A Good Year for the Outlaw

Peoria is losing a high school – eventually, and from all appearances, about five years too late, but that’s not important now – and the loss of one of the four public schools should and probably will cause a re-alignment of conferences.

This would be my plan:

Richwoods, Manual, Quincy Notre Dame and the new Woodruff Central WarLions (cool, donchya think?) need to find a new home. Bloomington and Champaign are already set, so is Springfield. So I suggest they join Galesburg, Quincy, Rock Island, Alleman, Moline and United Township (the current “Western Big 6″) to form the Western Big 10.

Where does that leave Peoria Notre Dame? The Irish to the Mid-Illini. But that would give the M-I nine teams, kind of unruly, no? Yes. So then Canton, joined by Kewanee, Princeton and IVC of the unruly-in-size-and-balance NCIC, would move to the Olympic, which is soon to lose a couple of it’s smaller members.

The results would look like this:

Western Big 10 – Rock Island, Moline, United Township, Alleman, Galesburg, Quincy, Quincy Notre Dame, Richwoods, Manual, and Woodruff Central.

Mid-Illini – Pekin, Morton, Metamora, East Peoria, Washington, Dunlap, Limestone, Peoria Notre Dame.

Olympic – Macomb, Monmouth-Roseville, IVC, Kewanee, Sherrard, Farmington, Rock Ridge, Princeton

Orion and Knoxville, the smallest of the Olympics, can move into the Lincoln Trail to join the likes of Mercer County (the new name for the Aledo-Westmer consolidation) and others. The NCIC would survive just fine, they are leaning more and more towards bigger schools as it is.

There’s my idea. Let’s see what happens.