The Original Big Ten Conference Quiz

Answer:

The "Original Seven" schools to be grouped together were the University of Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin. They were all part of a conference known as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives. They were officially part of the conference when it was founded on February 8, 1896. It became the first official NCAA Division 1 conference. Three years later, the University of Indiana and Iowa joined the conference. In 1912, Ohio State was added and the conference officially had ten schools. They were still not called the Big Ten but the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives was also being known as the Western Conference. Informally people were calling them the Big Ten but it was not their official name yet.

In 1946, the prestigious University of Chicago chose to de-emphasize athletics and officially withdrew from the conference and they were back down to nine schools. They were unofficially being called the Big Nine conference. Michigan State replaced the University of Chicago and joined the conference three years later. Even though they were back to ten schools, the Big Ten name was still just a publicly named nickname for the conference.

Finally in 1987, the universities officially adopted the Big Ten name as it was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization. But in just three years, things got complicated again. The schools wanted to improve their football conference appeal and offered Penn State University an invitation to join the conference. The Big Ten logo stayed but with eleven teams, they altered the logo to showcase there were now eleven official schools.

In 2010, Nebraska petitioned to join the conference and they were unanimously accepted bringing the conference up to twelve schools but still called the Big Ten. In 2014, they expanded to fourteen teams when Maryland and Rutgers joined and added even more Eastern colleges to the Midwest conference.

The appeal to grow their brand nationwide continued when in 2022, the University of California Los-Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC) joined. The following year, the University of Oregon and the University of Washington were approved and that brought the total number of teams in the Big Ten to eighteen.