Expansion Talk Overshadows Big Ten Bragging Rights
Dave Curtis - SportingNews.com
May 24, 2010
Most years, when the Big Ten football coaches huddle in Chicago, group therapy ensued. The annual meetings completed a calendar that had grown familiar in these parts:
Fall: A highly touted champion emerges from the regular season, and the teams head to bowl games convinced their conference ranks with any in America.
Winter: Ranked squads from around the country, usually led by USC, hammer Big Ten teams in bowl play.
Spring: The coaches field months of questions on why the Big Ten still lags behind the SEC and others.
So went the circle of life in Big Ten football. Then came New Year's and an oasis of winning. Ohio State snapped a bowl victory drought by rolling Oregon. Iowa dominated Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl. Wisconsin beat Miami, Penn State sloshed past LSU. And the best news of all? The Buckeyes, Hawkeyes and Badgers were led by all-conference players with eligibility remaining.
The success meant this year's meeting set up as a pep rally. The coaches in Chicago could crow rather than cower, bragging about the postseason from four months ago and the sky-high potential of this season.
Instead, the all-expansion, all-the-time tone has postponed the optimism until at least August. There were no curtain calls this week; the questions, for the most part, had nothing to do with the Big Ten's big football run.
"You have a good one, and nobody's talking about it," Wisconsin athletic director and former football coach Barry Alvarez said. "You have a bad one, and everybody's talking about it."
Expansion figures to dominate the discussion through the summer. Come kickoff, when what happens in helmets and pads matters again, the Big Ten can start reaping. Ohio State looks like a consensus top-three squad and an undefeated regular season should be enough to return to a national title game. Either Iowa or Wisconsin will end up joining Ohio State in every preseason top 10 and some polls will include both schools.
Don't mistake the bowl triumphs and the high expectations for any sort of renaissance. The drop-off from the conference's top three to the next eight seems steep. Perception-wise, the Big Ten will profit this fall from the confluence of several factors -- credit the conference's schools for some; others have nothing to do with what's happening in the league.
Here's a quick glance at why 2010 could be the Big Ten's big year:
No panic: In 2007, Iowa missed a bowl, and the following offseason included off-field allegations involving football players' conduct that prompted a Board of Trustees review. In 2008, Wisconsin lost five times in Big Ten play, needed overtime (plus three missed extra points) to vanquish I-AA Cal Poly at home and got rocked by Florida State in the Champs Sports Bowl.
Both programs seemed shaky from the outside, and both schools' athletic directors heard calls for making coaching changes. Neither did, and now Kirk Ferentz and Bret Bielema have consistent winners again. Both return the guts of their 2009 rosters and mirror their program's past champions -- strong up front, looking to dominate the run game, and tough at home. Plus, both get Ohio State at home.
Iowa's play last year gives it a slight head-to-head edge and makes it a national title sleeper.
"We feel great about the guys we bring back," Hawkeyes athletic director Gary Barta said.
No great teams elsewhere: Look around the country and find the national juggernaut. Other than Boise State's Blue Turf Bunch, who's a lock to cruise through the season? The unknowns doesn't stop there. In the Big 12, will Texas regroup? Will Oklahoma rebound? How will Nebraska handle winning again? Name the best team in the Pac-10. How about the second-best team in the SEC?
Thanks to returning players and stable coaching staffs, the Big Ten delivers more certainty than any other major conference. Its top three are clear, and they run with the Big 12's triumvirate as the nation's best intra-conference trio.
Bank on two of them reaching BCS bowls, looking to build on last year's 2-0 performance.
"In order to change the outlook a little bit, all it was going to take was a couple big wins, bowl games," Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez said.
It's time: The Big Ten last captured the nation's attention in November 2006, when No. 2 Michigan and No. 1 Ohio State played a virtual national semifinal at the Horseshoe. The conference has too many traditional powers and too many talented players for the lapse to last much longer. All the big boys get their time in college football, and they all rotate to the shadows, too.
The SEC has won four straight national titles, but many fans forget it went 3-5 in Bowl Alliance/BCS games during a six-year stretch (1995 season to 2000 season).
This reason pretty much combines the first two -- the Big Ten is strong at the top, a claim most leagues can't make in 2010.
Dave Curtis is a writer for Sporting News. E-mail him at dcurtis@sportingnews.com.
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