Around the Big Ten

[Dr. Strangelove]

Another links with the news

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/6833142/big-ten-conference-use-9-game-league-schedule-football-2017

The first year following teams will get five home games: Nebraska, Iowa, MSU, OSU, Indiana, Illinois

[Hannibal]

Mandel reiterates that the Big10's division names stink but he likes the non-geographical split.

I still tend to agree with him on that and think putting Michigan, OSU, MSU, and PSU in the same division would've been too lopsided.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/201...ten.divisions/

It wouldn't have been lopsided enough to justify the disaster that expansion has been so far. I'll bet that most hardcore Big Ten football fans can't list the teams in each division without looking them up. The retarded division names were somewhat inevitable once you did away with the geographical divisions. There's no satisfying way to name non-geographical divisions.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Well expansion has hardly been a "disaster" before a single game has even been played under the new alignment. I would say adding Nebraska was enormously successful. They've added a very profitable championship game and dealt a potential death blow to a rival conference. I can tell you the divisions right off the top of my head

Call it the Big10 North and South if you prefer. Except for Wisconsin, it's more or less geographically correct.

[Hannibal]

Yes, we added one game to the schedule. Take the revenue from that one game, divide by 12, and tell me how much that is compared to the athletic budget at OSU or Michigan, or the gate receipts from one football game. To get that one game, we split up Michigan and OSU into separate divisions as part of a retarded and charmless divisional alignment that mirrors the shitty way that the ACC did it. On top of that, the divisions have dumb names that have made the conference the laughing stock of the nation. I'm glad that we added a quality football program instead of a shitty one, but beyond that, I can't think of a way that it could have possibly gone worse.

Call it the Big10 North and South if you prefer. Except for Wisconsin, it's more or less geographically correct.

More or less? I vote "less". Unless you think of Columbus and State College as being "south" of Lincoln or Iowa City, and not "east".

[Mackenzie]

Just curious as to opinions... What if you knew that Martin's legacy would be much needed facility improvement/expansion as well as being instrumental in and overseeing of the arguably, or not, worst three years in the history of M football, would you have hired him anyway? Of course that leaves out other notable achievementz such as hiring JB. But if it was only the facility vs football legacy would you have still hired him?

[Hannibal]

I know that Rodriguez was not a popular hire, but what should Martin have done instead? Don't say Les Miles. LSU was not going to let Miles go. LSU was on a national championship run. They would have matched whatever Michigan threw at him, and then some. Schiano? I liked Schiano, but you can't look at his record up to 2007 and say that he would have definitively been a better hire than RichRod. When we found out that he was being interviewed, a lot of people said "meh". Brian Kelly? Possibly, but he had issues too, including the transition to the spread. After that, it was a vast wasteland of candidates. The RichRod era was a complete fiasco, but I can't help but think that it is just an extreme example in which we made the best decision that we could make with the data that we had, and it ended up being disastrously wrong.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Yes, we added one game to the schedule. Take the revenue from that one game, divide by 12, and tell me how much that is compared to the athletic budget at OSU or Michigan, or the gate receipts from one football game. To get that one game, we split up Michigan and OSU into separate divisions as part of a retarded and charmless divisional alignment that mirrors the shitty way that the ACC did it. On top of that, the divisions have dumb names that have made the conference the laughing stock of the nation. I'm glad that we added a quality football program instead of a shitty one, but beyond that, I can't think of a way that it could have possibly gone worse.



More or less? I vote "less". Unless you think of Columbus and State College as being "south" of Lincoln or Iowa City, and not "east".

The Big12 divded itself by strict geography and they inadvertantly created a very lopsided arrangement in which all the strongest programs (historically) were in the South except Nebraska and all the bigtime money programs (except Nebraska) were in the South. Why exactly would we want to imitate THAT instead of the ACC?

Strict geography would've created very unbalanced divisions in terms of both power and money. Add to that what to do with Notre Dame should we finally ever get them. If you cared at all about balance, they'd go right to the west, BUT, all their rivals are in the East. So what do you do?? Slide them into the East too, add Missouri, and tell Indiana to take a hike to the West?

