This past December, the Big Ten officially announced that for the first time in nearly a decade, the conference will seriously be considering the possibility of adding a twelfth team. Over the next year and a half, an investigation will be launched to determine potential candidates as well as how the conference will be reorganized if and when the expansion is completed.
Although it continues to be called the Big Ten, the conference has actually had eleven teams since 1989, when the previously independent PennStateUniversity became an official member. In 1999, the Big Ten also considered adding another independent school, Notre Dame. Although the move gained some momentum, negotiations eventually broke down and Notre Dame chose to remain non-aligned. Candidates for conference expansions are not limited to independent schools, however. There have been plenty of instances where schools have joined or left conferences, such as the major conference realignment of 2005. In that year, Miami, Virginia Tech, and BostonCollege all left the Big East to join the ACC. The Big East was forced to compensate for its losses by adding Cincinnati, Louisville, and South Florida as well as two other schools which do not have football programs, but were nonetheless invited for their basketball teams.
The Big Ten’s recent announcement has ignited a wave of speculation over which school the conference ought to select if it does choose to expand. Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, and even Nebraska have all been thrown into the mix as sports fans across the country argue for a number of possible scenarios. University of Michigan Professor John U. Bacon, who teaches a course on the history of college athletics, believes there is no question as to who the best candidate really is. “Personally, the only team that I would like to see included would be Notre Dame,” says Bacon. “Notre Dame is a perfect fit athletically, academically, and geographically.” However, Bacon noted that the prospect of Notre Dame joining the Big Ten is rather unlikely. “Being Independent is a big part of their identity,” says Bacon, “so I doubt Notre Dame will join at this point.”
In all likelihood, the expansion would entail the transition to a divisional conference setup and conference championship game. Teams in separate divisions would meet only once every couple of years, which would significantly affect historical conference rivalries if teams such as Michigan and OhioState were not put in the same division. However, Mark Rosentraub, a professor from Michigan’s Ross School of Business, does not believe that this type of scenario will occur. “If the Big Ten were to go to twelve teams, the rivalries will always be maintained,” says Rosentraub. “OhioState and Michigan are not going to pass on that.” In terms of economic benefits, Rosentraub believes that all Big Ten schools stand to profit from the expansion, largely due to the enormous TV audience a conference championship game would attract.
Nevertheless, even if Michigan and OhioState continue to play each other year, the rivalry would not go completely unaffected by the expansion. In past years, the game frequently acted as a sort of de-facto Big Ten championship game due to the fact that Michigan and OhioState have historically dominated the rest of the teams in the conference. The presence of a real championship game could potentially downplay the game’s traditional influence. When asked if he believed the rivalry’s prestige would be at all diminished by the expansion, Professor Bacon responded, “A little bit, yeah,” because the game would inevitably be “dwarfed by the title game.”
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