Big Ten alignment - Best article yet

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To me putting just sticking PSU into the opposite division is just wrong no matter how you slice it. If this is what happens I'll be fine as a Gopher fan, but I wouldn't blame PSU fans/coaches/players if they were pissed off.
 

Dumb! PSU does not belong with us.....I have little interest in them and I am sure they have little interest in us. Also, we need to play Michigan as a rivals game whether they are in our conference or not-the little brown jug is the coolest of all trophies. Sports Illustrated is off just like Rittenberg is.
 

All in all, I could live with this. I have a feeling there's almost no chance that we're going to be given all 3 trophy games annually, so I'd much rather give up Michigan then have them screw with Iowa or Bucky. Having PSU in the west isn't ideal, but if you're going to split up OSU, Michigan and PSU, it's going to be PSU that moves. At least they get the rivalry with Nebraska renewed and a virtual guarantee that either Michigan or OSU will be thier cross-over rival.
 

howeda7 said:
All in all, I could live with this. I have a feeling there's almost no chance that we're going to be given all 3 trophy games annually, so I'd much rather give up Michigan then have them screw with Iowa or Bucky. Having PSU in the west isn't ideal, but if you're going to split up OSU, Michigan and PSU, it's going to be PSU that moves. At least they get the rivalry with Nebraska renewed and a virtual guarantee that either Michigan or OSU will be thier cross-over rival.
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Pretty much how I feel. They'll never mess with the Axe or the Pig and as much as I'd like the Jug to be an every year deal I've already resigned myself to the fact that it likely won't be.
 


loki said:
Dumb! PSU does not belong with us.....I have little interest in them and I am sure they have little interest in us. Also, we need to play Michigan as a rivals game whether they are in our conference or not-the little brown jug is the coolest of all trophies. Sports Illustrated is off just like Rittenberg is.
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PSU doesn't really belong with anyone. I would MUCH rather have PSU than for us to move into a division with OSU. Also, this division alignment is by FAR the best as far as our chances to get to a conference title game. Yes, the LBJ is a great trophy, but playing Indiana every year is much better for us. I would be happy with either this set up, or straight geography.
 

Same garbage, different author.

East/West

Discussion over.
 

Joe Paterno started talking about expansion before anybody else did. He also made it clear that he, and Penn State, wanted a team from the East to help out their travel situation across the board.

If they get sent West it will be interesting to hear the response.
 

Iceland12 said:
Joe Paterno started talking about expansion before anybody else did. He also made it clear that he, and Penn State, wanted a team from the East to help out their travel situation across the board.

If they get sent West it will be interesting to hear the response.
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I'm not sure why it would matter. They fly to every football game anyway, right? So the extra travel time is negligible - maybe an extra half-hour or 45 minutes per conference game road trip on average. If the divisions also affected non-revenue sports, I can see why it would be a big problem, but all indications are that the divisions are for football only.
 



2727Gopher said:
I'm not sure why it would matter. They fly to every football game anyway, right? So the extra travel time is negligible - maybe an extra half-hour or 45 minutes per conference game road trip on average. If the divisions also affected non-revenue sports, I can see why it would be a big problem, but all indications are that the divisions are for football only.
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Paterno seemed to think it mattered enough to bring it up in the past.

Did Delaney comment on the "football only" status of realignment?
 

Iceland12 said:
Paterno seemed to think it mattered enough to bring it up in the past.

Did Delaney comment on the "football only" status of realignment?
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I don't think there are many other sports that all 12 schools participate in except basketball and maybe wrestling, and there's no need for divisions in either.
 

I hate arbitrary starting points of competitiveness. What happened in the early 90s is no more relevant to college football today than what happened in the 60s. So using the early 90s as a metric skews us into the bottom tier. If you look at the last 10 or 12 years the Gophers have consistently been a middle tier Big Ten team.

And if you look at all of history, obviously the Gophers are part of the elite upper echelon with Michigan and Ohio State.

The Wacker years mean nothing in terms of where the Gophers are today.
 

