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That's the new word according to the Washington Examiner. Louisville, UConn, Cincy, USF and Georgetown have given their approval for it to happen and meeting are ongoing.

A twenty team basketball conference?

Or are they assuming that they will lose a few teams?

And I would still rather have Missouri in the Big 10

LMFAO. Every one of 'em is west of the Mississippi. These conference shakeups are comical.

This seems premature. Seems to me it would make more sense to see what the Big 10 does first. What if the Big 10 raids a couple of Big East schools? Not only are ISU, KU, K-State and Missou out of place geographically, they are joining a bad conference.

BlueHen86 wrote:This seems premature. Seems to me it would make more sense to see what the Big 10 does first. What if the Big 10 raids a couple of Big East schools? Not only are ISU, KU, K-State and Missou out of place geographically, they are joining a bad conference.

The MWC would make more sense, with the addition of Boise State it is continuing to become a stronger a conference.

These conferences are going to get renamed right? The MWC should be okay in terms of a name, even if they add KU, KSU, and ISU.

However, the Big East can't stay the Big East with those teams. The B10, B12, PAC10, et all can't keep their names I wouldn't think

That'd be the end of a dominant KU hoops run....

clenz wrote:These conferences are going to get renamed right? The MWC should be okay in terms of a name, even if they add KU, KSU, and ISU.

However, the Big East can't stay the Big East with those teams. The B10, B12, PAC10, et all can't keep their names I wouldn't think

1. The Big Ten proved they can't count when they lured Penn State in. The A-10 has the same problem.

2. The Pac-10 lost "Pacific" status when they took the Arizonas from the WAC. All they have to do is change the number.

3. Goodness knows what's going to happen to the Big XII. Perhaps resurrect the Big 8 or even, God forbid, the SWC?

4. There IS precedent about East being out West. For decades, the Atlanta Falcons were in the NFC West. The Cardinals were in the NFC East for years, too (StL and Phx). But the clincher is the Stockton Thunder and Alaska Aces of the ECHL.

bluehenbillk wrote:That'd be the end of a dominant KU hoops run....

why?

Not all of the teams in the Missouri Valley (football or otherwise) are actually in the Missouri River valley.

clenz wrote:These conferences are going to get renamed right? The MWC should be okay in terms of a name, even if they add KU, KSU, and ISU.

However, the Big East can't stay the Big East with those teams. The B10, B12, PAC10, et all can't keep their names I wouldn't think

Sure it can. It's the Big East, having schools west of the Mississippi just shows how big it really is.

I might agree with you if it was called the Little East.

Kansas in the Big East isn't far fetched - but it would still be an afterthought of a football conference. It'll be a dominant basketball conference, even without football, but it would slant towards that one sport.

clenz wrote:These conferences are going to get renamed right? The MWC should be okay in terms of a name, even if they add KU, KSU, and ISU.

However, the Big East can't stay the Big East with those teams. The B10, B12, PAC10, et all can't keep their names I wouldn't think

no way big 10 rebrands its name... NO CHANCE

UNHWildCats wrote:

clenz wrote:These conferences are going to get renamed right? The MWC should be okay in terms of a name, even if they add KU, KSU, and ISU.

However, the Big East can't stay the Big East with those teams. The B10, B12, PAC10, et all can't keep their names I wouldn't think

no way big 10 rebrands its name... NO CHANCE

Agreed - Big 10 is probably the best trademark in college sports. And unlike the Pac-10, it's never gone through repeated changes in it's number so it's entrenched.

GannonFan wrote:And unlike the Pac-10, it's never gone through repeated changes in it's number so it's entrenched.

1896-1898: seven members
1899-1907: nine members
1908-1911: eight members
1912-1915: nine members
1916-1946: ten members
1947-1949: nine members
1950-1989: ten members
1990-2010: eleven members

clenz wrote:These conferences are going to get renamed right? The MWC should be okay in terms of a name, even if they add KU, KSU, and ISU.

However, the Big East can't stay the Big East with those teams. The B10, B12, PAC10, et all can't keep their names I wouldn't think

Why not? The Big East already has Cincinnati and Marquette? It's not like the Big East hasn't already gone West. I think the name would not be accurate, but it's not now...of course, neither is the Big Ten, Pac 10, or Big XII.

JayJ79 wrote:

GannonFan wrote:And unlike the Pac-10, it's never gone through repeated changes in it's number so it's entrenched.

