Lansing Area Radio Reporting

The Jug will never again truly be up for grabs. From this point forward (well, from 2006 forward, actually), Minnesota will never have even the slightest chance of beating Michigan. 

Or so I hope.

IU, Illinois and Purdue in one division? Looks a little unbalanced to me.

Out of NU and Minny, which don't you see as a cupcake?  I'd consider either of them before Purdue.

So we play the best three teams on the other side?

Hopefully not, that's a ridiculous competitive disadvantage if true.

....how did people decide whether to post in this thread, or the one right before it...?

A sociological study to be had there.  Anyone need a Masters thesis?

Well, to be fair, A LOT of the people who post here never even look at the sidebar.  Ever.  They look at the MGoBoard page, which lists posts by most recent post.  So, the decision to post in this one versus the other one probably results from the fact that this one was further toward the top of the page than the other one (which it was when I clicked on it).

It's far from perfect from our perspective, but it's still a hell of a lot better than it was when I went to sleep last night.

I see the point about having a tougher schedule, but I'm looking forward to the days when we'll have teams that will *WANT* to play a tougher schedule because we're the leaders and best.  Let's take on all comers and show them who THE VICTORS are!

I said this on another post a while ago but the whole "Michigan is gonna have a tougher schedule" is BS.  OSU has protected games right now against PSU and us, if you were to line that up against everyone else's protected games, you would consider that the toughest of the bunch and they have owned the Big Ten this decade.

Isn't that tough?

I don't know that the bottom is that much tougher. Yeah, NW might make it so, a little. But we were going to play MSU anyway. That wasn't going to change. And really, if you look at it, of the groups of 3-

In ours, only Northwestern has won a Big Ten title in most of our lifetimes. In theirs, Illinois and Purdue have. I don't know than other those couple of years that they played us tough that Minnesota has been any better than Indiana has. I think our teams are more consistent....theirs have bigger ups and downs.

And Wisconsin has been better than Iowa, and Nebraska probably better than PSU...so, it evens out.

I broke it down historically in my first post here, but the tiers are essentially...

TIER 1: Michigan, OSU, PSU, Nebraska

TIER 2: Wisconsin, Iowa

TIER 3: Purdue, Michigan State, Northwestern

TIER 4: Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana

We do end up in a tougher division. Wisconsin gets the short end of the stick as far as rivalries though. Lose Minnesota and don't get Nebraska. What did Barry Alvarez do at that meeting?

http://shouldvewatched.blogspot.com/

How often do you really think that's going to be the case?

There have been times in the last 15 years where one team has had the conference championship locked up going into The Game. I don't think either team took it easy to prep for the Rose Bowl. It's UM/OSU. More times than not, it will determine if one/both of the teams will proceed to the BTCG.

Well if one or both teams have thier division locked up, chances are they are playing for a National Title so I highly doubt any team is going to go half throttle.

I see the incentive to not show everything or bck off a little, however 1 loss can ruin your chances of a MNC especially if that loss is to a UM or OSU. There is no way you can bank on the Big Ten Championship game getting you into the BCS championship game with the amount of parity in the game today.

I have to imagine they'll count toward division standings. Otherwise, there's not really a Big 10 conference, there are two conferences that have an agreement to play a championship game and to hold a series of non-conference games.

In-division records will likely be a key tie-breaker (right after head-to-head, I'd imagine), but all Big 10 games should/will count toward the divisional standings.

One senario might be the Bcs national championship. It could keep them from not caring. A one loss team still has the chance to go to NC.

I was never for putting them in separate divisions. There is less chance for the game to having meaning than if they were in the same division.

It seemed to work last time....

Michigan has been a red-letter day for every B10 school since time immemorial.  Perhaps it's my arrogance, but I believe that most teams get more pumped up about beating Michigan than OSU, even in years when we are down.  Why?  Most wins, biggest stadium, winged helmets, arrogant fans, brown jugs, whatever -- for most teams in most years, even a losing season can be deemed successful, and perhaps glorious, if you beat Michigan.  So I'm not so worried about all of the new "rivalries."  As the players have said about a zillion times on the CTK videos, "This is Michigan.  There's always pressure to win."

Bring it on.

Pretty sure the divisions are only for football and nothing else.