Big10 Football: Are "Experts" Changing Their Tune?

Both Ohio State (#4) and Michigan (#12) dominated in their bowl game victories and Michigan is on pace for one of the nation's top recruiting classes this year. Had Ohio State not stumbled against Michigan State (#6) near the end of the season, many people felt the Buckeyes would have had a good chance to repeat as national champions. All of which confirms that, as we indicated last year, the Big 10 is playing good, competitive football and many fans and sports journalists are beginning to recognize it.

January 2015 - For quite a few years it's been fashionable among the so-called college football "experts" to speak disparagingly of the teams in the Big10 Conference. They're too slow; they aren't recruiting the "athletes" other conferences (particularly the SEC) are getting. The Big10 plays a boring brand of football, the old "three yards and a cloud of dust" mentality, unlike the more wide open offenses of the Pac-12 Conference. The Big10 coaches are behind the times, etc. On and on it would go.

Going into the just-completed college bowl season, and even though ten of the conference's fourteen teams were selected to participate in a bowl game, what was the consensus on the number of games the Big10 would win? One, maybe two at the most, according to most experts and that was only because, statistically, the conference really couldn't go 0-10, could it? After all, every week there are upsets, so there probably would be one or two in the bowls and the Big10 would end up with a win or two.

Well, something happened on the way to that projected embarrassment: the conference actually won 6 bowl games and lost 5. Yes, that adds up to eleven games played, not ten. That's because the Ohio State Buckeyes, to almost everyone's surprise, handily defeated perennial SEC power Alabama, which put OSU in the first NCAA Football Playoff Championship Game. Which the Buckeyes also won going away, this time against the Oregon Ducks and the Ducks' vaunted high-powered offense.

But don't think that Ohio State is just the exception in the Big10. As mentioned earlier, four other Big10 teams won their bowl games, including the Michigan State Spartans. Quietly, Mark Dantonio has been building a football powerhouse at MSU, finishing each of the last two years ranked as one of the top five teams in the nation.

MSU's success, of course, hasn't set well with their in-state rival, the Michigan Wolverines, whose football program is the winningest in college football history. Michigan recently hired former Wolverine quarterback Jim Harbaugh as its new head coach; Harbaugh has been successful both at the college level and in the NFL and is considered by most observers to be one of the top five coaches in the game. (By the way, during Michigan's coaching search, didn't you love how the networks' NFL "insiders" almost unanimously would pooh-pooh the idea that Harbaugh would ever leave the NFL, where he was so successful, and go back to coaching college football?)

So the next time you listen to one of those know-it-all talking heads on TV or one of the equally overconfident football analysts on the radio, they may be singing a different tune when it comes to Big10 football.

{One of our friends in the Midwest wrote this column, so he may be a bit biased, but we can't argue with his facts. We'll be anxious to see how the next few years play out.}