I had planned to write this up after watching some football last night, but put it off because the Wisconsin game was a late game in Arizona. Of course, ESPN beat me to it.
Looking at the schedule this week, I saw a bunch of winnable games against decent competition for the conference this week. Washington, UCLA, Central Florida, Notre Dame, etc. aren’t the cream of the elite crop, but they are good, quality, teams. If the Big Ten wants to put it’s recent reputation behind them, this would have been a good week to do it. Instead, we watched Nebraska fall apart again, Penn State fall short, Wisconsin leaves themselves in a situation where they could get screwed by poor officiating instead of simply kicking the go ahead field goal, and Michigan, well at least they didn’t lose to Akron, right?
Ohio State did it’s thing, Purdue and Illinois didn’t pull off an upset, but played well and had some of the other games been won, we would be talking about how even those games were a sign of improvement conference-wide. Instead, the conference can go back to taking it’s lumps, and when the computers rank the schedules of Ohio State against Oregon, there won’t be any contest. If the Big Ten wants to get a team into the National Championship game this year, or into the 4 team playoff next year, they will be relying on other teams losing instead of simply winning and standing on their own strength of schedule. That’s not a good way to start every season.
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