Legend, Jim Delany, Now Following Instead of Leading

What really bothers me about Leaders and Legends is that they aren’t even closely unique to the Big Ten, and do nothing to strengthen the brand. To the contrary, the blogosphere dedicated to other conferences have already started mocking them. The Big Ten is full of so much history and tradition, why can’t we pick names that highllight some portion of that?

In that spirit, my contributions are:

1. 1896 and Land Grant Divisions. In this case, it doesn’t matter which is which. Like Leaders and Legends, it’s not about being specific to the schools in each division, so much as about attributes of schools in the Big Ten generally. Unlike Leaders and Legends, it’s pretty uniquely Big Ten. 8 of the 12 are original Big Ten founding schools (the confernence, founded in 1896, was originally refered to as the Big Nine. U of Chicago exited in 1946). 8 of the 12 Big Ten schools are Land Grant colleges, which refers to the Morrill Acts of the 1862 (it was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln!) and 1890. MSU was effectively the prototype for the Land Grant act, having been established as a state land grant institution in 1855, and the Illinois legislature was effectively responsible for getting it passed into federal law. Both Penn State and Nebraska are land grant universities. I can’t think of two names that point out the awe inspiring history of the Big Ten more.

2. Midwest and Great Lakes Divisions. UM et al in the Midwest, and OSU et al in the Greak Lakes. These are the generally geographically descriptive divisional names. The OSU et al division are all great lakes states. All schools in the Big Ten are midwest schools, but if you look at a map, UM et al is slightly more classically “midwest” than OSU et al. No school then can be said not to fit with the division name it gets, and the names are strongly associated with the Big Ten overall geographic footprint.