In case you were oblivious this summer, some teams shuffled between football conferences. It caused a little stir and I don’t think we’ve seen the last of it.

To review: The Big Ten has 12 schools, and the Big 12 has 10 schools. Oh, and that irrelevant conference out west, the Pac-10, it now has 12 schools. These leagues opted a while ago to insert numbers in their names and now they want to stick to their name because it has ‘brand loyalty’.

In the Southeastern Conference, our students have a fair understanding of basic math and realize that a Big XII with 10 schools is really some sort of Big 10, while a Big Ten with 12 schools is really a Big (or should we say Mediocre) 12. The conference names have become irrelevant, so why not change them?

Well, according to this article from the Wichita Newspaper (apparently it’s a place between some expansive cornfields in the Midwest), these three football conferences with irrelevant names are not willing to change.

Can you imagine that?

The conference representatives say that they want to cling to their brand names (these are the same representatives that say their conference has better education than the SEC). The Big Ten was founded in 1896 and the commish says that their name “carries a lot of meaning to a lot of people.” Now, he and those other two conferences must decide whether “name brand is more important than accuracy after the first round of conference realignment left all a bit off kilter in terms of membership and monikers.”

To give you glimpse into the madness, take a look at this quote from the article:

Conference expansion has been a popular pastime for the last 20 years, and names have come and gone as many leagues, mostly of lesser prominence, have morphed into new animals.

But the BCS conferences have more at stake. The Atlantic Coast Conference and Big East didn’t have to worry about such things in the mid-2000s when their numbers changed.

Most assume the Big Ten will stand pat to retain more than a century of tradition. But will the Big 12, a mere teenager, consider alternatives?

“Those are two different situations,” said Brett Boyle, associate professor of marketing at St. Louis University. “The Big 12 could probably get away with (changing) because in most people’s memories it’s been something other than the Big 12. The Big Ten brand name has too much value to let it go just to get the math right. They would give up that tradition.”

There has been plenty of confusion between conference names and membership through the years and it continues to be widespread, sometimes within a conference’s walls.
The Big 12 requests that the media not refer to the league in print as the “Big XII” yet maintains the roman numeral as a prominent part of its logo.

The Atlantic 10 has 14 members, giving it the biggest numeric discrepancy in the country. And geographic accuracy has never been a particularly important requirement. If it were, Chicago State wouldn’t be in the Great West, Louisiana Tech in the Western Athletic Conference, San Diego State in the Mountain West or Marquette and DePaul in the Big East.

In 1990, the Big Ten opted to merely change its logo. Al Grivetti, who was a graduate student at Northern Illinois, incorporated the No. 11 into his now-famous design.

“I also gave them a 12, a 13 and a 14,” he said. “It wasn’t particularly taken seriously, but I did it to show it could be done if needed. I firmly believe the Big Ten stands for the conference, not the number of schools.”
The Big XII seems to be in even more of a mess. They might just completely fall apart in the next couple of years, so then they won’t need to worry about a name anymore.

In conclusion, I can only say that I am proud to be a fan of the best conference in the country. Our founders also had the foresight to leave stupid numbers out of the name, and the word ‘Big’ for that matter!

Is football season here yet?