Section2 said:
I don't think there are many other sports that all 12 schools participate in except basketball and maybe wrestling, and there's no need for divisions in either.
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Makes sense; in the grand scheme of things whether Penn State or Iowa's Men's Basketball team finishes 11 or 12 isn't of much importance.

Joe Pa must have felt that having them finish 6th sounded much better.
 



AhliBobwa said:
I hate arbitrary starting points of competitiveness. What happened in the early 90s is no more relevant to college football today than what happened in the 60s. So using the early 90s as a metric skews us into the bottom tier. If you look at the last 10 or 12 years the Gophers have consistently been a middle tier Big Ten team.

And if you look at all of history, obviously the Gophers are part of the elite upper echelon with Michigan and Ohio State.

The Wacker years mean nothing in terms of where the Gophers are today.
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Exactly, what kind of arbitrary point is 1993? If you set in at 2000, it would be much different, if you set it at 1920 it would be different again. I think competitiveness is simply code for "brand name". Don't make the same mistakes as the ACC Delaney...go East/West.
 

Good Idea SI. Lets put 4 of the clear cut top 6 teams in the same division. And lets put the top 2 teams in with 4 of the bottom six.


And then to take it a step further. Lets call it even.


What people who are creating these scenarios need to understand is this: Perhaps it is a good idea to take PSU out of the East and put them in the west so that the big 4 are divided 2/2. But if you are doing it for the sense of "competitive balance," when you move Penn State from the East to the West, you cannot trade them for one of the bottom feeders. SI tries to trade them for Northwestern (who they have rated 9). If you are actually doing it for competitive balance, you have to trade them for Wisconsin or Iowa. If you trade them for someone other than Wisconsin or Iowa, then it creates a balance problem more than it solves one.
 

AhliBobwa said:
I hate arbitrary starting points of competitiveness. What happened in the early 90s is no more relevant to college football today than what happened in the 60s. So using the early 90s as a metric skews us into the bottom tier. If you look at the last 10 or 12 years the Gophers have consistently been a middle tier Big Ten team.

And if you look at all of history, obviously the Gophers are part of the elite upper echelon with Michigan and Ohio State.

The Wacker years mean nothing in terms of where the Gophers are today.
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Totally agree. To be fair, it is not COMPLETELY arbitrary -- he used the year Penn State joined...but that is still fairly arbitrary, IMO. You can bend and twist stats to fit your argument most any way you want.

1. Ohio State and Michigan MUST be in the same division. There's no way either the conference or the schools wants to touch the tradition of these teams' season-ending showdown, and you certainly don't want the possibility of them meeting again a week later in a title game.
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This is the statement that bothers me the most. Why do we continue to bow down to OSU and Michigan? Why don't we just call it the Buckeyes and Wolverine and other Big 10 Conference?
 

30 years from now, by which time at least two of the current prestige schools may be in a long funk and at least two new prestige schools may have been born, anything but a natural geographic split will seem like absolute foolishness in retrospect. Sportswriters keep concocting these convoluted solutions to a non-problem in order to create stories.

Imagine if the Big Ten had gone to 12 schools in the 1960s. Would traditional powers like Minnesota and Michigan State need to be split up between the divisions for competitive balance?

The only solution guaranteed to produce no regrets is East West. Keep it natural.
 

ouch. kinda forgot wow bad the gophers have been in the past 17 years since B11 began. even with the 1-11 start, Brew has a winning% of .388 the past 3 years. eat that haters. :pig::pig:



-------------------
Recent Conference Records of Big Ten Teams and Nebraska
TEAM RECORD TEAM RECORD
1. Ohio State 106-29-1 (.779) 7. Purdue 63-70-3 (.463)
2. Michigan 94-42 (.691) 8. Michigan State 63-72-1 (.463)
3. Nebraska 75-37 (.669) 9. Northwestern 59-77 (.434)
4. Penn State 86-50 (.632) 10. Illinois 45-90-1 (.331)
5. Wisconsin 79-54-3 (.581) 11. Minnesota 44-92 (.324)
6. Iowa 71-64-1 (.522) 12. Indiana 33-103 (.243)

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/20...-divisions/index.html?eref=sihp#ixzz0rdM86VmP
 

Tough choice

For Michigan and OSU = Which of the new kids do you want to play with = PSU or Nebraska?