1896-1898: seven members
1899-1907: nine members
1908-1911: eight members
1912-1915: nine members
1916-1946: ten members
1947-1949: nine members
1950-1989: ten members
1990-2010: eleven members

According to Wiki it has been called the Big 10 since 1917. Since the inception of the conference, only Michigan, Ohio State. Michigan State, Penn State, and Nebraska have been added and U of Chicago subtracted.. that is since 1896! Thats a really stable conference with teh same name of nearly 100 years. C-USA has more changes than that in 5 years.

Franks Tanks wrote:

JayJ79 wrote: 1896-1898: seven members
1899-1907: nine members
1908-1911: eight members
1912-1915: nine members
1916-1946: ten members
1947-1949: nine members
1950-1989: ten members
1990-2010: eleven members

According to Wiki it has been called the Big 10 since 1917. Since the inception of the conference, only Michigan, Ohio State. Michigan State, Penn State, and Nebraska have been added and U of Chicago subtracted.. that is since 1896! Thats a really stable conference with teh same name of nearly 100 years. C-USA has more changes than that in 5 years.

Michigan was actually a founding member in 1896. Michigan left the B10 in 1905 and rejoined in 1917.


http://michigantoday.umich.edu/2010/06/ ... hp?id=7770" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Stability was the rule in the Big Ten from the time it added Michigan State in 1950 to Penn State's inclusion 40 years later. But in the league's 115-year history, that long period of calm was its only one. In five of the league's first seven decades, at least one school hopped on or jumped off.

A bigger surprise: The only school to leave and return to the conference is the school perhaps most identified with the Big Ten itself: the University of Michigan.

The ripples from those tumultuous transitions a century ago are still felt throughout college football today.

In 1901, Michigan brought Fielding Yost to Ann Arbor for a purpose: to win games, win Big Ten titles, and beat mighty arch-rival Chicago. Heading into the last game of 1905, Yost had achieved all that and more. He'd won 55 games—against only one tie—four straight Big Ten titles, and his first four games against Chicago, by a 93-10 margin.

Only after it quit the Big Ten did Michigan develop fierce rivalries with Ohio State, MSU and Notre Dame.
But when he arrived in Ann Arbor, Yost had even bigger ambitions. He was determined to get some respect from the Eastern establishment—and he did.

Before the days of polls, writers usually settled informally on one or two teams as the best in the nation. During Yost's Point-A-Minute years, they tabbed Harvard and Michigan in 1901, Princeton and Michigan in 1902, Yale and Michigan in 1903 and Penn and Michigan in 1904. The Eastern representative always changed, but Michigan consistently stood as "Champions of the West"—on a par with its Eastern brethren.

Throughout the 1905 season, it looked like nothing could stop Yost's juggernaut from stretching its string of unbeaten seasons, Big Ten titles and national crowns—but that's when things got interesting.

The University of Chicago's legendary coach, Amos Alonzo Stagg, had been king of the nascent Big Ten until Yost showed up—and Stagg resented losing the throne. Watching Yost become the first "Western" coach to win a national title, while drubbing Stagg's Maroons each year, could not have helped.

In the 1905 season's last game, many believe Stagg sent one of his lesser players in to get one of Yost's stars kicked out of the game—and it worked, helping Chicago win by the meager margin of 2-0.

Stagg's razor-thin victory protected him from being accused of sour grapes, and freed him to make every effort to get Yost kicked out of the league. But instead of a frontal assault, Stagg squeezed Yost out by promoting a series of reforms he hoped Yost wouldn't accept.

Stagg's timing was perfect. In 1905 alone, 18 players died on college football fields. The man in the White House, President Theodore Roosevelt, was a fan of the game, but for that reason he called the coaches and presidents of Harvard, Yale and Princeton together to urge reforms. This meeting begat another meeting, which gave birth to the Intercollegiate Athletic Association. Five years later, in 1910, the IAA renamed itself the NCAA, and an institution was born.

Reform was all the rage in college football—and that's where Stagg saw his chance. As the de facto leader of the Big Ten, Stagg pushed for new rules governing recruiting, funding and eligibility—which Yost, probably to Stagg's surprise, readily agreed to—but Yost couldn't stomach the conference's proposals to reduce schedules from a robust eleven games to a measly five, restrict player eligibility to three years, and insist that football coaches be full-time faculty members. Stagg already was, Yost was not.

