Big Ten Championship Game Expected Next Season

Courtesy Sports Pickle

Big Ten officials showed their excitement about adding Nebraska to the conference next year, but they showed more excitement about what they bring: a conference championship game.

It’s no surprise that next season after Nebraska is officially part of the Big Ten that the conference is going to pick up a championship football game, and expand their number of conference games to nine in order to keep rivalry games from not being played on some years.

While it has not been announced that the conference will officially play a championship game Commissioner Jim Delaney said he fully expects the coaches and athletic directors to agree to a championship game and ninth conference game.

“I think there’s a real consensus among our athletic directors to do that,” Delany said Monday at the league’s football media days. “How quickly we can do that? We can’t do that in the next year or two. I’m hopeful we can make some progress for years three, four. Hopefully, it’s not three or four, but it could be depending on the contractual commitments.”

After all, the only reason the Big Ten had to expand was to make sure there would have been a championship game. Since the N.C.A.A. relegated that a conference needed to have 12 teams to play a championship game the Big Ten has become irrelevant in the final weeks of the season. With the Big Ten season ending two weeks before the other 12 team conference’s season did, a a longer layoff before the national championship, the Big Ten was getting to be not only irrelevant, but also a pushover in the national championship game. Since the BCS championship game’s inception in 1998, the conference has made it to just three championship games, and has come up with just one victory. Meanwhile, the SEC and Big 12, both of which were previously 12 team leagues, combined for 13 appearances with eight wins.

But another topic that came up at the Big Ten media day was the topic of expansion. While the league did not reach 16 teams and stayed with 12, it is expected that the conference will start looking again for teams to join in to make the N.C.A.A.’s first super conference (If they get there before the new 12 team Pac-10 which added Colorado and Utah for 2011).

However, Delaney made it clear that the conference “is not actively involved” in further expansion, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

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Corey Johns

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You could say Corey was born to become a sports journalist. His father won a national championship coaching college soccer. His mother is a baseball fanatic who hasn't missed seeing an Orioles game since 1983 (literally, sometimes it's annoying). His great uncle was a big-time boxing promoter and his maternal grandfather was once a department head at the Baltimore Sun. Basically, sports and journalism run through his blood. He played just about every little league sports there was when he was a kid and was a multi-sport athlete in high school; even playing in the first-ever high school sanction Rugby game in the country. Eventually he retired from sports as an undefeated Maryland state Rugby champion as a high school senior. Perhaps lack of athletic talent has more to do with the retirement, but he will tell you that it more had to do with a great desire to jump right into media. Upon his graduation from University of Maryland, Baltimore County as a triple communications major, Corey started the So Much Sports network and has continued to grow his websites and continues to work to make them premier sports media outlets.

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