You play every year. Conference opener for both. Win your division play again in the last game.

The second part may be optional, I don't think the first part is.

PSU is east Nebraska is west, and hopefully never in the BT championship game shall they ever meet.

D@Mb I keep forgetting that I don't care if PSU OSU and Mich are together. But I would like Mich with MN.
 


tjgopher said:
1993 is when Penn State began playing in the Big Ten. I'm sure that is why the writer used that as the dateline.
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Correct, Mandel says so in the article:
With the Big Ten, we have a convenient starting point of 1993, the year Penn State joined the conference. That gives us 17 seasons worth of data and encompasses high and low points for nearly every program. It gets a little trickier when incorporating Nebraska, which not only played in a different conference, but which was still a member of the much-weaker Big 8 in '93. In the Huskers' case, I used only their records since 1996, when they joined the Big 12.
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Unregistered User said:
Same garbage, different author.

East/West

Discussion over.
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+1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111, ad inifitum
 

East-West is the only split that makes any sense. East-West is balanced. Sure, you can cherry pick time periods to make it say what you want, but it's been balanced for quite some time. An East-West split is natural, it won't stick out like a sore thumb in those years when the divisions aren't balanced (no matter what you do, there will be years when one division is significantly better than the other). Are they going to reshuffle divisions every time one seems to be ahead of the other?

Let's not have another ACC.
 

Well done by Mandel. This would be a fair split. Someone's going to get bumped to the "west", and Penn State is the obvious candidate. It's certainly not going to be Michigan or Ohio State.
 


So, in the name of competitive balance we end up with Ohio State and five teams that suck in the East, and four real good teams in the West. When will the mental masturbation end?

East/West, end of story.
 

Penn State is not going to be in our conference. Michigan may end up with us but Penn State is too far away...Geography and lack of rivalries would prohibit them being with us. Also, I agree with those that are stating that picking 1993 is arbitrary....why not 2 years ago, 10 years ago or 50 years ago. Believe it or not, MN will be good again so picking conferences based on recent history is silly. Base the conferences on history, tradition and location.
 

Penn State is the obvious choice NOT to be put in the West. This is because they are the most eastward of the teams in the conference.

Seventeen years is a very screwy time to base things on. Those players of 17 years ago are long gone. If we must not base everything on the events of the last season, surely we can agree that events of 17 years ago have little bearing on where things are likely to be now.
 

Why?

No way in the world they're going to put Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State in the same division. It's as simple as that. Whether we/I agree with it or not, that's what's going to happen.

There are 4 things I feel certain about with regards to division alignment:

(1) Penn State will be separated from Mich/OSU;

(2) Michigan, Michigan State & Ohio State will be in the same division;

(3) Indiana and Purdue will be in the same division; and

(4) Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin will be in the same division.

Those 4 things will happen. The rest is what they'll haggle about.
 

SelectionSunday said:
Why?

No way in the world they're going to put Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State in the same division. It's as simple as that. Whether we/I agree with it or not, that's what's going to happen.

There are 4 things I feel certain about with regards to division alignment:

(1) Penn State will be separated from Mich/OSU;

(2) Michigan, Michigan State & Ohio State will be in the same division;

(3) Indiana and Purdue will be in the same division; and

(4) Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin will be in the same division.

Those 4 things will happen. The rest is what they'll haggle about.
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I don't necessarily think all 4 of those things will happen. If they do stick to those four points, the divisions are practically decided already. Since PSU will be separated from MI/OSU and MI/MSU/OSU will be in the same division (call it the East), that puts PSU in the other division (call it the West) which you already have containing MN/IA/NE/WI. Since Indiana and Purdue can't be split up, they have to go into the East since there are already 5 teams in the West. Therefore, the only thing to be decided is the last spot in each division... does Northwestern or Illinois go West?
 

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