By now you may have heard Big Ten Commish Jim Delany shared with the media the idea of expanding to 12 teams (does this mean I have to change my website name again?). The reasons I've heard are:

Uneven number of teams makes scheduling hard
The conference needs a playoff and 2 6 team divisions makes that easy
The long layoff from the end of the UM-OSU game caused the BCS debacles

and Barry Alvarez' unique one

It's getting expensive to schedule non conference cupcakes so there needs to be another conference team to take the place of the 4th non conference game...HUH?

First the arguments against the above

The conference could have a playoff with 2 divisions, with one division having 5 teams and the other 6. That assumes you want to move to 2 divisions and further water down playing most conference teams.

The conference could create a bye week so that the last games end a week later, the same week when most conferences have their Championship Team.

The conference could minimize the cost of 4 cupcake games by moving to a 9 game conference schedule! It is bad enough that currently we don't play 2 teams in the conference. Ideally I'd like to see 10 conference games and 2-3 non conference, forcing at least one from a BCS conference.

But let's say money and the need to support programming for the Big Ten Network requires a playoff. Which team? I've heard Syracuse and Rutgers. Since when did we decide to abandon our Midwestern roots completely. How about a school more similiar to the profile of our existing members such as Missouri? Is it that the TV market for Missouri isn't big enough?

I will remark more on this subject later, but first I'd like to hear from you