NCAA rule change should lead to Big Ten changes for championship game

The days of a two division format in the Big Ten and other conferences could be numbered. The NCAA is working to review a rule change that would allow conferences to have the ability to determine how a conference championship game can be arranged, allowing conferences to abandon the long-standing NCAA policy that only division champions may compete in any sanctioned conference championship game.

And this could be a major change for the Big Ten.

When Nebraska joined the Big Ten in 2011, it allowed the Big Ten to hold its first conference championship game in football. The NCAA previously required conferences to have at least 12 members in order to be eligible to organize a conference championship game, made popular by the SEC following its addition of Arkansas. With Nebraska bringing the conference membership to 12, the Big Ten split its membership into the awkwardly-named Legends and Leaders Divisions.

Without looking it up, which division was Penn State in? The answer is down below.

When the Big Ten made its most recent expansion to welcome Maryland and Rutgers to the conference, the conference took advantage of the newest members to remake its division lineup with a more traditional East and West format. And, for many of those years, the perceived dominance of the East has been a recurring storyline. What happens when the two best teams in your conference are pit in the same division?

That’s often just the way things go sometimes for every conference, but this appeared to be a more pressing concern for those following and covering the Big Ten, which has seen every Big Ten championship game since the 2014 expansion won by the champion of the East Division (Ohio State five times, Penn State, Michigan, and Michigan State once each). The last four Big Ten championship games have been decided by double-digits.

So, with the NCAA preparing to allow conferences to dictate their own championship game terms, and with a mega-media rights deal in the works, it makes too…