Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Division alignment announcement


So, much to the chagrin of, well, everyone, it appears as though the Big Ten has decided to split Michigan and Ohio State into opposite divisions in the upcoming alignment, expected to be announced today. Without further ado, your projected divisions are:

Wet OwlHates This
MichiganOhio State
NebraskaPenn State
IowaWisconsin
Michigan StatePurdue
MinnesotaIndiana
NorthwesternIllinois

Initial thoughts: Ugh, what a terrible decision. Aside from splitting up OSU and Michigan, which is obviously the cardinal sin, I don't see any way that this comes close to competitive balance. Excluding the top three (which still seem slightly more difficult in the Wet Owl division), Michigan State clearly trumps Purdue; Minnesota is better than Indiana; and Northwestern and Illinois, at least currently, are no where near equals. This appears to give Michigan a much harder road to traverse, but we'll get to that later. There are other problems I see here that I don't really feel like going into until this is all official, which well....

Is there any silver lining?
Yeah, maybe. Given ESPN's recent track record with breaking news of this nature (Reggie Bush, Big Ten Expansion, Brett Favre, etc.), this may very well just be words in the wind. It feels a little more permanent to me, but there's always a hope that this is one reporter's/blogger's "insider" spouting off about some cooler talk. Let's hope.

UPDATE
Andrew at The Sports Journalists sent me this picture about the announcement and jokingly asked that I find some hidden meaning in it:

I'm not going to read anything into it but, yeah.

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