Northwestern is out of the Legends and in with the West.
The Big Ten Conference will scrap its current divisions in favor of a geographic split that will start in 2014, the conference announced Sunday. NU will join Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Purdue and Wisconsin in the West Division. Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State and Rutgers will compose the East Division.
The move was precipitated by the addition of Maryland and Rutgers to the conference in November.
“Big Ten directors of athletics concluded four months of study and deliberation with unanimous approval of a future football structure that preserved rivalries and created divisions based on their primary principle of East/West geography,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany said in a news release.
The conference will also go to a full nine-game conference schedule for football beginning in 2016. During a transitional period in 2014 and 2015, teams will play each team from their division and two from the opposite division. Beginning in 2016, they will play three from the opposite division.
University President Morton Schapiro said earlier this week that NU lobbied for placement in the West Division.
“We had spirited discussions here in senior staff about, ‘Are we a Midwestern university?’ or, ‘Are we eastern?'” Schapiro said Thursday at an on-campus address. “Part of me’s thinking, ‘Wow, we have so many alums in the Boston-D.C. corridor … and wouldn’t it be nice to be in that division?’ And at the end, we fought long and hard … to stay in the western division, and that’s because we’re proud to be Midwestern.”
The new alignment may be a boon for the Cats in football. While Wisconsin has been the Big Ten representative in the Rose Bowl the past three years, NU will avoid annual games against powerhouses like Ohio State and Penn State.
