(02-06-2014 12:23 AM)He1nousOne Wrote:  Just some more food for thought. I suppose some of you could be thinking that we wont be having divisions thus geography doesn't matter. If you are like myself though then you are of the mindset that we will be having more divisions not less and geography will matter more than ever before.

So, for the Big Ten that means taking only one Western program and one Eastern leaves you with a western division of Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota and Kansas if we go four divisions at 16. That is why you wont see the Big Ten taking one East and one West despite how nicely a division such as Penn State, Virginia Tech, Rutgers and Maryland looks.

First, I think it'd be Nebraska, Iowa, Illiniois and Kansas in the west. In the east, Rutgers, Maryland, and Penn St. need a fourth, but who? OSU without Michigan? VT or UVA would fit quite nicely along side a Kansas addition to the west.

To your point, though, except for football, divisions don't really matter that much. Think of wrestling, track, baseball, basketball, hockey or any other sport - the Conference can hold a championship meet or tournament and every team (or almost every team) can participate. It may still make sense to have divisions for such sports for any number of reasons, such as to make scheduling easier, promote rivalries and have regular season divisional champs named.

For football, divisions matter because that's the ticket to the conference championship or semi-finals, but they don't really matter much for scheduling purposes. It's relatively easy for the football team to fly anywhere in the conference, so football divisions could be based on historic football power, for example, rather than geography in order to promote competitive balance. There could be different divisions for football than other sports. In a 16 team conference, for example, we could have two 8 team divisions for most sports, with each 8 team division further dividing into two 4 team divisions based on competitive balance for football.

I don't see geography as being a limiting factor in expansion, although I admit there could be some odd looking divisions resulting from it.