The wild, wild Big Ten West rides off into the sunset as unassuming, unpredictable as ever

MINNEAPOLIS — If Power 5 divisions looked like humans, the Big Ten West would sport freckles, a snotty nose and a jean size labeled as husky.

In contrast to their well-off East brethren, the West’s seven representatives are overlooked, and rightly so. In all nine of the conference’s title games since its divisions were reorganized by geography, the West has nary a victory. The last five featured double-digit spreads favoring the East champ, and all five were won by at least 12 points.

Never has the disparity between the divisions been greater than today. The East won last year’s crossover games 13-8 and has won six of the eight crossover games so far in 2023. Penn State has beaten Illinois, Iowa and Northwestern by a combined 76 points. Michigan beat Nebraska and Minnesota by 80 total points.

The top three teams in the East are ranked No. 2, 3 and 6 nationally. The top two teams in the West are receiving votes.

“If you look at the national rankings, you see where those fall right now,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said when asked about disparity between the divisions. “But there’s a lot more football left to be played here before we get to the championship game.”

How did it start?

Some feared this type of imbalance when Nebraska joined the Big Ten in 2011. Instead of dividing into East and West Divisions, the league office split the teams based on historical competitive equality. Using 17 years’ worth of data, the Big Ten placed the teams into tiers. At that time, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Nebraska were in one tier, followed by Wisconsin and Iowa in another. The rest of the league then lined up based on rivalries and geography.

The goal was to create two structures capable of weathering downturns. In three seasons, Wisconsin won two titles and Michigan State claimed one and lost one. Nebraska and Ohio State qualified for title games but lost by double figures. Although there was some disenchantment with the loss of a few annual rivalries, the structure was level.

Then came a major change. Ahead of the 2014 season, Maryland and Rutgers joined the conference. Instead of assigning each team to either the Legends or Leaders Division, the league chose to place them with Penn State and revisit geography as a primary tenet. Former commissioner Jim Delany thought the West would be competitive enough to hold its own.

“These things ebb and flow,” Delany said in 2014. “Northwestern has been to a Rose Bowl. Wisconsin went to three in a row. Nebraska has won national championships. Iowa has played in very big games. Illinois has played in Rose Bowls and other major bowls.

“When I think about historic balance, I think that the teams will play out based on the quality of the players and quality of the coaches. And I’m not worried about that part of it.”

The Big Ten had eight teams in the Eastern time zone and six in the Central. Three border schools were considered potential candidates to move west: Purdue, Indiana and Michigan State. The Hoosiers were discussed but never given serious consideration. The Spartans wanted to play in the West because of the school’s ties with the Chicago market and competitive series with Wisconsin and Iowa. Purdue was the closest geographically to the West, had a traveling trophy with Illinois and was a permanent rival of Northwestern from 1995 to 2010.

But there was one other situation that impacted the move. Penn State’s immediate future was unpredictable after sanctions following the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Michigan was 21-27 over the previous six seasons in Big Ten play, with four losing conference records. If those traditional heavyweights were down and Ohio State also played Rutgers, Maryland, Indiana and Purdue every year, it had the potential to damage College Football Playoff opportunities. So instead of allowing Michigan State to move west, the league strong-armed the Spartans to stay east and shifted Purdue to the West. Only the Boilermakers’ rivalry with Indiana would be protected.

The West Division appeared strong enough to compete against a quality team from the East. Iowa and Wisconsin had combined for 11 seasons of 10-plus victories plus four more nine-win campaigns from 1998 to 2013. Nebraska won the Legends Division in 2012 and had seven double-digit winning seasons over that same span.

It was most perfect for Wisconsin and Iowa. Not only would it reestablish their rivalry, but it gave Wisconsin a chance to play its neighbors annually. As a Leaders Division member, Wisconsin was in the same division with just one of its six border foes (Illinois). The Badgers played Minnesota in a crossover game every year, but it wasn’t regularly scheduled to play Northwestern (two hours away) or Iowa (less than three), let alone Michigan or Michigan State.

Although Iowa was better off than Wisconsin geographically in the Legends Division, a West Division gave the Hawkeyes five border opponents in the same division plus Purdue. Iowa and Illinois didn’t play for five consecutive years before the divisions changed.

“It’s been great,” Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz said of playing nearby opponents. “We’re living a little bit in the past having border teams and all that kind of stuff.”

Competitive winds shift

The sole reason for Michigan State staying in the East played out in 2014. Michigan and Penn State combined for a 5-11 Big Ten record. Ohio State was unbeaten in conference play and beat the Spartans in a divisional showdown. The season finale between Wisconsin and Minnesota was winner-take-all for the West title. BTN aired that game, which at the time was considered the most important telecast for the league-owned network.

