So now we know how the Big Ten becomes the Big Six and the Other Big Six, and, as with math, geography is not involved. Wisconsin is cheek-by-jowl with Penn State. Northwestern and Illinois share a state but not a division. Indiana and Purdue have gone east while Michigan, east of both, has gone west.

(“Also south,” some wise guy from Columbus no doubt will add).

All of this, we are told, is to preserve some of the conference’s most cherished rivalries, a noble and worthy sentiment. No one wants Floyd of Rosedale to go unclaimed some year, so Iowa and Minnesota are in the same division. Ditto the Old Oaken Bucket, the Little Brown Jug and the Paul Bunyan Trophy – which you’d think ought to involve Minnesota somehow, but which unaccountably is the prize Michigan and Michigan State fight over every year.

First glance tells you the conference did Purdue and Indiana no favors in the fall, with only Illinois as a sometime vacation destination. Everything else is hard labor: Penn State, Ohio State, Wisconsin, The Line For Blood Transfusions Forms Here.

Second glance?

Second glance tells you that noble sentiment about preserving rivalries might well be pointless when it comes to the only rivalry that matters.

That, of course, would be Ohio State-Michigan: Bo-vs.-Woody, Three-Yards-vs.-A-Cloud-Of-Dust, Loser-Gets-Toledo.

Considering how cavalierly it’s treating geography otherwise, the Big Ten has chosen to put the two schools in separate conferences. This would mean the unthinkable – i.e., the two schools not playing every year, as Nebraska and Oklahoma no longer do in the Big 12 – except that the conference honchos say that won’t be the case.

Here’s the thing, though: Does it really matter if it is?

Simply by adding a cash-cow championship game like a rogue appendage (the only real reason for expanding the conference to 12 equally divisible teams), the conference has already diminished its traditional rivalries to a greater or lesser degree. Maybe the Bucket game will still mean as much to Purdue and Indiana, or the Floyd of Rosedale game to Iowa and Minnesota, in most years. But if by some twist of fate one of those schools goes on to the championship … well, suddenly the market value of oaken buckets and bronze pigs takes a dive.

You can’t manufacture a Big Game out of hype and payday lust without diminishing every other big game you used to have. There is, after all, only room for one.

That brings us back to Michigan and Ohio State, whose annual November eye-gouge figures to be hurt worst by the conference’s new look. Once it held the conference title in its hammy fists, more years than not. Now it won’t.

Now it will only be an appetizer, with the main course to come. Not only does this render the traditional November meeting inconsequential – think a clash of titans reduced to a mere prelim – it likely takes some of the bloom off the title game as well.

Quick, tell me the last great rematch game between traditional rivals. Can’t remember one, can you?

Like it or not, though, that’s what we’re going to get now some years, so buckle up. Or unbuckle. Or something.

Next stop: The Old Oaken Revenue Stream.