The Big Ten has undergone a drastic transformation over the past three decades.
What was, true to its name, a 10-team league for 40 years expanded to 11 when it added Penn State in 1990. It was only the beginning. Over a three-year stretch, the conference footprint expanded west to Nebraska, and east to Maryland and Rutgers. In 2024, a once-unimaginable step will be taken when USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon join the conference, turning the traditionally Midwestern Big Ten into a truly national league.
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Through all of those additions, the structure of Big Ten football has also changed.
With more members, the conference split into divisions and, in 2011, became the last of college football’s Power Five conferences to stage a conference championship game. With the additions of the four West Coast schools next year, the Big Ten will scrap its divisional model, a move that’s in line with the rest of college football (the ACC did so this year and the SEC will follow suit next year once Texas and Oklahoma join).
Before the Big Ten’s division format disappears, here’s a look at its history:
History of divisions in college football
As modern conference realignment began in earnest in the early 1990s, the structure of the leagues bringing in new members subsequently morphed.
In 1992, its first season since adding Arkansas from the Southwest Conference, the SEC adopted East and West divisions. The winners of each group — in 1992, it was Florida and Alabama — met up in what became the first-ever conference championship game at the Division I level.
It didn’t take long for others to follow the SEC’s lead.
The newly formed Big 12, a merger of the entirety of the Big Eight Conference and four members from the since-dissolved Southwest Conference, split into North and South divisions in 1996 and staged a conference title game. By 2005, the ACC — after it picked up Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College from the Big East — was hosting a conference championship, as well.
With 11 members from 1993-2010, the Big Ten wasn’t splintered into divisions and didn’t have a conference championship game. That would soon change, though.
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Big Ten Leaders and Legends divisions
In June 2010, Nebraska left the Big 12 for the Big Ten, marking the first time in 20 years the Big Ten had expanded its ranks. In anticipation of the Cornhuskers’ arrival for the 2011 season, and with the conference now at 12 members, the Big Ten announced that it was splitting up into two divisions.
The move itself was expected, but the monikers for the two groups weren’t. Rather than offer up geographic designations as many conferences did, the Big Ten dubbed its divisions the Leaders and Legends.
"'Legends' is a nod to our history and to the people associated with our schools who are widely recognized as legends — student-athletes, coaches, alumni and faculty. 'Leaders' looks to the future as we remain committed to fostering leaders, the student-athletes who are encouraged to lead in their own way for the rest of their lives, in their families, in their communities and in their chosen professions," former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney said in a release announcing the names. "We're proud of our many legends and even prouder of our member institutions that develop future leaders every day."
The labels and the rationale for them were widely mocked and criticized. Even if geography wasn’t used in determining which teams were in which group, surely there were some better options? Perhaps the Lakes and Plains?
Even in a subsequent news conference, Delaney acknowledged it might take a couple of years for the names to take hold.
“I just don't understand why geography or directional names were thrown out so quickly,” Terry Hutchens of the Indianapolis Star wrote at the time. “East and West makes perfect sense to me. Iowa and Nebraska are in the same division so the Legends Division could clearly be the West. And Penn State is in the other one so it could clearly be the East. As for some of the schools in the middle, who cares?
"This is a conference that continues to call itself the Big Ten even though there are 12 members. It's not like the lack of geographical ties would really amount to that much. Perhaps some day, somewhere between 36 hours and two years, this will all make a lot more sense and it will just roll off our tongues when we're talking about Big Ten divisions.”
The divisions included the following teams:
- Leaders: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Wisconsin
- Legends: Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern
The Big Ten staged three conference championship games during the Leaders and Legends era, with Wisconsin winning the first two and Michigan State the third.
For as much ridicule as the division names withstood, it was a sensible setup that managed to avoid lumping many of the conference’s traditional powers together. Delaney said the Big Ten’s football programs were split up and bunched together based on competitive balance, not geography.
As the league’s next divisional arrangement showed, that wasn’t the worst idea.
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Big Ten East and West divisions
In the spring of 2013, the Big Ten’s presidents and chancellors approved a plan that would abandon the Leaders and Legends designations and move to East and West divisions beginning with the 2014 season, when Maryland and Rutgers would begin competing in the conference.
While the decision fell in line with other conferences like the SEC and Pac-12 that used geography to group its members — and while the new titles aren't nearly as haughty — it dramatically shifted the balance of power in the league.
Under the new setup, the divisions became comically unbalanced.
The conference’s three all-time winningest programs — Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State, which are all among the top seven FBS programs in all-time victories — were thrust into the East division, along with Michigan State, which had become a nationally relevant program under coach Mark Dantonio.
It meant that in many years, three or four of the conference’s best teams that season were fighting for a single spot in the championship game, while the West division regularly offered an easier, more navigable road. This year, for example, Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State spent the vast majority of the season ranked in the top 10. A West division team never rose higher than No. 18 in the US LBM Coaches Poll.
Since the current format began in 2014, the Big Ten East champion is 9-0 in the championship game, with an average margin of victory of 20.1 points per game. A Big Ten championship game hasn’t been decided by fewer than 10 points since 2017.
In that way, the farewell to the East and West divisions is fitting. No. 2 Michigan enters Saturday’s matchup against Iowa favored to win by 22.5, a number that’s considerably higher than the Hawkeyes’ points-per-game average (18).
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List of Big Ten championship games
Here are results from the 12 all-time Big Ten championship games, all of which have been played at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis:
- 2011: Wisconsin 42, Michigan State 39
- 2012: Wisconsin 70, Nebraska 31
- 2013: Michigan State 34, Ohio State 24
- 2014: Ohio State 59, Wisconsin 0
- 2015: Michigan State 16, Iowa 13
- 2016: Penn State 38, Wisconsin 31
- 2017: Ohio State 27, Wisconsin 21
- 2018: Ohio State 45, Northwestern 24
- 2019: Ohio State 34, Wisconsin 21
- 2020: Ohio State 22, Northwestern 10
- 2021: Michigan 42, Iowa 3
- 2022: Michigan 43, Purdue 22
