Voice of the Hawkeyes Board

This has ALWAYS made sense, except to those in B1G Conference HQ. Location, location, location! Iowa fans HATE Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois and vice versa, and everyone hates each other. That's what it takes for great rivalry games- not some stupid trophy (except for Floyd of Rosedale, of course!).

Now, how about some common sense instead of bizarre creativity with the division names? East and West sounds pretty logical to me. Legends and Leaders has sucked from Day #1.

1) Sometimes, in order to get something, you have to give up something, in which case Delany can keep Leaders and Legends just as long as he realigns the divisions geographically.
2) One of the "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" is to begin with the end in mind, which means that if they're smart they're only going to want to do this once, which means that as they discuss "realignment," they'd be smart to have an eye on future expansion possibilities so that adding new teams is just a tweak and not a complete system reboot. If they keep the divisions the way they are and split up Rutgers and Maryland, that tells me they're thinking future expansion is more likely to come from the east (ACC) than the west (Kansas). Of course, if they got to 16, the whole 2-division alignment could get tossed in favor of the "pod" plan of four divisions of 4 teams each.

3) What's also obviously at stake is the future of the annual rivalry games, e.g., Ohio State-Michigan, Iowa-Purdue, MSU-Indiana, Wisconsin-Minnesota, PSU-Nebraska, and Illinois-Northwestern. If they keep playing them, it will screw up the frequency of how often each team gets to play the rest of the teams in the other division. Assuming they realign geographically, that means either the Michigan or Indiana schools would have to be separated. I personally believe they'll put both Michigan schools and Indiana in the East with Ohio State, while Purdue goes to the West. Purdue and Indiana's rivalry gets screwed but something's got to give and the B1G can rationalize splitting them up easier than keeping Ohio State and Michigan in separate divisions. That means the divisions would look like this:

East/Leaders: Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers
West/Legends: Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Purdue, Wisconsin

There's actually very nice balance in there because while the East/Leaders is admittedly top heavy with OSU and Michigan plus MSU and PSU (assuming they can keep their head above water for the next 3-4 years), while the West/Legends is pretty solid from top to bottom, i.e., a strong argument could be made that its "worst" team (Minnesota) is better than IU and Maryland and maybe even Rutgers. Also, everyone of the current "rivalry" games gets addressed by putting those teams in the same division except PSU-Nebraska, which really doesn't qualify as a "rivalry" in the traditional sense in that they just started playing each other annually two years ago.

This.

If two teams have to be separated, it's much more likely to be IU-Purdue than UM-MSU. The Indiana schools simply do not have the political power in football. Maybe it can be worked out to give them protected, inter-divisional status (the only rivalry that would need it), but if the B1G goes to 9 games, that would be very difficult. That would mean Purdue would play the 6 other west teams, plus IU, and then the other six east teams would rotate in for two years every six years. Not good for conference cohesion. The other twelve teams would rotate in three opposite division teams every two years.

Nor did Indiana and MSU consider themselves rivals. My point was that if the B1G values those rivalry games so highly, with a geographical realignment they'd be able to protect them all except Nebraska-PSU because each team's "rival" would be in its division.

I also can't help but think Wisconsin got screwed. I seem to recall they really wanted Nebraska but the B1G gave the Huskers to PSU.