Hlas column: Big Ten's new division names are already legendary ... for badness

This seems like a good time for levity, so let's discuss the Big Ten's new division names and Saturday's start of the 24-day-long bowl season.

Mocking the Big Ten is shooting fish in a barrel. Legends and Leaders. Those are the football division names. Four days after that announcement, the world is still in stunned disbelief.

If you want to brand or re-brand something, maybe you're just better off going to a middle school and offering free pizza to the class that comes up with the best idea. It's amazing how little you sometimes get from spending big bucks.

Legends and Leaders got panned by people across America. It has been noted both start with “L,” which owns the worst connotation of any letter in sports.

The Big Ten just can't help itself. It always seems to err on the side of pretentiousness. It was the last of the major conferences to hold a postseason basketball tourney, which it once considered a shabby money-grubbing idea. It wouldn't expand to 12 teams and have a football title game. Not until years of fatigue from watching other leagues grab cash and attention because they had such an event.

East and West were fine divisions for the SEC when it went to 12 teams in 1992. The Pac-10 recently announced it was going with North and South for its newly expanded league. But the Big Ten just couldn't cut its divisions by geography. Oh no, there was competitive balance to consider.

The league said its four dominant historical programs were Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio State and Penn State, and to have three of those in the same division would produce a competitive imbalance. As if you can count on any of the four (well, other than Ohio State) being a superpower indefinitely. This is Michigan's third-straight year of football mediocrity, by the way.

If you're in the East or West, you know where you are and who's with you without thinking too hard about it. That's a good thing. Quick, folks, will Iowa be in the Legends or Leaders?

Wouldn't it be weird to be in last place of the Leaders division? Or a mere mortal in the Legends? Won't the leader of the Legends belong in the other division?

Leaders and Legends. Wow. As a critic wrote on Twitter Monday, Dungeons & Dragons was already copyrighted. Sadly, I'm pretty proud of that line.

Regarding the bowls, all you need to know comes from the first bowl of the season, Saturday's New Mexico Bowl between BYU and UTEP. They're both 6-6. That's glorious. Eleven other 6-6 teams are in bowls. That's what happens when you need 70 out of the 120 FBS teams to fill those 35 games.

As if the New Mexico Bowl weren't enough Saturday, we get the Humanitarian Bowl and the New Orleans Bowl. Fresno State is in the Humanitarian Bowl, in Boise. Fresno State has already played in Boise once this season. It lost to Boise State, 51-0. Welcome back, Aggies.

Ohio faces Troy in the New Orleans Bowl. So I Googled “Ohio” + “Troy” + “Bowl.” The first listing was for a bowling alley in Troy, Ohio.

I'd say the bowls only get better after Saturday, but there really aren't many good ones. Oklahoma vs. Connecticut in the Fiesta Bowl? Connecticut? The team that lost by 20 points at Michigan, 14 at Temple, and 26 at Louisville? The BCS is a worse matchmaker than the person who brought together Charlie Sheen and ... anyone.

At least the national-title game is a good one, Auburn vs. Oregon. But know this: Auburn quarterback Cam Newton weighs 250 pounds. That makes him bigger than eight Oregon defensive starters, and almost as big as the other three.

Auburn is the SEC West champion. That means it was the best of the six teams in the western half of the SEC. It's not a Legend or a Leader. It's just No. 1.