5/27/2022 football Edit

Big Ten conference re-alignment supported by Tom Allen

Alec Lasley • TheHoosier

Senior Writer

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Following another lopsided Big Ten conference season in 2021, there is a lot of offseason talk regarding what the future of the conference will look like.

Last week, the NCAA Division One Council voted to allow individual conferences to determine which teams will partake in their conference championship games. That also has opened up discussions regarding divisions within conferences and if they will disappear.

For the Big Ten, that discussion has been re-engaged and Indiana head coach Tom Allen is well aware of the possibility in the near future.

“Every conference is having those discussions right now,” Allen said on Wednesday. “We talked about it during our meetings. I think it’s going to happen, I don’t know when, but I do think there’s a push in that direction to have the two top teams meet in the championship game."

Indiana went 2-10 last season and were winless in the Big Ten. While that one season isn't a reflection on what Indiana has done in the four seasons before, it just better highlights the difficulty of playing in the Big Ten East.

With Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State and Penn State on the schedule for the Hoosiers every single season, there is never much time for a break. A combined record of 4-28 against against those four programs since 2014 for Indiana, showcases that. Even more, three of those wins came in a covid shortened season in 2020.

An even larger reason for this discussion is the Big Ten Championship, a game the East has dominated since 2011. In that time, the East has won nine of the titles, with the only two losses coming at the hands of Wisconsin. Since the division re-alignment in 2014, no team from the West has won.

“At the end of the day you just want equality in the schedules for everybody, and if you look at the last eight years, every winner of the Big Ten has came from the East," Allen said. "Four different teams have won it during that time period, so I can see that definitely being the direction we go."

Since the AP Poll's inception, Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State all land in the top 10 for most appearances in the final poll of the season. Their average ranking over that time is all inside No. 10.

Expanding further, Michigan State is the next Big Ten program to pop up and it sits at No. 20 in most appearances but also still has an average ranking of 9.11. Wisconsin is the first team from the West at No. 22, with an average ranking of 11.46. Nebraska, who sits at No. 8 overall hasn't finished in the final AP Poll since 2012, when it was No. 25. Additionally, it has just two seasons making an appearance in the top 25 since 2015. The Cornhuskers have also won more than three games in the Big Ten just once since 2015.

“I think the most sensible thing to do with the size of our conference is to maybe have a couple teams that you play all the time to be able to uphold the rivalries," Allen said. "That’s a big deal in our conference, there’s a lot of really strong rivalries that you want to see continue.

“And then to be able to play a rotated schedule, where if a young man comes to play for Indiana, in the course of his career he will be able to come to every single stadium and play in all of those places. There’s places we still haven’t played in since I’ve been here."

The Big Ten West has programs such as Northwestern, Purdue, Illinois and Minnesota, who to their own right have had successful seasons in the past few years. But, from top-to-bottom, the East has true College Football Playoff contenders each season that finish second or their own division.

“I think the bottom line is still to just have an equitable schedule, and they’ve (the Big Ten) given us some samples to be able to see what that would look like," Allen said. “It’s very feasible, and I do think it’s going the direction of having a couple that you play constantly, no matter what division you played in the past and then the rest are rotated.”