Holy cripes! Division Names Edition

So the Big Ten announced it's new division names:

Legends Division
Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Northwestern, Nebraska, Minnesota

Leaders Divison
OSU, PSU, Illinois, Purdue, Indiana, Wisconsin

This gets a Groan-. These are bland and meaningless. There's no conference significance to them aside from Leaders being a nod to Michigan, I guess, although Michigan isn't even in that division. For all of the talk of trying to honor the greats of the conference etc., this is a truly abysmal showing.

And the new logo?

This is mostly inoffensive besides the fact that it looks like it should be on a billboard for an anti-smoking ad. My biggest problem is the 10 allusion in B1G. Even the old logo acknowledged that there were 11 teams in the Big Ten. I understand it's a little harder to do with 12, but I don't know why they're playing up the number 10 in the logo and making no concession to the fact that the conference has 12 teams.

Overall grade: C-

Big Ten alignment notes

It's official. Your Big Ten football (about more which later) conferences are as rumored:

Schembechler Conference*	Hayes Conference*
Michigan	Ohio State
Nebraska	Penn State
Iowa	Wisconsin
Michigan State	Purdue
Minnesota	Indiana
Northwestern	Illinois

Michigan will keep its cross-divisional rivalry with Ohio State and, at least for now, The Game will be played on the last week of the Big Ten season.

Other notes:
- There will be a championship game that, after the 2011 game which will be in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, will change locations.
- These alignments are for football only. Delany said, "Basketball will deal with alignment itself", which kind of sounds like, "I don't really care about basketball. It'll get taken care of eventually."
- *The conference names aren't set but there's a good chance we end up with (or at least we should end up with) "Hayes" and "Schembechler" conference names. Delany said something along the lines of, "There are a lot of legendary coaches and players etc. from the conference. We'll announce names for the divisions soon."
- The Big Ten is also going to have a new logo soon but will keep the Big Ten name (obviously).
- There won't be a 9th conference game in 2011 but it sounds like they'll go that way eventually.
- Michigan's 2011 conference schedule is as such:

10/1 - Minnesota
10/8 - @Northwestern
10/15 - @Michigan State
10/22 - bye
10/29 - Purdue
11/5 - @Iowa
11/12 - @Illinois
11/19 - Nebraska
11/26 - Ohio State

That's about all in terms of information given out today.