The Show-Me State apparently has so many loose lips that we should expect to have the next big expansion news to break out of Branson. Hooray for more rampant speculation and beer! As far as news stories about Big Ten expansion go, this is at least within the realm of reasonably coming to fruition. This particular 5-team combination is no surprise to the followers of this blog as we discussed this in detail in the comments a couple of weeks ago with hypothetical pod alignments and the potential financial and prestige merits of this option.
As a far as collective requirements for the Big Ten, this group consists of great academic schools all are members of the AAU , provides one marquee football brand name Nebraska , grabs a set of guaranteed households Missouri and makes a legit play for the New York City market Syracuse and Rutgers.
This is seriously what passes for wonderful news in South Bend these days. In addition, I found the comments from University of Nebraska president Harvey Perlman to be slightly titillating. One week ago , he told the Omaha World-Herald the following:. In an article yesterday in the same paper, Perlman was a lot more evasive:. Things that make you hmmmm…. Anyway, Dienhart suggested that there would be four 4-team divisions if the Big Ten were to go with the proposed 5-school expansion.
At the same time, every team would have a permanent non-division rival as follows:. The rotating pod mechanism allows everyone in the conference to continue to play each other on a regular basis even in a team conference and still comply with NCAA rules requiring divisions of at least 6-teams each to play an exempt conference championship game.
Now, if you want a REAL rivalry trophy, check out this bad-ass politically incorrect killing machine that Illini like myself and Northwestern fans get to enjoy… wait a second… WTF?! I was firmly in the camp of believing that Michigan and Ohio State HAD to be in the same division for a very long time no matter how the conference was expanded and that seriously mucked up logical pod setups if you stuck that principle.
