Hello. How was your spring? I bet it was cold. You know what would warm you up? Laughing at James E. "Jim" Delany!
This past weekend, as the Big Ten prepares to add two middling programs, the presidents of the conference voted on the proposed new divisions. Naturally, as these votes tend to go, the measure was rubber stamped. No longer can you snigger at divisions with pretentious names. That crutch is gone as East and West now rule the day.
Lots of questions have been asked recently. How equal are the new divisions? How equal are the old ones. Yes, one conference having Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State in one division sure seems like one division is stronger, but can we see that hypothesis demonstrated numerically?
We can. Bill Connelly of Football Study Hall and Football Outsiders just released scads of information at the former site, including the totality of the F/+ rankings that exist, which would be from 2005-current. All 14 current and future Big Ten teams are ranked as such:
So what do the current divisions look like:
Full marks to the conference brain trust; they wanted even divisions and they got them.
How do the new conferences stack up. Well....
To be fair, Penn State is probably going to have a lower ranking for a few years, and the alignments would be even more out of balance if Purdue was placed in the East. Still, we've moved away from total balance, and if the media narrative of "Big 2/Little 12" actually does come true (which would require Meyer to be in Columbus for more than 5 seasons and Hoke to do better than his career record would indicate), then you moved to a pre-expansion Big XII model, which was pretty far from being egalitarian.
Can we do better? Of course. Taking the existing divisions and adding Maryland to the Legends and Rutgers to the Leaders gives us:
The opposite placement would give us similar averages to what we have currently.
I don't understand the desire to switch to a format that emphasizes geography when the previous arrangement seemed to be working properly. The fear that Michigan and Ohio State could meet two straight weeks isn't backed up by any sort of historical trends since 1970 and is mainly a tall tale the media is spinning. Travel costs? Maryland is reportedly receiving a 20-30 million subsidy for travel for joining the conference.
Fixing what isn't broken, from where I sit. Then again, my brain wasn't susceptible to freezing this spring down here deepinthehartof, Texas.
