big ten divisions - the historic way
So I wrote my perl script in such a way that it would be easy to recalculate things with new data, i.e., anything other than my friedcheese.org rankings. Let’s use historical winning percentage, since everyone seems so gung ho about that when they argue for splitting up the Michigan/Ohio State/Penn State triumvirate.
Using figures from http://football.stassen.com/records/, we get:
East
Indiana, Michigan State, Nebraska, Penn State, Purdue, Wisconsin
West
Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State
Both divisions rock an average winning percentage of .584. This is less geographic than before, trading the Big Two for Nebraska and Wisconsin. A pure geographic breakdown gives a winning percentage of .615 in the east and .554 in the west.