Big Ten makes it official: East/West Divisions & 9 gm schedule
Big Ten just put out the press release:
http://www.bigten.org/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/042813aaa.html
Big Ten East Division: Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State and Rutgers.
Big Ten West Division: Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Purdue and Wisconsin.
9 game conference schedule beginning in 2016.
Protected cross-division games eliminated with the exception of Indiana-Purdue.
East Division will have 5 home conference games in even years, meaning Michigan will have Ohio State at home in our 4 game home conference slate in odd years.
That makes no effing sense unless the goal is to try to make it more difficult for B1G teams to play for the national championship. It sounds like the kind of demand a whiny school who complained about being in the more difficult division would make.
Play the 5 in your division and half (3 teams) in the other divisions.
That's not really true. If you play 8 games with a 14 team league then you play 6 division and 2 non-division games every year. Which means that you do play every single team every 3.5 years so with a 4 year player's career they would see every other school. The only way you don't see all of the other teams in 4 years if you repeat home and away with schools over 3 years rather than just playing one or the other and then playing different schools the next year.
It is true that you would not travel to other schools during each players career you wind up only playing 4 road games against those 7 teams in 4 years so they never get to visit 3 of those other 7 schools. Though I can't think of a reason that not visiting another campus really matters as they don't do much more than play and hang out at the hotel on road trips.
April 28th, 2013 at 11:42 PM ^
there will now be 6 opponents in your division, not 5
geez can we go to the west side
This is all good for us.
Remember when we were going to have to play MSU as the last game of the regular season, while Nebraska / Penn State and Ohio State / Wisconsin became the new Big Ten headliner games?
Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with where we ended up.
The BIG East Division is the new Big 12 South.
And Nebraska is once again on the outside looking in.
With a lot more money this time.
With the possibility of only having 4 home games in a season, I think that it probably means that we are done scheduling road games in the non conference schedule every other year. This also probably means more games against MAC foes at the Big House, since money talks.
Cool. We're already one step closer to the SEC.
How fitting. The game before they unveil the new divisions on BTN is the game where Iowa beats Sparty on the last play of the game.
edit: I thought I saw there was supposed to be something on btn. I guess not. Oh well. Still nice to see them lose like that.
On a personal note.... I enjoy road trips West more than road trips East... I really enjoy taking over Northwesterns Stadium on a fall day and was hoping to eventually make it to Camp Randall stadium and the long trek to Nebraska.
Wait until you see how we take over College Park.
UM, MN, WI, MSU, PSU, Rutgers and NU in the North Division.
OSU, NE, IA, IL, IN, Purdue, Maryland in the the South Division.
Though UM would have a inter-division game every year against OSU while half of the north would not play OSU in a particular season...so MSU, PSU, NU or WI could ease into a division title at times.
Even though the East at this point in time and for the foreseeable future will be the dominate division, I like that the way to the big 10 championship will be through the Michigan - OSU game.
In a few years it will be the far more better game then the B1G championship game. It may come to the point where the winner of the UM-OSU game will rest their starters in the B1G championship game so that they will be fresh for the NC playoff run!