Big Ten football has become the subject of some ridicule and jest this season, but can a successful bowl season fix their damaged reputation?
Let’s be honest here. The Big Ten, in terms of football, has taken it on the chin over the past…oh, I don’t know…half-century? OK, so maybe that’s stretching it a bit, but it has been a while since the teams of the Midwest (and now Northeast) were a feared commodity on the gridiron.
Scarlet and Game
Does the Big Ten deserve more respect than they’ve been given? The argument can be made either way. Every conference has teams who are doormats, or who lose games to FCS or lower-level teams. But when it happens in the Big Ten, it seems to be magnified and broadcast with particular fervor by the media.
Maybe it’s because of the chest-thumping and chirping they used to do as a conference, or maybe it’s because nobody really likes Urban Meyer (oversimplified, yes…but you know you thought about it).
And this year, the Big Ten looked to be the Private Pyle of the nation – held down on a cot, while other conferences took turns beating them down with bars of soap tied up in hand towels.
Things got off to a particularly rough start in 2014, with the Big Ten dropping seemingly every Power-5, out-of-conference game they had. In fact, by the middle of September, the Big Ten had a 1-9 record against other Power-5 conference foes, with a few unlikely losses to smaller schools as well.
The phrase “Midwestern football is dead” was actually uttered on ESPN as October neared, and the talk was that the Big Ten would easily be the conference shut out of the College Football Playoff.
Michigan State was seen as the conference’s lone hope for any respectability, with Ohio State only being given a nod of acknowledgement out of respect for Urban Meyer and the program, since no one gave the Buckeyes any real chance after losing starting quarterback Braxton Miller before the start of the season.
But as the 2014 season went on, Ohio State kept on winning, Michigan state kept on looking less spectacular, and Wisconsin started to turn heads, carried by the able legs of Melvin Gordon.
Still, most brushed the B1G off their playoff charts as if they were pesky flakes of dandruff.
By the time the season came down to the final week, Ohio State was in prime position to slide into a playoff spot, Michigan State, Wisconsin and Nebraska all had shots at 10-win seasons, and yet still, nobody took any team from the Big Ten seriously because, after all…they had played Big Ten schedules.
The dust settles, the smoke clears, and the bowl bids go out. Ohio State is in the playoff, Michigan State got into a New Years Six bowl, and eight other Big Ten teams were moving on for a postseason bowl game. Great news, right, Big Ten fans?
Upon further review…B1G teams are underdogs in every one of their bowl games.
Welcome to the Rodney Dangerfield conference.
So with 10 teams playing in bowl games, all of them expected to lose, can Big Ten football do a massive redemption job and restore its image as a true powerhouse conference during this year’s bowl season?
Well…perhaps. It’s going to take a lot of work, and some impressive wins.
If Illinois beats Louisiana Tech in the Zaxby’s Heart of Dallas Bowl, it probably won’t help much. But every other bowl game in which the Big Ten is playing, they are facing a Power-5 opponent, four of them against the mighty SEC.
One of those SEC games just happens to be a national semifinal game against the Alabama Crimson Tide. No big deal. Just a shot to knock off the number one team in the nation and move on to a national championship game.
But even if the Big Ten goes 4-6 in their bowl games, and sweeps their games against the SEC, they would still do more to prove a “down year” for the SEC rather than making a reclamation case for themselves.
It’s practically an all or nothing proposition here. For the Big Ten to perk up enough ears and make sportswriters remove their glasses and clean the lenses one good time, they’ll have to sweep or nearly sweep every bowl game.
That means running the table against Louisiana Tech, Boston College, North Carolina, Stanford, Tennessee, USC, Auburn, Missouri, Baylor and Alabama.
Safe to say that the Big Ten has their work cut out for them. But based on the play of the conference in the latter part of the season, an 8-2 record or better during bowl season would restore a lot of faith in the conference…unless one of those two losses is to Alabama.
Therein lies the key. The Big Ten posted a record of futility against the SEC in title games during the BCS era, and a Buckeyes loss to Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide would only add fuel to the fire about Big Ten teams not being championship worthy.
Win most of their bowl games…beat Alabama…and there you have the recipe for the Big Ten entering 2015 as a conference to be reckoned with, and not to be marked off as loss with red pen in a non-conference game. But that alone won’t rebuild the reputation of what was once a football-strong conference.
It’s taken years to destroy the conference’s football image, and it will take nearly as many years to rebuild. Even if Ohio State wins the national championship, the word “fluke” or phrase “odds eventually had to kick in” will be tossed around before most admit that there is something brewing worth seeing in Big Ten football.
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