Ohio State President Favors Division Split

Ohio State president favors division split

Ohio State president Gordon Gee told the Dayton Daily News he is in favor of a plan that would put the Buckeyes and Michigan Wolverines in separate divisions when the Big Ten reorganizes.

The conference added Nebraska as a 12th member, which will force scheduling changes. Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez has said expansion to nine games in conference will happen in 2015.
Gee is also in favor of a schedule in which Michigan and Ohio State would not play the final game of the regular season, as is tradition.
The Buckeyes' fan base may not be in line with the president.
Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith told The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer he has received about 350 fan e-mails -- 90 percent want the Buckeyes and Wolverines to continue to play the final Saturday of the regular season.
"I think in the division or out of the division, you could play the last game," Smith told The Plain Dealer. "There are obviously warts with both of those. But there's no doubt you could do it both ways."
The fear is if the two teams are in different divisions, they would play in the final week of the regular season and turn around and play in the Big Ten title game.
Gee is in favor of playing the Wolverines twice, just not back-to-back.
"We want to beat them twice," Gee told the Daily News.



Barry Alvarez Slip? Iowa, Wisconsin to Be in Separate Divisions, AD Tells Paper
Iowa and Wisconsin will not be in the same division when the Big Ten expands to 12 teams next season, according to Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez. Alvarez told the Wisconsin State Journal that the long-time natural rivals are going to be in different divisions, the first hint anyone has given about what the new landscape of the Big Ten will look like.
Realignment has been the source of much angst in Big Ten country. Conference commissioner Jim Delany (right) has already hinted that Ohio State and Michigan might not be in the same division and their annual matchup, usually held on the last Saturday of the season, may take place earlier.
The public has reacted to Delany's comments about moving the Michigan-Ohio State game in much the same manner as it would react to finding a dead rat in the potato salad. Everybody knew that some traditional rivalries would wind up being discombobulated as a result of expansion. OSU-Michigan, in the last game of the season, was never thought to be negotiable.
The question of competitive balance won't go away, however. Michigan is down at the moment, but recent experience with traditional powers suggests the Wolverines won't be down forever. Alabama was 7-6 in 2007, Nick Saban's first season, and the Tide would prefer not to discuss the decade before that. Keeping the league in two balanced divisions means that no more than two of Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Nebraska can be in the same division. How much sense would it make to pin Penn State and Nebraska together?
Delany also held out the possibility of an Ohio State-Michigan championship game, which would be quite a big deal indeed. Others have pointed out that the Big 12 didn't ever get the Clash of the Titans championship game it wanted, and the ACC has yet to produce the Miami-Florida State title game we all expected would be an annual event.
Part of the problem in the Big 12's case is that the divisions are unbalanced. A school from the Big 12 South won the conference 10 out of 14 years. That was an unforeseen complication. Remember back to 1996, when Colorado went 10-2 and Kansas State 9-3 but still didn't win the North, while Texas won the South with a record of 8-4. Oklahoma was 3-8 that season. You'd better believe Delany looked at the Big 12's struggles before he decided to forgo a strictly geographic split.
Alvarez also told the State Journal that the conference will adopt a nine-game schedule but cannot do so before 2015 because of previously scheduled games. That means that every Big Ten team will play the other five teams in its own division and four from the other division. Big Ten teams already skip two conference opponents a year, so this won't be too disruptive.
Nonetheless, the Iowa-Wisconsin split means an annual game between those two schools isn't necessarily a guarantee. A lot will depend on if other teams get separated from natural rivals. A protected rivalry or two is a safe assumption, and Iowa-Wisconsin would be one of many rivalries the conference would want to protect.
Delany says we'll know by mid-September how the divisions will be split. Alvarez's revelations probably aren't the last we'll hear before then, however. Mid-September is only three weeks away, but in Internet time, that's a couple years. You can't expect a secret to be kept that long these days.