Big Ten East Could Be Decided By Rankings?
Michigan State's dramatic, thrilling, whatever adjective you want to use victory over Michigan is the first of three big puzzle pieces that fit into who will represent the Big Ten East division in the conference championship game, but if the two other pieces fall a certain way, there could be some controversy.
Assuming Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State when the rest of their games they don't play each other and the two big games left go something like this:
Ohio State over Michigan State
Michigan over Ohio State
There is going to be a problem for Big Ten fans and fans of these schools.
In this "What if?" scenario OSU, MSU, and Michigan would all be 7-1 in the conference. According to the official Big Ten tiebreakers they would fit every single level of a three team tiebreaker as equal and the result would go down to college football playoff rankings.
From bigten.org:
Tiebreaker number five will most likely be the tiebreaker to separate these three team and while it may be considered better than a random draw it still could lead to some major issues begin taken up by the fanbases of two of the three schools involved.
Again, this is all a gigantic "if", but it is certainly plausible and after Saturday's game the old adage "Anything can happen" is certainly in play here.