It’s been a little over a week since the college football season ended, so now that the dust has settled and we’ve had a little bit of time to reflect and think about what exactly Tim Tebow does that causes sportscasters who are twice his age to turn into 12-year-old girls at a Jonas Brothers concert, we can now FINALLY put the 2008 season to bed.

But before we do that, I would first like to congratulate the Utah Utes on their triumphant national championship campaign this year. After destroying Alabama 31-17 in the Sugar Bowl and finishing the year as the lone undefeated team (13-0) in the FBS, they were very deserving of their national championship crown.

Note: Since in actuality Utah got screwed, the Utah Attorney General is looking into the possibility of pursuing legal action against the BCS, claiming anti-trust violations. It’s uncertain how far the AG is willing to go to pursue this, but with a little divine intervention from Brigham Young, I think Utah has a legit case to finally bring down the BCS.

What most Midwesterners will remember about the 2008 college football season was another collapse by the Big Ten in the postseason. After going 1-6 overall in the bowls and losing their sixth straight BCS game, everyone was ready to put the Big Ten on BCS probation.

There’ve been a lot of theories floating around trying to explain the Big Ten’s futility. Some of the most common ones are: lack of athletes, travel, warm weather, offensive style and the long layoff. I think all of these problems are fairly minor and range somewhere between myth and illusion. Here’s why…

Lack of athletes: In recent years some of the Big Ten teams have looked completely overmatched in the bowl games. The embarrassing fashion that they lose in makes it seem as though they are not fully equipped to compete with the SEC/Pac-10 teams. In reality, it doesn’t make sense that this happens. The Big Ten has had a lot of NFL-caliber players on their recent teams. Let’s take the 2006 teams for example and compare the number of NFL draftees they had to their opponents.

Rose Bowl – USC 32, Michigan 18
BCS Championship – Florida 41. Ohio State 14
Players drafted by NFL since these games:
USC - 15
Michigan – 13
Ohio State – 11
Florida – 10

Although there are some players who played in those games who are still yet to be drafted (Beanie Wells, Tebow, etc), this stat accounts for most of the older, more influential players in those games. The talent level was essentially equal across the board.

Travel: The Big Ten is at a slight disadvantage when it comes to travelling to bowl games because most of the games are in warm weather spots on the West Coast or the South. Though travel has an influence, these teams arrive at their bowl locations around a week in advance, so jetlag is no longer an issue.

A bigger issue might be the home-field advantage that USC gets in the Rose Bowl, LSU gets in the Sugar Bowl and Florida gets in the Orange Bowl. Although Big Ten fans are loyal and travel well, I would say the fans are usually distributed around 65-35 against the Big Ten. Not that big a deal, but it is factor nonetheless.

Warm Weather: I don’t buy when people say Big Ten football is built for the cold and therefore they don’t perform well in warm weather. That doesn’t make any sense because cold weather is only a factor for like two or three games in late November while warm weather is the ideal football situation. It would be like a golfer preferring to play on a windy day instead of a calm day. Though I believe Pac-10 teams would have A LOT of trouble if the Rose Bowl were played at Wrigley Field, all teams from all corners of the Earth should be capable of playing in warm weather.

Offensive Style: Time and time again, the Big Ten looks incapable of competing with the high powered offenses from other conferences. It just seems like the Big Ten style of play puts them at a disadvantage.

The best solution for this: PLAY BETTER DEFENSE.  If you don’t think it’s possible, just look at Super Bowl XLII. The Giants (with an average offense) were able to beat the Patriots, who had the best offense in NFL history, because they played superior defense. Big Ten teams are fully capable of playing lock down D. In fact, Ohio State nearly pulled it off against Texas simply because their defense played so well and kept Colt McCoy in check until the last drive of the game.

Long Layoff: The Big Ten is the first conference to end their season, finishing the Saturday before Thanksgiving. This usually gives them around 40 days off before their BCS game. For other schools, it’s usually around 30 days. There’s basically no difference between the two, both are ridiculously long breaks for a football team to be on. It wouldn't matter if it was 30, 40, 50 or 100 days.

