As we’ve written for the past several days, Big Ten athletic directors have a whole host of decisions to make over the next few months, including how many league games they should play, how to align the divisions, the next bowl lineup and even what to call the divisions.
“We’ve got some heavy lifting to do here for the next few months,” Purdue athletic director Morgan Burke said.
But what if all that huffing and puffing turns out to be a Sisyphean task? There’s one thing that could send conference leaders scrambling back to the drawing board: more expansion.
The decisions the athletic directors will make for the 2014 season and beyond will be based on the new 14-team format with Maryland and Rutgers joining. Many people suspect the Big Ten is not done adding members and could soon grow to 16 or even to 20 members. Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee recently informed us that conference expansion talks are “ongoing.”
The athletic directors are well aware of the possibility that more teams could be coming at just about any time.
“Based on the last three years I’ve been in this business, you’d be crazy not to think about it,” Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon said. “But it’s hard to model anything because you don’t know what to model. The minute you get yourself convinced that you’re going to go from 14 to 16, for all you know you’re going to 18, and a lot of people think the ultimate landing place is 20. Who knows?”
Continue reading: More expansion looms over AD decisions
