Year after year, the Big Ten’s best teams come out of the East division. In the four seasons since the Big Ten switched from the Legends and Leaders divisions to the current geography-friendly format, the East champion has won all four conference title games. This decade, the league has been dominated by five schools—Ohio State, Wisconsin, Michigan, Michigan State and Penn State—and four of those programs are lumped together in the East.
There might not be a better way to split the conference’s 14 teams. That doesn’t change the fact that there is a criminal imbalance between East and West, an imbalance accentuated by lean years at Nebraska.