The Big Ten's new division names show how the conference is, maybe justifiably, a little full of itself.
View full size"Maybe if people don't embrace it in the first hour, maybe after 24 or 36 hours they'll get a chance to feel it and take it in," Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said Monday in announcing the conference's new names for its 2011 divisions. "And if not, maybe in a couple years." Or never?COLUMBUS, Ohio -- In money, television, expansion and academics, the Big Ten has been at the forefront of intercollegiate athletics. As college sports has evolved, the Big Ten often has blazed the path.
And in naming its new football divisions on Monday, the conference had to remind us of that.
Legends and Leaders are the names for the six-team divisions that the will start with the 2011 season, and the nods to past contributions and future endeavors create at once a contrast and co-mingling of ... "geez, it's all a little highfalutin, isn't it?"
You get the sense no one at Big Ten headquarters stopped commissioner Jim Delany before the announcement and said, "Dude, they're just football divisions."
"We're hopeful that they will resonate over time," Delany said, "and they will give us an opportunity to speak to our past as well as our future."
Admirable, sure. The Big Ten should be bigger than the games. But the conference, with one football national title in 13 years of the BCS era, wasn't naming research facilities here.
Leaders (the division with Ohio State and Penn State) and Legends (the division with Michigan and Nebraska) comes off as a bit pompous for a conference that doesn't fear reminding the rest of the college world that it is calling a lot of the shots. In a Sports Business Journal listing last week of the 50 most powerful people in sports business, Delany was ranked No. 25, the highest ranking for anyone in college sports -- seven spots ahead of new NCAA president Mark Emmert.
At a forum of conference commissioners in New York last week, Delany wasn't shy about telling the non-BCS conferences that the Big Ten was getting a little tired of giving up more spots in the Rose Bowl and other major bowls -- "I'm not sure how much more give there is in the system," Delany told the panel.
One of the biggest stories of the bowl season was Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee calling into question the fitness of schools like TCU and Boise State to play for the national championship. Maybe we're just lucky the Big Ten didn't go with "Awesome" and "Awesomer."
Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany discusses the division names
Delany said directional names like East-West and North-South were out because the league wasn't divided that way, focusing first on competitive balance. Naming divisions for individuals, like Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler, was deemed too exclusionary.
While also announcing a new logo, the Big Ten's best move was the creation of 18 trophies named for 36 Big Ten players and coaches, each hyphenated. For instance, there's the Hayes-Schembechler Coach of the Year, while the best player in the league title game will win the Grange-Griffin Championship Game MVP, named for Illinois legend Red Grange and OSU two-time Heisman winner Archie Griffin.
The Buckeyes led the way with five trophy names, with running Eddie George, offensive lineman Orlando Pace and safety Jack Tatum also recognized.
For the divisions, other candidates like Lakes and Plains or patriotic things like Stars and Stripes were considered. I always liked Black and Blue as a simple nod to the Big Ten's toughness and a cool, easy shorthand when considered separately, like "Hey, do you think Ohio State will win the Big Ten Blue this year?" instead of "Will Ohio State win the Big Ten Leaders?"
In a Cleveland.com poll, 87 percent of respondents by Monday evening said they didn't like the names, while 10 percent didn't care and only three percent liked them. The Big Ten knows its choices are a bit unusual.
"We looked at what people had done," Delany said, "and then we really looked at ourselves."
Well, they got that part right, then. If you told people that a conference had named its divisions Leaders and Legends, few would guess it was Conference USA.
The Big Ten is positioned as well as any conference in the nation for what's to come. It really is a conference with a bright future and a storied past. And it happened to come up with division names that will look weird on T-shirts.
"Maybe if people don't embrace it in the first hour, maybe after 24 or 36 hours they'll get a chance to feel it and take it in," Delany said. "And if not, maybe in a couple years. ... Any time you have something new, I think it takes some getting used to. But we certainly gave a lot of thought to the options."
And decided on this.
It's so Big Ten.