All Shook Up – 2011 NCAA Conference Realignments
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If your kids aren’t doing well in math at school, maybe it’s not their fault. For example, how many college football teams are there in the NCAA’s Big Ten conference? Is the correct answer 9, 10, 11 or 12?
If you said “10,” you have been living in denial since 1990, when Penn State joined the original Big Ten schools and brought the total to eleven. This year, however, thanks to conference realignments, the correct answer is now “12.”
As of July 1, 2011, the roughest, toughest gathering of gridiron gangs in the Midwest has been joined by Nebraska, whose defection from the Big 12 leaves that conference with ten teams. So the Big 10 now has 12 members and the Big 12 has 10 members. Got it?
What’s more, the revamped Big Ten has created two new divisions. The Legends Division is made up of Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska and Northwestern. The Leaders Division features Illinois, Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State and Purdue. Each team is scheduled to play every team in its division, plus one “cross-over” game every year and two rotating cross-divisional games, similar to the SEC and ACC.
Meanwhile, the move of Utah and Colorado to the Pac-10 (which used to be the Pac-8 once upon a time) has resulted in a renaming of the conference to the Pac-12. Never mind that both the new teams are land-locked and nowhere near the Pacific Ocean. At least the math works.
Only for football, not other intercollegiate sports, the new Pac-12 has sorted its members into two groups. The North Division has California, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, Washington and Washington State. The South Division gets Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, UCLA, USC and Utah. But don’t look at a map; it only adds to the geographic confusion.
Each PAC-12 school will play nine conference games: five against divisional rivals and four against teams from the other division. Annual inter-divisional games between the Northern and Southern California teams are locked into the schedule, and the Pac-12 championship game will be held each December at the home site of the highest-seeded team in the conference.
Elsewhere, BYU has gone independent, making room for Boise State to join the Mountain West Conference. If it all seems confusing, don’t worry. Just bookmark this page to keep abreast of the action as the 2011 NCAA football season unfolds.
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