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College Teams Mon Dec 13 2010
Big Ten Goes Mod With Odd New Logo
With college football season finished except for the bowl games, the Big Ten on Monday unveiled a new logo and names for its two new football divisions. Nebraska will become the conference's 12th school next year, so the old logo, with "11" represented in negative space, had to go.
And yes, that is what they came up with. See, it's clever because the "I-G" looks like "1-0."
It's turquoise because ... well, I have no idea why.
All versions of the new logo incorporate that brilliant -- as in blinding, not awesome -- shade of blue, with some white and black.
The two new football divisions got their names as well. With the conference unwilling to choose geographic names and understandably reluctant to honor specific figures from only two schools, they scraped the bottom of the corporate buzzword barrel and came up with Legends 
(Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern) and Leaders (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Wisconsin). Apparently no other generically inspirational nouns were available. I look forward to immediately forgetting both of these names.
In other almost-cool-before-you-ruined-it news, the conference announced 18 (mostly) individual football trophies and awards, which is a fine idea, but then gave them the most unwieldy hyphenated names you could possibly conjure. Each award -- from the title game MVP to punter of the year -- is named for two former Big Ten stars.
The coolest is the Stagg-Paterno Championship Trophy, honoring two of the most legendary coaches in American sports history. But most of the others would have been a lot better with just one name attached. It's not as if every school is represented exactly equally -- Ohio State has 5, Iowa has 2 -- and choosing one former star per position wouldn't have been any harder than choosing two. Are Alan Ameche and Ron Dayne really the unquestioned best running backs in Big Ten history?
If you haven't had your fill, check out the accompanying promotional video, which features former University of Minnesota star turned cloying moralist Tony Dungy (among others) and the phrase "nuclei of life."
Phil Tortora / December 13, 2010 9:10 PM
What the Big Ten is doing is a joke. It would have made perfect sense to have a Big Ten East of Penn State, Ohio State, Indiana, Purdue, Michigan, and Michigan State. And also have a Big Ten West of Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Northwestern, Minnesota, and Nebraska. It would work geographically and be largely balanced, just like the Southeastern Conference’s divisions are aligned.
http://philiptortora.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-big-ten-divisions-are-joke.html#