The Big Ten and the BCS

So last year I wrote an article explaining why the Big Ten couldn't seem to live up to their billing as one of College football's elite conferences whenever bowl season rolled around. This year, they have gone 4-3 including two BCS Bowl wins (Ohio State and Iowa). This success prompted one blogger to proclaim:

"This year changed everything, and the haters can suck it."

Don't pull your shoulder out of socket patting yourself on the back there, buddy.

First off all, you had four wins in seven chances. In only one of those games (The Capital One Bowl) did you beat a team that is a perennial powerhouse (Miami hasn't been an elite team in quite some time, Georgia Tech is a perennial also-ran...in it's home state, Oregon's a strong team, but hasn't been to a BCS game in 11 years).

Second, I've seen nothing from the "Big" Ten that would make me change my opinion of this weak conference. Iowa shut down a team that had no passing offense...AKA: the second best team in the state of Georgia. Ohio State beat a team whose pass defense was less than a yard better than Syracuse's. Penn State's win over LSU was notable, but anyone familiar with the SEC this year will tell you that LSU was overrated. This is a team that had trouble beating Mississippi State this year. Also, you had adverse field conditions, which is always the great equalizer. Additionally, LSU was just out-coached, and LSU fans will admit to that. However, that is a testament to Joe Paterno specifically and NOT the Big Ten in general. The other "Big" win: on a bad field, Wisconsin beat an erratic Miami team that can't run the ball. In the conference's 4 wins, no team scored over 26 points, the largest margin of victory was 10 points. Three of the four games could have easily gone the other way in the 4^th quarter (one of them probably would have if LSU was a disciplined team and had a coach who wasn't living off Nick Saban's legacy) and two of those were played on bad field conditions.

Now let's look at the Big Ten's three losses. Michigan State lost to a headless Texas Tech team that had a mountain of distractions in the Alamo Bowl. a brain-dead Auburn team did everything in it's power to give Northwestern the win in the Outback Bowl, but Northwestern just wouldn't let them. Then Minnesota lost to that "perennial powerhouse" Iowa State in the Insight Bowl.

Is there a single team in the Big Ten that belongs in the same sentence with Alabama, Texas, TCU, Boise State or Florida? My sources say, "No."

So while this year's bowl season was a winning one for the Big Ten, it does nothing to reverse the overall trend. It still doesn't change the fact that your leadership can't embrace reality and schedule you guys some decent non-conference opponents. It still doesn't change the fact that "pound for pound" and man for man, you can't match up across the board with Southern and Western teams and you justify it with whining about conspiracies, smug, prejudicial (and in some cases, borderline racist) assertions about the intelligence of Southern players, and the old crybaby standard: "you guys must've cheated."