Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Realigning the Big Ten in the Wake of the Sandusky Scandal

Penn St football will never be the same again after the sanctions that Mark Emmert and the NCAA forced upon them.  (Personally I think they had no business penalizing the program and should be focusing their efforts on preventing violations not reacting to them with their sanctimonious penalties.)  This leaves the Big Ten Conference in a pickle because for the next 2 seasons only four members of the 6-team Leaders Division are eligible for postseason play--the Leader's two strongest brands and two out its three strongest teams cannot win the division.  This leaves a terrible imbalance between the two divisions and will likely mean that we will see a Leaders Division "Champion" make the title game over a much more deserving 2nd place team from the Legends Division due to the sanctions in place.  last year in the Pac-12 a 6-6 UCLA "won" the South Division with a 5-4 conference record because USC was ineligible to carry the South's flag at the title game.  That UCLA was crushed by Oregon while a far superior Stanford team sat at home.  The same could happen in Big Ten Country the next 2 seasons.  I have two suggestions for the Big Ten:

A)  Immediately enact a new rule stating that if one or more members of a division are facing postseason bans then the second place team of the opposite division will go to the Big Ten title game if they have a better conference record than the team that would ordinarily represent the division in the title game.  This could mean that they would be replacing a team who won the division by default because, like in UCLA's case, the actual winner was ineligible OR as the result of sanctions weakening one or more elite teams that division was utterly noncompetitive compared to the other.

B) Scrap Leaders and Legends and go to geographic--East/West divisions.  Leaders and Legends was built on the premise that the 4 biggest money makers/brand names--Penn St, Ohio St, Michigan, and Nebraska--would be split up evenly and that each division would also get one of the two up-and-coming programs--Wisconsin and Michigan St.  It was a good idea at the time but with the Penn St program in shambles for the next decade and Ohio St facing issues over their own because of Terrell Pryor's tattoos this paradigm no longer works.  Put Penn St, Ohio St, Michigan, Michigan St, Indiana, and Purdue in an East Division and Illinois, Northwestern, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska in the West.  Let Indiana and Illinois keep a preserved crossover rivalry and the same with Purdue and Northwestern.  All the trophies are thus protected.  Ohio St, Michigan, and Michigan St hallmark the East while the trio of Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Iowa provide the backbone of the West.  When Penn St recovers the conference can reconsider going back to the old divisions but for the time being Leaders and Legends just don't work.   

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