Yost knew if he complied with the new Big Ten regulations, his team would have little chance against the Eastern powers. To sacrifice that hard-won recognition galled Yost.

Adding insult to injury, Stagg joined forces with U-M's own President James B. Angell, who might have been Yost's second-biggest enemy. President Angell simply hoped to return college athletics to the English ideal of mens sana in corpore sano—"sound mind in sound body"—which emphasized more student participation and less notoriety for the victors.

Stagg's motives were less altruistic. Though Stagg wasn't any more pious than Yost, he was willing to accept the changes himself if it meant slowing down Yost's Point-a-Minute squads. Having finally beaten Yost, he probably wasn't anxious for a re-match.

When it came time for Michigan's Faculty Board in charge of Intercollegiate Athletics to vote, Yost urged them to refuse the conference proposals. They did, forcing Michigan to drop out of the Big Ten in 1907.

That's right: Michigan, the school most closely associated with Big Ten football, left the conference in a huff.

A team adrift

At first the students and alumni were happy with the decision, until the Big Ten passed a rule prohibiting conference teams from scheduling any more games against former members who had since withdrawn—an edict clearly aimed at ostracizing Michigan, the only team to leave the Big Ten—which they called the "non-intercourse" rule.

Yost's decision to leave the conference had other equally unintended, and equally lasting, side effects. Michigan didn't play Chicago for another 12 seasons, so it had to resort to filling the schedule with independent schools like Notre Dame twice, and Ohio State, which was not yet in the Big Ten, for the first six of those years. Another independent, the Michigan State Spartans—then called the Michigan Agricultural College Farmers—appeared on Michigan's schedule for just the third time in 1907, and have continued to do so all but four seasons since.

Over time, leaving the Big Ten generated more problems than it solved. Michigan scheduled yearly games against Cornell, Penn and Syracuse, but those rivalries never matched the intensity of the Chicago and Minnesota games. Worse, to fill out its schedule, Michigan had to play teams like Lawrence, Mt. Union and Marietta. And even if Michigan's football team could survive being outcast by the Big Ten, its other varsity teams could not.

Returning home

In November of 1917, ten years after Michigan told the Big Ten what to do with its new regulations, both sides agreed it was in everyone's best interest for Michigan to return to the conference. Yost submitted to the Big Ten's rules, and the conference schools welcomed Michigan back without resentment.

The Wolverines' decade in the wilderness cost them continuity, conference titles, money and national prestige, but ultimately, Yost got almost everything he wanted. In hindsight, being dropped by Chicago was a good deal. Michigan lost a rivalry with a school that was fading fast, and three of Michigan's non-conference replacements—Ohio State, Michigan State and Notre Dame—remain the Wolverine's biggest rivals to this day, which helped two of them gain admission to the Big Ten. Since returning to the Big Ten, Michigan has won 36 conference titles and seven national crowns.

Stagg's Chicago teams, which had won five of the first 18 Big Ten titles, won only two more after Michigan returned, finally dropping football altogether in 1939. That made room for Enrico Fermi to create the first controlled nuclear reaction under the empty stands of Chicago's football stadium. (Fermi, by the way, also lectured at Michigan.)

So, whenever a commentator remarks that Michigan is the nation's only team with three great rivalries, Wolverine fans should thank Amos Alonzo Stagg, who made it all possible—however unwittingly.

And whenever someone says they know exactly how the rumored Big Ten expansion will play out, remember that the biggest consequences of that conference shake-up long ago were completely unexpected.

Clenz - that article is a joke with it's commentary.

Only two conferences have been MORE stable - IVY League, and before last week, the Pac-10.

So there was some shuffling 100 years ago - whoopie...

Since then, The Big 10 has added three teams (Michigan State, Penn State and now Nebraska). Chicago is still a Big 10 member.

dbackjon wrote:Chicago is still a Big 10 member.

No. They are a member of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which could be considered the "academic Big Ten", but they are no longer official members of the Big Ten Conference.

dbackjon wrote:Clenz - that article is a joke with it's commentary.

Only two conferences have been MORE stable - IVY League, and before last week, the Pac-10.

So there was some shuffling 100 years ago - whoopie...

Since then, The Big 10 has added three teams (Michigan State, Penn State and now Nebraska). Chicago is still a Big 10 member.

Chicago is still a Big 10 member?