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How to Heal Big Ten Football

Written by Ryan Murphy on Friday, 30 November 2012 09:23.

For the past five years, the debate about Big Ten football’s weaknesses has occurred on New Year’s Day. Bowl game loss after bowl game loss—mostly against SEC foes—caused a whole heap of abuse on the Midwestern conference as the season wrapped up.

But this year, it happened at an even more embarrassing time. After the non-conference slate of games.

To be fair, no single conference schedules difficult non-conference games all the way down the line. The Big Ten’s cupcake parade isn’t unusual. What’s unusual is the struggles the league had against those cupcakes.

Numerous losses to MAC team and ugly victories over inferior foes brought about a firestorm of justified criticism to the entire league. Not to mention going 0-for-Notre Dame.

The question on everybody’s mind is: what’s wrong with the Big Ten?

Let’s start by answering what’s NOT wrong with the Big Ten.

The Big Ten has talent. Sure, the SEC has more, but if recruiting services and NFL draft results mean anything, no other conference has more than the Big Ten.

The SEC has a leg up in recruiting over the Big Ten (weather, ESPN’s backing, coaching prestige, etc.), but this still doesn’t answer why the Big Ten has fallen behind even the Pac-12 and ACC.*

The two main problems with the league are also the primary areas where the league needs to heal itself: coaching and scheduling.

Coaching

Joe Paterno once quipped that football is more about “Jimmys and Joes than about Xs and Os.” But if the Big Ten has comparable talent with everyone outside the SEC (and even there, the gap probably isn’t as pronounced as some would have us believe), why is the product so inferior? Look at pipeline and pocketbooks.

Most of the SEC’s top coaches are either ex-head coaches from other major college teams, ex-coordinators for elite college teams, or former NFL coaches. The Big Ten, on the other hand, relies mainly on a MAC pipeline. Urban Meyer’s hire was truly the only splash head coaching move the league had made since Rich Rodriguez was Michigan’s nineteenth choice back in 2008.

One of the reasons the Big Ten doesn’t make glitzy hires? They don’t pay enough. Seven of the eleven highest-paid coaches come from the SEC. Think there might be a correlation there with on-field production?

Granted, you can’t buy wins (unless your Auburn). But perception feeds reality. If a recruit is deciding between Michigan State and Auburn, he might factor in that Auburn’s coach makes twice as much as Michigan State’s.

I’m not saying that the Big Ten pays peanuts for their coaches. Iowa, for some reason, pays Ferentz a boatload. Hoke at Michigan has a top-ten salary. But the personalities, the names, the hyped coaches live elsewhere. Meyer is a start, but he’s gotta be looking at the stiffs around the league, thinking “Help me out here, guys.”

Penn State, although far from a “typical” situation to draw examples from, got a decent name for its head coach (an NFL coordinator with sufficient college experience). But they pay him less than a million. I know they had their external pressures in doing this, but you send a message when your salaries are low.

The Big Ten makes more dollars through TV deals than anyone else. Fact.

It’s time to jump in the ring with the big boys. Create a perception that you want to compete for national titles.

Scheduling

This points comes in two flavors: vanilla opponents and vanilla arrangements. Okay, I guess that’s one flavor.

Like I said earlier, the Big Ten’s cupcakes are no different than any other conference’s. But the times are a-changing. The mantra of “the Midwest is dying” is echoed nationally, and it’s sticking in everyone’s psyche.

The Big Ten needs to get out there and create compelling match-ups. To do this, schools have to kill the dream of getting eight home games in any given year. This might balance the checkbooks, but it’s killing the league.

Seven home games is a fine amount. Go away to one BCS opponent and host one BCS opponent. Bring in your two mercy-kills, and you’re done.

The Big Ten’s big stadiums need their revenue. I get that. But stick with just seven home games each year. It’ll go a long way for national perception.

The next thing the league needs to do is pick interesting non-conference games on a national scale. Easier said than done.

They tried to align with the Pac-12, but the Pac-12 couldn’t hack it. And I can’t blame them. They have nine league games. To lock into a Big Ten agreement would mean that their schedules would either be A) far more difficult than the rest of the country or B) far less diverse than they’d like.

Dropping Notre Dame is essential for the league. Notre Dame hates you, Big Ten. Quit sending the Irish love letters and asking them to move back in. They are in the league’s footprint, and this does nothing to increase the league’s national perception. When Stanford or Miami plays the Domers, it’s interesting national football. When Purdue and Michigan State do, it’s boring Midwestern football.

Scheduling the SEC is easier said than done. Few of them want to travel north, and many of them have non-conference opponents from the ACC. (Georgia Tech-Georgia, Florida Florida St., Clemson-South Carolina, etc.) Alabama—with its principal rival in division in the SEC—has some scheduling flexibility. (Have fun with that, say Michigan and Penn State.)

The other reason the SEC isn’t eager to jump into contracts with the Big Ten? They aren’t facing the negative perceptions. If they play four games against high school teams, no one will criticize because “the SEC is so tough.” Perception is reality.

Penn State’s current out-of-conference schedule is a perfect example of how NOT to select teams to improve your national perception. Virginia, Rutgers, and Pittsburgh highlight their next few schedules. Not only are those teams not blue-blood programs; they’re all less than 200 miles away. Sprinkle in a home-and-home with UCLA or Texas or LSU on top of those solid regional foes and you’re on to something.

