The Big Ten today announced a few things regarding their new conference alignments, including the names. The names are the "Leaders" and the "Legends." Wait, what? That's really what they're named? I mean, I'm all for use of alliteration, but these two names are horrendous. They start with the same two letters! Instead of something personal to the conference, like actually naming them after historical figures within the conference, they've gone with bland, meaningless, corporate fluff that doesn't really even make sense. I mean; Michigan has the "leaders" in their fight song, and we're placed in the "Legends" division. This is stupid, stupid, stupid. Here's the logo, also stupid:
What on earth is that big "one" doing instead of the I in "Big?" Does it declare us as #1 in all things Isn't that a little presumptuous? I mean, I get that the old logo had a 1 in it, but - here's the catch - it was followed by another 1 in negative space to cleverly display the number 11 as to denote how many teams are in the conference. Where's the freaking 2 in this thing? I spent 15 minutes looking for it like a Where's Waldo, but I don't think it's in there! Because this is stream of consciousness right now, I'm reading that apparently the "G" is supposed to look like a 0 making it a 10, which makes no sense given that we've actually added a team, not subtracted one.
I'm on board with Mgoblog's desire to call them "West" and "East" until something can be done. Is it possible that the Big Ten could just say "sorry - that was stupid" and come up with something better? Could they do that? I somehow doubt it, but the whole thing is being roundly panned on nearly every available outlet.
So yeah, Michigan is in the "West" and Ohio State is in the "East" until further notice.
Stupid.
Update:
Holy hotpants, just to confuse the hell out of everybody, this thing even has trophies, and two of them are named for players with the last name "Woodson." Both defensive backs. One is for "defensive back of the year" and the other for "defensive player of the year."
How much time did anybody spend thinking about this?