The Not-So-Big Ten

I'd like to raise a glass of Champaign to the University of Illinois. When the Illini upset Ohio State in Columbus last weekend, they spared college football fans the pain of watching the Buckeyes' inexorable march to a second straight blowout loss in the BCS national championship game.

I had hoped that underdog Florida's 41-14 annihilation of Ohio State—it wasn't as close as the scored indicated—in last year's title game would force some readjustment in how the BCS system evaluates the Big Ten champs. Mostly stocked with mediocre teams, the conference is not remotely what it is hyped to be. Yet for some reason the BCS keeps treating an undefeated Big Ten season with reverence, as if it's a far greater achievement than, say, an undefeated Big 12 team like the University of Kansas. Winning out in the Big Ten is not even the equivalent of one loss in tougher and more competitive conferences, like the SEC or the Pac-10.

The Big Ten has become a football fraud, a diminished conference that has been riding a reputation established a half-century ago. The football talent in this country, just like the population, has been steadily gravitating south and west for a long time now. While considerable talent remains in the upper Midwest, it tends toward the lumbering rather than the blazing. And as Florida demonstrated so brilliantly last January, speed kills.

Still, it's hard to understand why the experts are so generous in assessing the Big Ten. Perhaps it's because its teams so rarely challenge the national powers from rival conferences. Which helps explain why the Big Ten's out-of-conference record stands at 35-8 this season. But that mark stands as something of a joke—and when you parse the schedule, the joke turns out to be on the BCS as well as the Big Ten and its fans. Check it out:

* This season the 11 Big Ten teams combined have played just two out-of-conference games against nationally ranked teams—and lost both (Oregon 39, Michigan 7; Missouri 40, Illinois 34).

* Big Ten teams have played a total of just 14 games against teams from other major football conferences in 2007. While they have managed a wining mark of 10-4 in those contests, the cumulative record of the teams they defeated is an incredible 24-74, or a winning percentage of .245. In fact, the only winning "major" defeated by a Big Ten team this year is Nevada, a true minor major that has a less-than-lofty 5-4 record.

* 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.