Go figure, when the SEC or Pac10 can start recruiting a balanced athletic and academic individual, you wouldn't see so many fast running thugs playing in them Conferences. Oh and as for Bowl games, why do the Big10 teams always have to play in opponents home field advantage? Always.
Quess it is what it is, but I do know this, Michigan owns every conference when it comes to the records.
- 1
- 2
The Not-So-Big Ten
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
* The Big Ten fattens up annually on MAC teams. This year they have squared off 17 times (with Iowa still to play Western Michigan next week), and the Big Ten has gone 16-1.
* Beyond the MAC attack, Big Ten teams have played another dozen games against opponents from the Gateway, Southern, Sun Belt, Mountain West, Southern, Ohio Valley, Colonial, USA and Great West conferences, but not a single game against an SEC or an ACC team. Among the notable powers that rose up and smote Big Ten teams this year were Florida Atlantic, North Dakota State, Duke and, of course, Division I-AA's Appalachian State, which beat Michigan in Ann Arbor (but later in the season couldn't get past Wofford or Georgia Southern).
This is not exactly a new phenomenon. I first encountered it back in 1969 when I ventured west to grad school at a Pac-10 school and discovered there was a better brand of football. From 1970 to 1980 Ohio State and Michigan combined for 11 straight Rose Bowl appearances and won just once, losing six times to USC, twice to Stanford and once each to Washington and UCLA. For three consecutive years, beginning in 1971, the Big Ten champ arrived in Pasadena undefeated and went home beaten and befuddled. The first two of those losses were to lightly regarded Stanford teams. In 1971, against one of those "three yards and a cloud of dust" Ohio State teams, Stanford's opening score came off a double-reverse flea-flicker on the team's first play from scrimmage. In a revealing contrast, Stanford quarterback Jim Plunkett threw the ball 30 times, while Buckeyes QB Rex Kern ran it 20. The next year Stanford upset unbeaten Michigan, using a trick play and a late drive, orchestrated by quarterback Don Bunce, who threw 44 passes.
Though Michigan finally won one for coach Bo Schembechler in 1981, it didn't prove to signal a turnabout. From 1982 to 1992, the Big Ten went 2-9, as UCLA and Washington won three Rose Bowls each, USC captured two and Arizona State won its first ever. So, dating from my arrival in California—and doesn't all history start with me?—to 2001, when the BCS ruined the Rose Bowl by forsaking the traditional conference rivalry, the West Coast held a 21-11 advantage. Over the same period Ohio State and Michigan combined to go 6-15 on New Year's Day. So how, despite this record, did the Big Ten sustain this notion that it was a superelite football conference? With a lot of heartland hooey!
The Big Ten is essential a Big 2, Ohio State and Michigan, with a few other OK teams and plenty of football fodder upon which the top teams can fatten up. The Ohio State-Michigan rivalry remains as good as any in college football, indeed right up there with the best in all of sports. Still, all that history and hoopla and some 100,000-plus people in the stands in Ann Arbor this weekend don't make the teams what their fans choose to believe they are. And the winner on Saturday better pray that Oregon reaches the BCS title game and doesn't land in the Rose Bowl. Neither Ohio State nor Michigan wants to play the Ducks in Pasadena. Or even Wofford, for that matter.
© 2007
- 1
- 2
Discuss