FWIW, The reason the ACC title game sucks is because, hello, it's the ACC. Small and poor-travelling fanbases make up half the league and they decided to hold the game in far away from the conference's heart. It's not because of how they drew up the divisions.

[lineygoblue]

I still tend to agree with him on that and think putting Michigan, OSU, MSU, and PSU in the same division would've been too lopsided.

I don't think it would have been all that lop sided. All of the teams that I would have put in the "West", (Nebraska, Wisconsin, Iowa, Northwestern, Minnesota and Illinois) all have had recent success against the teams that I would have put in the "East". And anyway, don't we want the Big Ten BCS representative to be the best team the conference can offer?

Nobody is going to have a cake walk in this new conference. Out of the 12 teams, I think there are 7-8 teams with a realistic shot at a CCG victory over the next 3-4 years.

[Hannibal]

Remember that when the Big 12 was formed, it was lopsided in favor of the North for about five years. When you compare North and South, the South only outnumbered the North in historical powers 2 to 1. I'm guessing it would have fared worse if it had been gerrymandered like the Big 10 and you had Missouri and Colorado randomly selected to play in the same division as Texas and Texas Tech And for the record, I doubt that the Big Ten would ever be as lopsided for a sustained period of time as the Big 12 has been since 2002. OSU, Penn State, and Michigan haven't all been really good in the same year for a long time. The SEC has gone through periods of at least a few years where one half of the conference sucks and the other half dominates. Sometimes one team is an overwhelming favorite in the CCG, but it never kept the SEC championship game from being a huge event. The West would win three or four CCG's each decade. Look at the Big 10+Nebraska for the past 20 years and pick out the best team. Nebraska probably wins four or five times. Illinois wins maybe once, and Wisky and Iowa each win once or twice. Even NfW wins maybe once. Conference division battles would be much more interesting to follow if you had close geographic rivals competing for the division crown like you have in the SEC and the Big 12. The parity of the split is even less important, now that we are going to nine conference games and schedule parity is more likely. There's no more charm to the split of the divisions in the ACC and the Big Ten than there is for groupings that you get for teams in the Olympics. You could just as easily call them "Group A" and "Group B".

[entropy]

bad coaching hurt the north more than anything.

[Dr. Strangelove]

The ACC split is still very different from what the Big10 has done. Basically the only outlier in the Big10 split is Wisconsin. Otherwise the Illinois-Purdue-Indiana-OSU-PSU cluster is genuinely to the south of the other schools.

If it was like the ACC you'd see a division like Nebraska-Wisconsin-Northwestern-MSU-Indiana-Penn St

[Hannibal]

I think that you're reaching with the North-South bit. I'll bet that in your life, until this expansion, you never once thought of Pudue and Indiana as being "South" of Nebraska and Iowa. There's no clean North-South division possible with Big Ten country. UM and MSU are much closer to Indiana and Pudue than they are to Nebraska and Iowa. That would be like splitting up the SEC into north and south and calling Arkansas and Ole Miss part of the "north", while Mississhitty State and Alabama are the "South".

[Jamie H]

I know that Rodriguez was not a popular hire, but what should Martin have done instead?.

Exactly. People are letting the failure of Rodriguez color their memory. At the time, there was probably not a single bigger name that Michigan could have brought here. Many "experts" declared it a home run hire.

It didn't work out. These things somethings fail. Who else was Martin going to hire? DeBord? Ron English?

[Mackenzie]

Certainly did not mean to open up old wound regards RR and his hire. IDK, I still think Martin may have been left hangin in the wind by LC. Maybe. Also, I think that, under the circumstances, an interim coach may also not have been a bad idea. Certainly, in hindsight I doubt it could have been much worse. Maybe.

[lineygoblue]

I thought Rodriguez was the right hire at the time. Michigan's offense had stagnated, and Lloyd ball had been figured out by everyone in the league. The last thing Michigan needed was a Lloyd assistant like English or DeBord to become the next coach.

If Rodriguez would have made better decisions with his coaching hires, he'd probably still be here, and likely be quite popular.