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Big Ten Division Realignment Announced

Posted by Brian Krassenstein on Sep 1st, 2010 and filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Big TenAs much as many teams and their fans disliked the idea of the Big Ten realignment, something clearly needed to be done. This afternoon, the final nail in the latest realignment idea was hammered in as the Big Ten announced the new setup.

There will now be 2 separate divisions of 6 teams a piece. The divisions are as follows:

Michigan
Nebraska
Michigan State
Iowa
Northwestern
Minnesota

Ohio State
Penn State
Wisconsin
Purdue
Indiana
Illinois

The most dramatic shift is that, probably the two biggest rivals in all of college football are now in separate divisions, Ohio State, and Michigan. Having said this, the Commissioner of the Big Ten, Jim Delaney, has made sure that certain key rivalries take place each and every year. The following games will occur each year despite the new divisional setup. Ohio State-Michigan, Penn State-Nebraska, Illinois-Northwestern, Purdue-Iowa, Wisconsin-Minnesota and Indiana-Michigan State. The new divisions go into affect beginning in 2011

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  • Anonymous

    I know there was no easy way to add Nebraska to the conference without screwing things up. Don’t get me wrong – I’m delighted the Cornhuskers are joining us and will look forward to kicking their butts more regularly!But as a lifelong Penn State fan, I gotta tell ya I’m really disappointed we won’t have the annual game vs Michigan. That’s been a great matchup – the Wolverines won early days when PSU joined the Big 10 but the Nittany Lions have dominated them the past 3 straight years. The TV guys try to make the end of season Penn State-Michigan State game into ‘the big game’ for both schools. In reality, Penn Staters have no zest for Michigan State – they’ve never been viewed as our rivals. If you poll Penn Staters, the 2 schools that will be unanimously mentioned as ‘our rivals’ are Michigan and Ohio State. So, under the realignment, we get to go head-to-head vs the Buckeyes each year but will rarely play the Wolverines – that’s disappointing as we were really looking forward to continuing to kick their butts as payback and to settle the score for early days. Additionally, we will play 3 teams every year we have no passion for in Purdue, Indiana and Illinois.I personally think an East-West alignment would have been more interesting, with PSU, Ohio State and Michigan all going at each other every year and the farm boys in the West – Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin – all going head to head. This would’ve made for really good match-ups and great games to watch on TV during the season plus a really cool conference championship game like Penn State-Nebraska, Ohio State-Iowa, etc.I hope the Big 10 committee will find ways to tweak the current plan to make the conference as good as it can be and better than it is under this scheme. You’ll also need to come up with a new logo – the “11″ imprinted in “Big 10″ no longer fits.

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