Moving the Chains: Big Once More

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Beginning with Florida’s National Championship in 2006, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) had bragging rights to having the best team in the country 13 times over the next 17 seasons.  The only ‘outsiders’ between 2006 and 2022 were four years when Florida State, Ohio State, and Clemson – who did it twice – were on top.  

But now the SEC is no longer the big man on campus.  That title now belongs to (inhale and take a deep breath) the Big Ten, fresh from pulling off a midwestern ‘threepeat’ after winning a third National Championship in a row. 

And they didn’t do it the way you might expect, with a single dominant team.  Instead, the Big Ten pulled it off with three different ones.     

That’s right: the conference that doesn’t know how to count – the last time I checked the Big Ten has expanded to eighteen teams – has produced the last three NCAA Champions in college football: Michigan in 2023, Ohio State in 2024, and Indiana in 2025.  Defending champion Indiana is also the first FBS team to finish with a record of 16 – 0 since Yale did it back in 1894 – more than a decade before quarterbacks like Hoosier/Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza were allowed to throw the ball past the line of scrimmage.  

Time will tell if Indiana’s dream season was just a fluke, or if the Hoosiers are indeed poised to claim Penn State’s spot amongst the conference’s Big Three (Ohio State and Michigan being the other two).

Actually, let’s make that Big Four, now that odd duck Oregon has joined the conference.  If you’re curious as to why a team from the west coast now belongs to a conference originally based in the Midwest, you’re not alone.  In fact, you may be wondering the exact same thing about Rutgers, which is on the East Coast (not to mention in New Jersey) and on the complete opposite side of the country from Oregon.

Teams like Oregon and Rutgers will say it was for a number of reasons, but if they’re being honest, they’d say the main reason was financial stability.  The fact that the *geographical alignment makes absolutely no sense – to time-zone-challenged players as well as fans opposed to long-distance travel – is irrelevant.  Money talks a lot louder than either one of them.

*’Hold my beer,’ the Atlantic Coast Conference said 

right before inviting teams from the Pacific coast to join.

The expansion of the Big Ten sets up potential conference rivalries that will take some time getting accustomed to.  For example, UCLA and Maryland sounds more like a Liberty Bowl matchup rather than a regular season ‘rivalry’ game.  And there’s also that nasty three-hour time difference separating the two schools.    

Now, as for having 18 teams in a conference named the Big Ten …  

At one time the Big 12 was called the Big Six.  Over time and with expansion, it became the Big Seven, then the Big Eight, and by 1996 ceased existing altogether.  Then it simply merged with several teams from the Southwest Conference to form the Big 12.  

*The conference of West Coast teams went through a similar transition, 

beginning with the Pac-8, then the Pac-10, and ultimately the Pac-12 that, 

for the sake of argument, died a quick death when 10 of the 12 teams jumped ship, 

leaving behind just Oregon State and Washington State. 

 Fear not, because the Pac-12 will live to see another day: 

seven teams have been added for the 2026 season.  

Why they don’t just start fresh and call it the Big-9 is anyone’s guess.

OK, Big Ten, the ball is in your court.  It’s time for a new name that makes sense.  Here are three options: 

• Big Eighteen (B-18), because it’s numerically correct.
• Coast-to-Coast Conference (CCC), because it is geographically correct.
• Big Four + 14 Others (B4+14), because it’s the truth.

One last thing.  Now that the Big Ten has some of their games televised in prime time on NBC under the network slogan Big Ten Saturday, you might want to consider this:  

At one game last season, two announcers were standing on either side of NBC’s banner, which was supposed to look like this:

BIG TEN

SATURDAY

Only the announcer on the left blocked out the letters ‘SA’ and the announcer on the right blocked out the letters ‘AY’ as well as the entire word ‘TEN.’  That left just these letters visible to the viewers at home:

BIG

TURD

So I guess there are actually four options to choose from.