Despite all of these perceived problems, I think the Big Ten’s problem has been overlooked and can be solved almost immediately. What all the teams need to do is…

PLAY A TOUGHER SCHEDULE.

After doing the research and "crunching the numbers" from the past three years (where the Big Ten went 0-6 in the BCS), I realized that the Big Ten has had one of the softest strength of schedules over the past three years, and was by far the softest in 2008. 

According to Jeff Sagarin’s strength of schedule rankings (which rates every team's SOS in Division I from 1 to 242, 1 being the toughest), the average SOS rank of the top-5 Big Ten teams this year was 55. The SEC was the highest with an average rank of 19.2 and the only other conference with a lower average rank than 28 was the Big East with 51.6.

Average SOS Rank of Top-5 teams

2006
Pac-10 - 7.8
SEC - 16.2
Big Ten - 37.4
Big East - 41.8
ACC - 52.4
Big 12 - 54.8

2007
Pac-10 - 15.2
SEC - 16.2
ACC - 38.6
Big Ten - 50.4
Big East - 51.2
Big 12 - 51.6

2008
SEC - 19.2
Pac-10 - 25.4
Big 12 - 27.2
ACC - 27.8
Big East - 51.6
Big Ten - 55

2008 Big Ten Top-5 Teams National Schedule Rank
Penn State - 55
Ohio State - 46
Iowa - 63
Mich. State - 41
Northwestern - 70

I think the Big Ten’s problems aren’t because the teams are not good enough to compete; it is simply because they are not prepared to compete.

Here’s a look at the out of conference games by the top-5 Big Ten teams in 2008.

Penn State (4-0): Coastal Carolina, Oregon State, @Syracuse, Temple
Ohio State (3-1): Youngstown State, Ohio, @ (1)USC, Troy
Michigan State (3-1): @Cal, Eastern Michigan, Florida Atlantic, Norte Dame
Iowa (3-1): Maine, Florida International, Iowa State, @Pitt
Northwestern (4-0): Syracuse, @Duke, Southern Illinois, Ohio

Out of the top-5 Big Ten teams, only one played a ranked out of conference game (OSU@USC). The Big Ten is simply not good enough for their teams to get away with playing such soft outside competition. Teams like Coastal Carolina, Duke, Youngstown State and Florida International/Atlantic do nothing to improve their teams. Ohio State might as well have had intrasquad scrimmages than play some of these games. Just look at the picture above and tell me Youngstown State doesn't look like a team you would see on Friday Night Lights. Beanie Wells looks like he's a counselor at Offense-Defense peewee summer camp.

In most facets of life, success comes through meaningful experience. A failure to challenge yourself makes it much harder to reach your potential through these experiences.

A 16-year-old kid doesn’t finish driving school and go to NASCAR the same way a 22-year-old kid doesn’t graduate from college and become the CEO of a company. These kids may eventually become talented enough, but they need to learn through experience to make sure they are ready to succeed when the reach the top. Big Ten teams are falling behind in bowl games because they don’t have enough experience playing against the top competition.

I have a feeling Big Ten teams are reluctant to schedule tough games because they know they have the easiest path to the title game out of all the conferences. They have a weaker league, only play eight conference games, they don't have a conference championship game and they end the earliest. As we’ve seen in recent years, the best team in the conference almost always goes undefeated or has one loss, which is basically all you need for consideration for the title game.

The only problem is…those teams have made the title game (2006-07 Ohio State) and then gotten exposed for being frauds.

Now that the credibility of the league is at an all-time low, it’s time to scrap that strategy and do something that makes the teams better. From now on they should ignore the local small schools (Youngstown, Ohio, Temple, Eastern Michigan, etc) and try to schedule games against middle of the pack teams from the SEC, Big East or Pac-10. Yes, this will lead to the Big Ten champion probably having two or three losses and not getting a chance to play for the championship, but at least they’ll be ready to hold their own in the Rose Bowl and possibly win the damn game one of these years.

And honestly, who really cares about the BCS championship game? As we saw this year, the real national champion didn’t even have to play in it.

• Print
• E-mail
• 
• Related

ChiChi Madu
ChiChi was born in New York City and instantly became a fan of the Giants, Knicks and Yankees. More