you could try to convince Hawaii (or some other warm-weather school) to play you at their place. But is this all worth a ho-hum OOC away game? That Hawaii game in 1998 was one of the most boring, most anti-climactic games I've ever watched.

The two Big 10 championship game opponents can rest their first string and use this game to give their second/third string some reps.

This isn't like resting Peyton Manning in Week 17, when you already have a playoff bye. Yes, hopefully you could be up 27-0 at the end of the first quarter and pull your starters. But you could also end up in a dogfight with everything to lose and virtually nothing to win. Or worse, blow out David Molk's knee.

I'm with the others -- this isn't an idea that I could support.

Thanks for trying to come up with something in the first place but I don't like it. The idea of playing Eastern or Akron as the last game of the season is bad for the fans and the players.