For better than a 100 years, the Big Ten champion(s) were determined by having the best record at the end of the regular season. Times have changed and how we have divisions with a conference championship game. Still, I like the idea of keeping track of how things look with the old set-up and setting up some award for that achievement still.

So this thread will be about my fictional award, the Western Cup. It's named in honor of the original nickname for the conference, the Western Conference.

Using this formula, the Western Cup Champions the last two years were Michigan State in 2011 (outright champs) and Ohio State in 2012 (outright champs).

Big Ten Standing
Iowa 1-0
Ohio State 1-0
Wisconsin 1-1
Indiana 0-0
Illinois 0-0
Michigan 0-0
Michigan State 0-0
Nebraska 0-0
Northwestern 0-0
Penn State 0-0
Minnesota 0-1
Purdue 0-1

Interesting concept. They recognize regular season champs in basketball why not in football too?

It's kind of what I figured. Basketball has had tournaments for a long time (although the Big Ten and PAC-12's are much newer than most) and has never had a problem with having 2 different championship. Football meanwhile had a much longer record of determining champions by standing alone and then suddenly dropped that.

I get that the CCG winner is the real winner (the same can't be said without a lot of debate in basketball), but I think some kind of trophy is still warranted and could be worth something to the winner more so than a divisional trophy.