A Song of Plains and Lakes

[pianoknight]

For the fans of GRRM and/or the Big Ten:

[flyersfan]

Nice!

[Thatlaxgoalie]

if you made this you should make one for different conferences. Also can you pust what teams are which I can get some but others.

[BVZ]

Now this is cool. Some explanations would be awesome though, not quite understanding all of them

[the_grateful_ted]

I almsot didn't get this, then I connected the dots with Michigan and I freaked out. This is such a cool idea, nice work beautiful concept.

[Jake88]

This is actually quite beautiful. I'd love to see it for other conferences as well

The schools from left to right are (Not too positive on the red/black teams but pretty sure)

Illinois

Iowa

Minnesota

Nebraska

Northwestern

Purdue

Wisconsin

Indiana

Maryland

Michigan

Michigan State

Ohio State

Penn State

Rutgers

[pianoknight]

The map is split East/West by division, so geographically the teams are loosely in the same location; ie, Minnesota and Wisconsin are north of both Nebraska and Iowa, and all are in the West.

Obviously, it's not a straight map of the Rust & Corn Belts, but it's more or less geographical.

As for names, I wanted to mix "named" houses with other groups, similar to The Night's Watch or Maesters, etc, in GoT. The houses that are named feature a prominent coach or other figure. Schembechler, Hayes, Paterno, Osborne, etc.

The "House Words" were chosen from the school's fight song, motto, or other "lore." Nebraska, for example, has "In The Deed, The Glory" etched on the side of Memorial Stadium. If that's not a house motto, I don't know what is. Some are Mir well known (see: PSU, "WE ARE!"... <"PENN STATE"> omitted).

For the flags, I wanted something iconic without just a pure copy/paste of uniforms. Michigan is hard to pass the winged helmet, though, but you'll see things like the Northwestern stripe, or Rutgers' featuring 6-and-4 stars in honor of the very first collegiate football game's outcome. In certain cases I added some "extra" logos, such as the bronze gladius on the Michigan State flag (Spartan style sword, bronze from their alternates) or the Skull & Bones for Nebraska's Blackshirt defense.

All told, this took me probably 3 weeks of researching the schools, designing the flags and then drawing the map. Admittedly, I used a fantasy map generator to get the generic shapes and then added topography in various layers.

Glad to see the appreciation; it was a labor of love. If I do another conference, it'll probably be either the SEC for their well-established identities, or maybe the Big XII for the unique color schemes like TCU and OK State.

One more comment, Jake nailed the flags on the edges. It's East/West and then simply alphabetical, regardless of where the school is on the map.