Big Ten Struggling With Math
The Big Ten has some great academic schools: Northwestern, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and others provide great educations. The Big Ten, for the second straight year, is looking at adding another conference game to the schedule.
It doesn’t seem like a terrible idea really; another conference game means that you only miss one conference opponent per year, diminishing the chance that the top two teams don’t meet. It also builds up the strength of schedule of all the Big Ten schools by giving them one more quality game (unless that game is Indiana). Finally, it would likely eliminate the practice of picking up I-AA schools for the final out of conference match-ups. Bonus for Michigan.
The problem with the idea and the issue that has elementary students everywhere saying “wait a minute” is that the scheduling doesn’t add up. Literally.
The Big Ten has 11 teams (bad math already, right?) and if each team were to play nine games, little Johnny can tell us that equals 99 for the season. Since Johnny also knows that you need two teams to play each game, his division problem ending with an answer-it’s called a quotient he says-is 45.5 49.5 (ha, irony) games. We know Wisconsin would not have minded if a couple of its games last season ended at halftime, but that just doesn’t seem to work.
The solution, the Big Ten says, is to have one team play eight games. Brilliant! How awful would that be? As MGoBlog points out, who wins the conference if one team is 7-1 and the other 8-1? Dr. Saturday says what happens when the team that plays one less game misses Ohio State and Michigan (he meant to pick Penn State there, surely) and cruises to the championship?
Each site also proposes a solution. Dr. Saturday goes for the solution that we all have been eagerly awaiting for a while now: a 12th team. Notre Dame or not, this is a solid option and wouldn’t be that much different from adding another conference game, with the added benefit of an equal schedule. MGoBlog gets a little more creative with a system where the last place team in the conference from the previous year would play a MAC opponent in lieu of their 9th conference game. It’s not planned out or tested, but the idea is certainly interesting, so go check it out.
The MGoPlan seems more favorable than a system that randomly assigns one team eight games, while everyone else plays nine. Adding a 12th team is a huge step and the Big Ten needs to make sure they find the right team.
Even the current system is preferred to changing to a nine game conference schedule. So how about we settle down, Big Ten.
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Comment from David
Time February 25, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Um, you mean 49.5, not 45.5 . . . right?