Megan Schiefelbein ’04 asks Abe: “I have often wondered but never asked why there are 11 schools in the Big Ten Conference? How did that come about?”
ANSWER: The Big Ten Conference is the nation’s oldest Division I collegiate athletic organization. The conference was founded in 1896 during a meeting of seven Midwestern university presidents. At that time, it was called the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, and its mission was to establish control and administration of collegiate athletics. The seven charter members of the conference were the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin.
According to
www.bigten.org, the first official action of the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives was to “restrict eligibility for athletics to bona fide, full-time students who were not delinquent in their studies.” This initiative helped to regulate participation in college sports teams to actual university students, because some team rosters included professional athletes and other non-students.
The early years were tumultuous ones for the fledgling conference. In 1899, it was renamed the Big Nine when Iowa and Indiana joined. Membership remained stable until 1912, when Ohio State was admitted. Then in 1917, Michigan returned to the conference after a seven-year hiatus. Things evened out for a while, but then Chicago discontinued its football program and dropped out in 1946. In 1949, Michigan State was added to the conference’s membership list, and to accurately reflect the number of member institutions, it was called the Big Ten Conference.