“It was winner goes Indianapolis, winner wins the West,” Michael Calderon, BTN’s senior vice president of programming and digital media, told The Athletic last year. “It was a really big moment for us.”

The Badgers beat the Gophers to set up a matchup with Ohio State. The Buckeyes had lost quarterback J.T. Barrett the previous week against Michigan, and the Badgers were tabbed a four-point favorite. With Cardale Jones at quarterback, Ohio State destroyed Wisconsin in shocking fashion, 59-0. That victory, coupled with a 49-37 win against Michigan State, helped the Buckeyes leap from No. 6 to No. 4 in the final College Football Playoff rankings. Ultimately, Ohio State won the national title.

Twice in three seasons from 2015 to ’17, the West champions entered the Big Ten title game unbeaten only to lose in excruciating fashion. Michigan State’s 22-play drive culminated with a touchdown with 27 seconds left to beat undefeated Iowa 16-13 in 2015. Unbeaten Wisconsin fell 27-21 to Ohio State two years later. In 2016, Wisconsin built a 28-7 lead against Penn State only to succumb to a furious rally in a 38-31 Nittany Lions victory.

Within that three-year block, historical East powers Penn State and Michigan joined Ohio State at the forefront while Nebraska, the West’s marquee addition, slumped competitively.

In regular-season play, the divisions were competitive over the first eight years, with the East holding a 77-70 advantage in crossover games. But in 2022 and the start of 2023, the East has won nearly two-thirds of the matchups against the West, and Ohio State hasn’t played a crossover game yet this season.

The NCAA’s move to allow leagues to stage championship games without divisions in 2022 led to debate among Big Ten administrators. Divisions brought the positives of rivalry preservation and additional teams involved in conference races. But the imbalance was too much to ignore, especially with USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon joining the conference in 2024. There was no desire to shift, for instance, Purdue and Illinois to the East and bring all the newcomers to the West Division. In 2024, for the first time since 2010, the Big Ten will have a divisionless format.

“The schedules that were released last week, that five-year plan could not have been accomplished in a division structure by any stretch,” Petitti said. “It just would have been really difficult to balance competitively. Schools would not have seen each other; you would take years and years to basically see everybody else in the other division. It would have taken way too long.”

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Thanks for the mems

Widely panned for its style of play as much as for its lack of success, the Big Ten West remains a throwback to the league’s primeval past. Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois all play ground-acquisition football, as did Wisconsin before changing this year. The scores are low, and the strategy is often risk-averse.

Development remains a critical component among West teams. In the 2022 247Sports composite recruiting rankings, Iowa was the only program rated ahead of any East Division squad. Of the 79 four- and five-star prospects committed to Big Ten teams that year, only 14 landed in the West.

There’s a premium on coaching in the West, which has three national coach of the year winners (Ferentz in 2002 and ’15; Nebraska’s Matt Rhule, who won in 2019 at Baylor; and Wisconsin’s Luke Fickell, who won in 2021 at Cincinnati), plus previous Big Ten coaches of the year in Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck (2019) and Illinois’ Bret Bielema (2006 at Wisconsin). Ferentz is a four-time Big Ten coach of the year (2002, 2004, 2009, 2015).

“There’s definitely an identity,” Iowa tackle Mason Richman said. “It’s in the whole division and it’s just how teams play and how coaches are out there coaching and recruiting. We’re not going for the big-name guys. For us, it’s about developing, and I think other teams are taking on that mantra.”

But what will be remembered is the division’s physical, grinding style of play. It’s Wisconsin running back Melvin Gordon’s 408 rushing yards in the snow against Nebraska in the first West Division season. It’s Iowa linebacker Jack Campbell intercepting a pass in below-zero temperatures at Minnesota to set up the game-winning field goal in a 13-10 win last year. It’s the most successful West Division teams by far — Iowa and Wisconsin — facing off this week at Camp Randall to dictate the pace of the West Division’s final campaign.

It’s also the traveling trophies like Paul Bunyan’s Axe, the Floyd of Rosedale, the Cannon and the unrecognized Broken Chair Trophy. Those series will remain in some form, even as the West Division disappears after this year.

“This is my seventh year being in the East and West, and change is inevitable. I mean, it’s happening,” Fleck said. “Football’s football. The opponents and the schedules, expansion. So I don’t think it changes any of that. I just think it changes based on the helicopter view and the outside view, how we look at the conference and how we look at the Big Ten title game.

“It was only a matter of time with the Legends Division before and then the East and West. Now, we’re changing it again. In 10 years, it might look even different than it looks how we’re changing it now.”

(Photo: Matthew Holst / Getty Images)