The Big 10 Named Division- 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 actions create at once a dissimilarity 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 vibrate over time," Delany said, "and they will give us an opportunity to speak to our past as well as our future."
Commendable, 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 self-important for a discussion 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 "Awesome."
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 vibrate over time," Delany said, "and they will give us an opportunity to speak to our past as well as our future."
Commendable, 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 self-important for a discussion 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 "Awesome."
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