A few reasons to be bullish on Big Ten football

I am admittedly a fan of Big Ten football. In the interest of maintaining some level of objectivity on the blog I tried to avoid being openly defensive about the league’s prospects. Since objectivity is not a huge issue on a blog that receives tens of visits per month, I want to engage with some comments that a friend of mine sent in response to my recent post on the Big Ten’s bowl season prospects.

His points are as follows:

- The Big Ten’s bowl lineup is unfavorable

- B1G draft picks perform strongly in the NFL

- Demographic shortcomings are overstated

- Cultural issues (coaching salaries/oversigning)

Bowl Lineup

I’ve written about this one tangentially (check out the top section of this post), but it bears repeating. The Big Ten, by virtue of being located almost entirely in a region that no one wants to visit in late December or early January, would be the visiting team for nearly any bowl. The fact that they compound the problem by playing the Pac-12 in Southern California, the Big 12 in Texas and the SEC in Florida is icing on the cake.

College Football History 102: Effects of Conference Realignment

This is the second in a series on college football history. Read the first one here.

Conference realignment has been one of the major stories in college football since December 2009, when the Big Ten publicly announced that it was considering expansion. I found the Frank the Tank blog relatively soon after and enjoyed keeping up with things through his perspective, which emphasized the College Presidents’ point of view rather than sports fans. The story seemed to pull in fans and many prominent writers have been overwhelmed by their readers’ interest in the issue.

I think that conference realignment is an interesting topic not just because of the regional groupings of schools, the money at stake or the effect on classic rivalries, but because it is a chance for fantasy sports to move up a level. No longer are fans just picking players, their favorite team’s conference is now picking (or defending) top teams to make or break future power conferences.

Not only do I want to look at who won or lost the most recent realignment, I want to look at the significantly less important question of who won or lost previous realignments!