Date of OSU-Michigan still being debated

By Bill Rabinowitz

The Columbus Dispatch

Within a few weeks, the Big Ten will settle on a plan to split the conference’s football teams into divisions starting with the 2011 season.

Some annual rivalries will be discontinued, though not Ohio State’s with Michigan.

But the timing of some remaining rivalry games might change, and that could include Ohio State-Michigan.

“I don’t know where we’re going to end up,” Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said.

Since 1935, the Buckeyes and Wolverines have ended their regular seasons with arguably the biggest rivalry game in college football.

Smith said his one unshakable objective at the start of the realignment discussion was to assure that Ohio State and Michigan would play every year. There is no danger of that being threatened.

Beyond that, Smith said it’s wise to let the process play out step by step without trying to insist on further requirements.

He said he has received only a couple of e-mails worried about the possibility of moving the Michigan game to earlier in the season. Whether those — and other critical opinions expressed on the Internet — are reflective of the broad fan base is impossible to know, Smith said.

“I know one thing for sure — that we’re going to play [Michigan]) every year,” Smith said. “We may end up playing the last game of the year, or not. I just don’t know that yet.”

Conference athletic directors have had regular discussions with Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany and staffers to hash out the myriad issues related to the Big Ten adding Nebraska as a 12th member.

The league will split into divisions and have a championship game, which next year will be played in Indianapolis. Divisional alignments are expected to be completed by early September.

If Ohio State and Michigan are placed in the same division, it’s likely that their game will remain the last one of the regular season because there would be no chance of a rematch in the Big Ten championship game. If they are placed in different divisions, there would be an incentive to move their game to earlier in the schedule to avoid the possibility of playing in back-to-back weeks.

Asked if he had a personal preference about keeping the Ohio State-Michigan game as the final regular-season game, Smith wouldn’t say.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to say what my personal preference is, because it gets spun all sorts of ways,” he said. “I don’t really want to get into that discussion. I want the space so we can do our due diligence without people guessing what everybody ‘feels.’’’

In fact, Smith said he has not advocated a position during realignment discussions because he is still studying the issues.

Smith said at the start of the expansion process that he would “jump on the table” if necessary to assure that Ohio State and Michigan played every year.

He said it would be premature to say whether he’d eventually do the same about the timing of the game.

“I have yet to see anything else that has caused me to do that,” Smith said. “I have yet to see it, and I may not see it. I just don’t know that yet. To speculate, I just don’t work that way.”

While at Iowa State in the 1990s, he was part of the task force that handled league expansion of what became the Big 12. He said the failure to fully analyze all the issues came back to haunt the league.

“We moved too fast and made too many decisions that we shouldn’t have made that ultimately contributed to where [the Big 12] is today,” he said.