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Football
Smith, Buckeyes, Like Division Alignment Outcome
By Tony Gerdeman

Ohio State Director of Athletics Gene Smith spoke with the media Wednesday night about the new divisional alignments announced by the Big Ten Conference, and most specifically about the preservation of The Game against Michigan in its rightful place at the end of the conference season.

After weeks of speculation, denial, outrage, and disbelief from the masses, the conference finally announced the new divisional alignments to take place in 2011, and after the dust had settled, it wasn't all that bad.

The second-biggest news of the night was that the Buckeyes and the Wolverines would be in separate divisions. It was not unexpected, and had been rumored for some time. It was apparently a very easy decision.

“From jump street. From day one. Michigan really wanted it and we wanted it,” said Smith, when asked how long the two teams had been thinking about a split.

So yes, Ohio State and Michigan will be in separate divisions, but they'll still remain each other's final opponent of the season. In fact, Smith said that while there were discussions of moving the game to earlier in November—but never to October—the talks were “never that close” to coming to fruition.

Smith admitted that when he went to the conference call this morning to find out what the schedule looked like, he brought bullet-pointed arguments detailing why Ohio State and Michigan should remain at the end of the season. Many of those bullet points came from the hundreds of emails, letters and phone calls he received.

When asked if the pleas from the Ohio State fans had any impact on keeping The Game where it is, he said it “probably did a little bit”. He also mentioned that the vast, vast majority of correspondence that he received was well-thought out, and not just coming from a place of sheer emotion. In fact, some were so well thought out, they were “like dissertation papers”.

While some people are concerned about the possibility of Ohio State and Michigan meeting in back-to-back weeks, the topic never really came up in this morning's meeting.

“We didn't discuss that. It didn't seem to be a big issue,” he said.

It should be noted, however, that in all of this glee and joy, the current schedule happiness is only definite for the next two years.

“I hope it's permanent. But the one thing that's constant in life is change. I wish I could say it's permanent, but I can't,” explained Smith.

Where Michigan and Ohio State will meet in 2013 and beyond will have to be revisited because of potential expansion and the future nine-game schedule, which is likely to get here in 2015.

When talking about the conference's overall approach to the divisional alignment, he said that going strictly by geography would have been a mistake. The Big Ten took the top six programs and split them in half. They then took the next group and split them in half until they had two even six-team divisions.

As of right now, there is no fluidity to the divisions, meaning, they won't be moving around. The divisions are set for the foreseeable future.

Last week there was a report from Ann Arbor radio station WTKA stating that cross-divisional games wouldn't count in the Big Ten standings except for tie-breakers. Smith shot down that rumor, though admitted it was discussed. He did state that he was completely against the idea of not counting cross-divisional games.

The other main topic of the evening was the probable nine-game conference schedule set to take place in 2015, and Smith mentioned that every team in the Big Ten has to have at least seven home games to make their budget work. As a result, it will take some crafty maneuvering in the years when teams play five conference road games to get those seven home games scheduled. In fact, to remedy any possible problems for Ohio State, there may even be situations where Smith will have to renegotiate current deals and have the home and aways flipped to meet their budgetary needs.

But he also said he didn't want to go down that road because new talks bring about new talks about money, and that's never a fun thing.

While speaking about the future conference schedule, he addressed a concern about the continuation of the Buckeyes playing one major BCS non-conference team per year.

“That's not going away,” he explained. In fact, Smith said he's actually looking at adding more mid-level BCS teams to the schedule, much like they did with Colorado in 2011.

All in all, it was as much a win as Ohio State could have hoped for, especially considering all of the reports that were out there.

Above all else, The Game remains The Same.

And soon life will get back to normal. Even for Gene Smith.

“I can go back to my normal emails,” he chuckled, admitting a major sigh of relief at the day's good news.

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