If I were in charge of expanding the Big 10

With all the talk about Big 10 expansion, I thought I would weigh in on what I would do if I were the omnipotent commander of NCAA football.

I'm sold on the idea of the Big 10 expanding to 16 teams and becoming the first "superconference". If we're looking to make a big splash and get more eyeballs watching the Big 10 Network then it just makes sense.

I also really hate Notre Dame and don't want to see them involved in the Big 10. They've turned us down before and as much as it makes sense that we make an offer to them, I'm going to assume for the purposes of this post that they won't accept.

In terms of what schools should be added on, I don't have any radical thoughts. I think that 5 of the most talked about schools of Nebraska, Mizzou, Pitt, Rutgers and Syracuse all make sense from both an athletic and an academic standpoint.

The tricky part becomes when we have 16 teams with only 8 conference games. Scheduling is going to be a nightmare and odds of ties and split championships is going to dramatically increase without some creative thinking. My proposal is to do something similar to the NFL conferences and split into 4 divisions of 4 teams each. Some natural rivalries are going to obviously need to be preserved. Wisconsin-Minnesota, Michigan-Michigan State, Indiana-Purdue, Illinois-Northwestern, Illinois-Mizzou are all good fits for inter-divisional rivalries. Ohio State and Michigan need to be split up so that they both can emerge as division champions. I also think that Iowa-Nebraska and Pitt-Penn State will make for natural divisional rivalries to be included as well.

With those in mind my proposal for the divisional breakdown looks like this:

In the east, the Joe Paterno division:
Penn State, Pitt, Rutgers and Syracuse

Out in the west, (with apologies to Tom Osbourne, I'm a bit biased) the Barry Alvarez division:
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska and Iowa

Bo Schembechler division:
Michigan, Michigan State, Purdue and Indiana

and finally the Woody Hayes division:
Ohio State, Mizzou, Illinois, Northwestern

The most glaring flaws are the weakness of the Paterno division, a cakewalk in most years for Penn State, and the depth of the Alvarez division, everyone but Minnesota will be competitive almost every year. But, no arrangement that takes geography and rivalries into consideration is going to be perfect.

Next though is I think my most daring proposal, we should not only implement a conference championship game, but a 4 team conference playoff with a round of semi-final games.

Logistically implementing a semi-final game is going to be tricky, asking teams to play 2 extra games after the end of the regular season will likely be too much to ask. Therefore, I propose that the final game of the Big 10 season be scheduled based on the standings going into the last week of the season. 2 divisions could be paired up with the 1st place teams playing each other, the 2nd place teams playing each other and on down the line. That way the final week of the regular season becomes a functional conference semi-final and the conference championship game adds an extra game on for the teams that make it.

Thus there would only be 7 scheduled regular season games, including 3 divisional games that would be played every year. Obviously, Michigan and Ohio State won't be wanting to stop playing each other anytime soon, so 1 out of division rivalry game per team would also be a must.

I'm sure there are a number of problems with this that I haven't thought of yet, but having a 4-team playoff for the conference championship would certainly bring the attention of the country to the Big 10 for those final 2 weeks and add quite a few more subscribers to the Big 10 Network.