As I have said before the Big Ten has become the Big 1, and Little 13. Instead of Ohio State being in the championship game 75% or more of the time, it will now be in the championship game 90% or more of the time with no divisions. Ohio State will have a great chance of being in the Top 2 when they are not in the Top 1.
I don't think there is much (if any) risk of that because the dynamic here is vastly different than it was in the B12.
The problem in the B12 wasn't that Texas was better at football then everybody else, they weren't. Actually when the conference was new the issue was that the B12-N was too strong because the best two teams were UNL and KSU. Then later the B12-S was too strong because the best two teams were OU and UT but it was never really UT all alone.
The issue from the very beginning was that there was simply too much dead wood in the B12 from a revenue perspective. As originally formed the B12 was made up of:
- Four schools from Texas
- Two schools from Oklahoma
- Two schools from Kansas
- Missouri
- Colorado
- Nebraska
- Iowa State
Texas has a humongous population but having four schools from there in a major conference never made sense. They don't have four times the population of Ohio. Moreover, Texas' football fans aren't evenly distributed over UT, aTm, TxTech, and Baylor anyway. My impression is that Texas has the lion's share, aTm is next, and the rest have relatively small fanbases.
Two schools each from Oklahoma and Kansas makes no sense. The B1G has two schools each from Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan but Oklahoma's and Kansas' population is nowhere close to those states.
Iowa State is definitively NOT the main or "flagship" school in Iowa and, like OK and KS, Iowa's population is substantially less than IL, IN, and MI.
OkSU, KSU, ISU, and either Baylor or TxTech never brought enough fans to the table to be logical P5 teams. The B1G has that with Northwestern and the SEC has it with the second schools in TN and MS but one or two in a league isn't a major issue. With the B12, at least a third of their members simply didn't bring enough fans/eyeballs to the table. The B12 didn't share revenue equally because they couldn't. Texas brought the most fans (by a longshot) and they clearly were never going to settle for an even share of revenue in a league with the second schools in OK, KS, and IA plus the second, third, and fourth schools in TX.
The B1G is vastly different. Ohio State has a huge fanbase but there are other huge fanbases in the league (M, PSU, UNL) and even a lot of the league's non-helmets have decent sized fanbases. The Buckeyes aren't nearly as imbalanced here as Texas was in the B12.
A number of years ago the
NYT did a study where they used website clicks to measure fanbase size and they came up with the following top-10:
- tOSU
- M
- PSU
- ND
- TX
- aTm
- Auburn
- Bama
- UF
- Clemson
They did determine that tOSU's fanbase was the biggest (I have my doubts) but that isn't my point. The more important point is that Ohio State's fanbase is approximately equal to Michigan's (for this purpose it makes no difference which is larger, just that they are approximately the same). Then Penn State's is not much smaller than those two. Within the B1G per the NYT article:
- 3.2M, tOSU
- 2.9M, M
- 2.6M, PSU
- 1.4M, UW
- 1.3M, IA
- 1.2M, UNL
- 1.1M, MSU
- 1.0M, IL
- 1.0M, MN
- 0.9M, RU
- 0.6M, IU
- 0.6M, PU
- 0.5M, NU
- 0.5M, UMD
Ohio State doesn't and can't push the B1G around because they aren't the only game in town. M and PSU have fanbases approximately equal to tOSU's. UW and IA combined have about as many fans as tOSU. UNL, MSU, and IL combined have about as many fans as tOSU. There is very little dead weight in the B1G. Per the NYT article Baylor, KSU, and ISU would all be nearly dead last in the B1G.