The Big Ten underwent a little makeover on Monday. Commissioner Jim Delany rolled out the monikers for the newly created football divisions, and after much deliberation the Big Ten went with Leaders and Legends. Really? I know a lot of questions are running through your head right now, so let’s break them down one at a time.

Don’t most divisions use regional terminology? After a good 20 minutes of extensive Googling, I can say that not most but every other division in college football is named regionally. Both the SEC and Big 12 use east-west denominations, and the ACC uses the more descriptive than regionally relevant Coastal and Atlantic.

The ACC negates Delany’s argument that it wasn’t named regionally because it wasn’t a major consideration in making the divisions. We’re all still in the Midwest (quiet, Penn State). If east-west or north-south didn’t work how about Central and Midwest? No? All right I’ll admit a regional moniker is tough, but name any organized sport that doesn’t use regional names for divisions other than your little sister’s soccer league or your favorite bar’s softball league. NFL, MLB, NBA, the denominations might not always make sense but you don’t see anything like this.

Well, who are the Leaders and who are the Legends? Does that at least make sense? Not exactly. Delany tells us that picking the Legends as a division name was easy because “we have 215 College Football Hall of Fame members” but fails to mention how Minnesota is more legendary then we are. Of course I can’t argue that we are better leaders than Northwestern, but again, what made them legends of the football field?

Without having to highlight how much better we are then everyone else, the point is pretty obvious. Legends and Leaders are completely arrogant and irrelevant. Calling yourself legendary is kind of a dick move, and naming yourself leader without a national championship in your conference in nine years isn’t good either. Combine that with most legends being leaders and the whole thing is just lacking for relevance.

I heard they debuted a new logo too; maybe both things combined will bring some positive exposure for the Big Ten. Unfortunately, the aforementioned new logo sucks about as much as the aforementioned stupid division names (my word of the day, apologies). Anyway, the Big Ten hired illustrious design firm Pentagram to make this new gem which is big on top of ten with the “IG” looking like the numeral “10”.

So essentially it says Big Ten twice, a departure from the previous logo which contained an “11” within the wording recognizing Penn State’s addition to the league in 1990. Pentagram’s website explains this decision: “Seeing two numbers at once is clever, but it means redesigning the logo every time the conference expands”. Wow, evidently these guys think the Big Ten just expands every other week, sometimes on Tuesdays for no reason.

Not that its actually only happened twice since 1917 or anything… Anyway Pentagram has one more thing to say, “it was time for something direct and simple”, so they did the exact same thing and hid two numerals in the logo. But hey, it is so clever.

Assuming there was no regional name that could possibly work what would you name it? This is a tough one. I thought about mixing up the divisions in search of the perfect name, but I decided to be fair to the commissioner I’d stay with the current format. What I came up with was if you’re going to throw out the regional denomination instead of giving some nostalgic nonsensical name, make some money! Yeah that’s all the football program is about right?

That’s why we can’t have a normal playoff system – because of the bowl money. So sell those naming rights off to the highest bidder. The M&I Bank division, the E-Trade division. Or if you don’t want to compromise all integrity for a dollar, how about make the division name worth something. What if you gave the naming rights to the division winner from the year before, how pissed would Ohio State be if we made them play in the Wisconsin division every year?

John Waters ([email protected]) is a junior intending to major in journalism.