With the Big Ten expanding to 18 teams -- including USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington -- and possibly more in 2024, one of the big football questions concerns alignment. With 14 teams currently divided into two divisions, will the conference break into three divisions?
Stoney and Jansen offered a solution on Monday.
"You have to split it up somehow, and maybe you do it this way: Big Ten East and a Big Ten West, with two divisions in those sub-conferences," Stoney says. "And you have the winners of each division play in the semi-finals, and the two winners play for the Big Ten Championship."
"So not only a College Football Playoff, but a playoff in the Big Ten," says Jansen. "The two division winners inside the Big Ten West and Big Ten East."
It would look something like this, assuming ultimate expansion to 20 teams: four divisions of five teams, where division teams play each other every year and play one of the other three divisions on a rotating three-year basis, for at least nine conference games for each team each season.
"So by the time you graduate, if you are a student athlete, and I use that term liberally, you will get a chance to play every team in the Big Ten," says Jansen.
The weekend before Thanksgiving would be reserved for rivalry games like Michigan-Ohio State -- "and that’s when it used to be played," -- Jansen points out -- and the semi-finals of the Big Ten playoffs would be held on Thanksgiving Day. (Teams not in the semi-finals could be paired off by record so that each team gets 10 conference games.)
And the Big Ten championship game would be played the following weekend, per usual, in Indy.
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