Expansionism, Ho! Revisited!

by Sam @ WWAHT on Dec 16, 2009 10:00 AM EST Comment 1 comment

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This past summer, I discussed, at great length, the possibility of Big Ten expansion. I then examined the following candidates and the likelihood that they would actually pack things up and move to a new conference (or to a conference in the first place)

- and MilCardFan chipped in with an out-of-the-box suggestion, Nebraska

Surprise surprise, on the eve of what will likely be yet another disappointing bowl season, the issue has come up again:

Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez says the Big Ten will soon make a more aggressive push toward adding a 12th member.

Speaking to Wisconsin's athletic board on Friday, Alvarez, the former longtime Badgers football coach, said the conference already has investigated possibilities for expansion "from all over the country." And though he places no timetable on the search, Alvarez thinks conference commissioner Jim Delany will respond to a group of athletic directors and coaches who want expansion.

My initial thoughts upon hearing this were "Gee, can't we put off the usual offseason blog fodder until, you know, the actual offseason?" This is an issue that has been brought up incessantly ever since the Penn State addition worked out so well, and along with the usual offseason coachspeak, recruiting hype and pre-preseason previewing that fills the Big Ten's banana republic corner of Blogfrica after the bowl season, it's consistently one of the top three or four annual stories concerning the conference. But this time around it appears to have steam; Jim Delany stepped out of his SEC-fueled two-minutes' hate echo chamber for a brief press conference, footage of which can be seen here (Delany begins the conference with a cigar, oddly):

No, no, wait: that's a scene from the movie Blazing Saddles. Huh. Had me fooled.

Ah, yes, here it is. Right. Anyway, Jim Delany helped put together a press release which said what any needlessly shrewd moneygrubbing business entity would by issuing a very definitive maybe:

"The COP/C believes that the timing is right for the conference to once again conduct a thorough evaluation of options for conference structure and expansion," the statement reads.

After the evaluation period, Delany and his staff, in conjunction with the league's athletic directors and presidents, will decide whether to make a recommendation for expansion. At that point, they will inform Michigan State president Lou Ann K. Simon, the chair of the Council of Presidents/Chancellors, as well as the commissioner of the affected conference before pursuing a specific school.

I am told that Delany did in fact exclaim after that he "didn't get a harrumph out of that guy!" before telling said guy to watch his ass.

In all seriousness, I'm glad the conference is at least sending out feelers. The Big Ten was a well-deserved reputation as a dinosaur conference that is home to (unfortunately) multiple "dinosaur" programs. While adding Notre Dame wouldn't exactly be an infusion of young blood - in fact, it'd be piling old blood on top of old blood - it'd still give the conference the "new look" it desperately needs by necessitating a move to divisional play and, of course, a conference championship game. There are positives and negatives to this direction, as always, but for the most part, things that make us more like the Big 12 and the SEC are good things, and should be viewed as such.

Now, a move to divisions is a complicated one - geographically, the good folks at BHGP are right in that it can't easily be done when one considers the likely, largely eastern-oriented set of candidates. It'll still be difficult for the Big Ten to implement a "historical" division guideline in which all (or even most) rivalries are "protected", as almost every team has multiple rivals and it's difficult to keep those rivals in the same division. Why is that a problem? I'll put it this way: Ohio State and Michigan fans want the Game to be played at some point in the regular season, yes? I don't think anyone wants to get rid of it altogether. Now, who, outside (perhaps) of those fanbases, really wants to see them play each year in the conference championship game, which could, in fact, end up happening if Michigan finds its sea legs again? Exactly no one. So keeping rivals within each others' divisions is important, but with the number of rivalries in the Big Ten, it just isn't feasible. Especially when Penn State has a new main rival every other week. ZING!

These may seem like minor considerations, but they're not; there are a lot of obstacles to Big Ten expansion simply from a minimum-goals standpoint - academic reputation, location, etc. - that are going to be considered far in advance of "Uh, how do we actually split this thing up?", but the latter is just as big of an obstacle as the former. Really, the former is whatever the "Eggheads" - as BHGP put it so appropriately yesterday - deem to be a vital components of a Big Ten expansion target, and the latter will only be discussed after the former has been decided.

So, assuming this expansion does happen, how do I think things should be divided up?

Let's let Hawkeye State set the stage again:

The Big Ten is not about to give up tradition for the sake of expansion. That means Michigan will play Ohio State and Michigan State, Indiana will play Purdue, Illinois will play Northwestern, and the Iowa-Minnesota-Wisconsin troika will take place annually. This puts a serious kink in any plan to split the conference geographically should another eastern team be added. Some have suggested an ACC-style split, based less on geography and more on historical power, but such a split would still demand UM-OSU-MSU be placed in the same division, requiring Penn State to either join them and tilt the scales in the east's favor (and, as entertaining as the thought may be to Iowa fans envisioning annual championship game trips, would initially create a Big XII North situation) or give up the land grant trophy (I know that's not a dealbreaker) and join the western teams (which might well be one, given the potential travel issues).

First off, I'm fine with an unbalanced conference set-up. Perhaps that's because I'd be a beneficiary of playing in the tougher division, but I also am not sure how much it really maters. For years, the Big 12 has had a fairly sub-par Northern division and has got along just fine. In fact, three-loss Big 12 North champion Nebraska gave undefeated Texas a world of guff before finally falling on a last-second game-winning field goal just a couple weekends ago. Even in the SEC, the West was largely powerless to stop the East until Alabama's recent return to glory; from 2002-2007, it was basically LSU and everyone else, and that more or less contains the beginnings of the conference's glory days. Perhaps this is too truncated a view of things in these other conferences, however.

I'm not sure there'd be quite the disparity between the divisions if Penn State were to stay in the East; Michigan is down - and, barring some defensive miracle work from Greg Robinson - might not be the Michigan of old again any time soon. Wisconsin and Iowa routinely churn out teams who are perfectly capable of beating both Ohio State and Penn State, and while both have had their troubles doing it, they'd be very good, very competitive foils in the event of a conference championship game. Unfortunately, for this scenario to really hold water, however, Notre Dame will have to be in the West division. Assuming Brian Kelly gets the Irish back on track, Notre Dame would the West's Ohio State; yes, there are other teams perfectly capable of beating them and usurping the division throne, but the preseason divisional championship hype will consistently start and end with the Irish. That said, it throws the Irish's rivalry with Purdue - not a particularly storied one, but a fierce one nonetheless - into question.

In the end, I'm hammering on points I probably shouldn't hammer on until something actually happens. Knowing the Big Ten, this expansion endeavor will again be fruitless, and the discussion as a whole will be tabled for another later date. This will happen for a variety of reasons, most of them having something to do with "the Eggheads" and the fact that the conference as a whole is about as cohesive of an entity as Congress. I, personally, really have no dog in this fight, other than wanting to see this conference become nationally relevant again.

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