Another thing the league can do is start league games earlier. If the Big Ten wants to keep the cupcakes on the schedule, at least don’t put them all at once. The SEC stole the stage in week two the last two seasons—first with a huge Georgia-South Carolina match-up and then with their welcome-to-our-league games for Texas A&M and Missouri.

I like having a tune-up game for week one, but then let’s jump into it. The Big Ten already recognized its outdated scheduling practice when it added Nebraska. We now play after Thanksgiving, and we have a conference championship game. Delany and Co. have shown they can adapt to the times. Now it needs to adapt by moving league games up earlier.

Pay up and schedule up. Two simple remedies for what ails the Big Ten.

*One side note that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere: perception feeds reality and vice versa. The Big Ten Network has brought financial windfall to the league, but it has meant less exposure from ESPN and perhaps even negative exposure from ESPN. To be blunt—ESPN is college football for the masses. I watched Penn State play Virginia on ABC earlier this season, with every replay being preceded by an ACC on ESPN logo. You don’t think those subliminal messages affect teenagers?

The Big Ten's Plan to Close the Gap

Written by Ryan Murphy on Monday, 06 May 2013 14:37.

Being a fan of the Big Ten these days is like being Ricky Schroder in The Champ.

The end of major conference realignment and the NFL draft: two more areas where the Big Ten took apparent black eyes last month. The ACC teams signed a Grant of Rights that effectively dashed the Big Ten’s hopes of moving farther south, and the Big Ten was nearly shut out of the first round of the draft, further symbolizing the conference’s talent drain. Ouch and ouch.

The question remains for league fan: how can the Big Ten recover its football reputation?

Last season, I chronicled how to heal the Big Ten, citing a need for higher coaches salaries and improved national scheduling as two main foci. Other “big picture” factors certainly exist—like the SEC’s oversigning policies and their lower academic standards—but let’s talk nuts and bolts now. What specifically needs to happen for the Big Ten to take a step in the winning direction this season?

1. Ohio State and Michigan need to win. As much as it pains me as a Penn State fan to say it, the conference’s marquee teams need to get back near the top. Michigan—perhaps the Big Ten’s best national recruiter—lost a ton of talent to the top SEC teams during the disastrous RichRod years. Brady Hoke has them back on top in recruiting; it’s time for them to be a perennial top-10 team again. Ohio State seemingly has righted the ship after a miniscule one-year slump (2011); while they don’t need to hold their current No. 1 ranking all season long, they need to play like a legitimate top-5 team this season.

The only thing left after displaying their excellence in the regular season for OSU and UM? Win some elite bowl games—which is just part of what spiraled the league downwards in the first place. Two straight national title games annihilations, Buckeyes? Three bowl wins in a decade, Wolverines? Really?

2. The second tier needs to raise the bar. If the Big Ten had a heyday in the last decade, it was probably around 2002-2005. Purdue had Tiller, Minnesota had Mason, Iowa had Ferentz, and Wisconsin had Alvarez. All four of those teams had great reputations nationally as quality programs, even though none were necessarily BCS title contenders. The top teams of the Big Ten could wax (OSU ’02, UM ’04, and PSU ’05) and wane (PSU ’03 and ’04; OSU ’04, and UM ’05), but the real reputation of the league relied on the strength of the middle.

Last season’s big stomach punch for the Big Ten’s middle-of-the-pack was the collapse of Wisconsin and Michigan State. Both were top-15 teams pre-season; both crawled just above .500 by season’s end. Looking forward for this group of teams, D’Antonio and Fitzgerald seem here to stay, which bodes well for the Spartans and Northwestern Wildcats; UNL’s Pelini and Iowa’s Ferentz already have successes behind them, if only they can take more steps forward; but the rest of the league is punctuated by question marks. Which program will be the Big Ten’s version of Stanford or Oklahoma State or Georgia—second tier teams that annually increase the respectability of the whole league?

3. Bill O’Brien needs to keep working magic. Penn State is likely to be an afterthought each season when it comes to discussion of nationally relevant teams. The NCAA’s strong-arm tactics made that a reality with last July’s unprecedented sanctions. However, O’Brien’s coaching abilities last season coupled with a resilient group of underrated seniors made everyone take notice of what kind of success still might be possible for the Nittany Lions. A few favorable calls or lucky bounces, and an undefeated season in 2012 wasn’t out of the question.

What O’Brien and Penn State can offer the Big Ten over the next few years probably won’t be a sanctions-riddled juggernaut like USC ’11 or OSU ’12, but it may be a tantalizing taste of NFL-style football and a rare overachieving team among a league of recent slackers. Elite talent is still coming to PSU (current recruiting rankings have PSU as third behind UM and OSU, which is historically their fated position as well), even if it is coming in smaller numbers than to the rest of the Big Ten. It’ll be hard for PSU to be a league front-runner (like it was as recently as ’08 and ’09), but if they can push the league’s best teams and dominate the middle ones—despite the crippling sanctions—that will be far better for the Big Ten in the long run than a hollow shell of the old Beast of the East.

At some point, the Big Ten has to start trending upward again—the league is too rich financially and its fans too passionate for it not to. If this is the year, it doesn’t have to be “national championship or bust” to change the momentum. The three steps prescribed above are all it will take.