'The Satanic Verses' of Midwestern Football
November 21, 2008
Usually in this space, on this weekend, Your Editor writes the same old column—the column in which I extol the virtues of Ohio State-Michigan, one of the greatest rivalries in all of sports.
But this week, in the midst of a very unusual year in the Big Ten conference and a particularly introspective time for Your Editor, I have instead decided to write a much different column. And I warn you Buckeyes and Wolverines fans, what I am going to write is somewhat sacrilege. You're not going to like it.
This is not a column I could write if I still lived in Ohio. No way.
Because, in a sense, what I am about to write is the college football equivalent of Salmon Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” This column may end up banned in schools stretching from Sault St. Marie to Cincinnati. It may well considered grounds for excommunication from the Church of Midwestern Football. We’ll have to await Pope Jim Delaney’s ruling on that.
But you know what? I’m going to write this anyway, because it needs to be written. Here goes.
I begin with a question: Is the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry good for the Big Ten?
And I move forward with an answer: No.
[Enter riots in the streets of Columbus and Ann Arbor here].
Now, calm down, Buckeyes. Chill out, Wolverines. And please, just hear me out.
See, Your Editor has simply come the realization that Ohio State-Michigan game is a bad thing for my alma mater. And though Pope Delaney and those folks in Chicago have tried their best to prevent word of the growing unrest throughout Big Ten country to leak to the press, let me assure you, there are plenty of folks in East Lansing and Madison and Champagne-Urbana who feel the same way. What we all now realize is that, for some reason or the other, the Big Ten is not particularly interested in what’s good for Wisconsin and Michigan State and Penn State and Illinois.
What the Big Ten is interested in is what’s good for Ohio State and Michigan. Or maybe more accurately, Delaney and gang are interested what’s good for the Ohio State-Michigan game.
There are several reasons for this, of course. And some of them are actually legitimate.
First, the Ohio State-Michigan game gets big television ratings. Which is why ABC each season reserves the third Saturday in November for this game only. Second, Ohio State-Michigan has historically been really important, with a ridiculous number of those games determining the Big Ten champion. Third, the Ohio State-Michigan game is basically the Big Ten’s national identity.
Which is the problem.
Having a single game represent your entire conference may have made sense back in the days of The Ten Year War. In fact, it may have been just fine as recently as the early 1990s. But college football has changed an awful lot since then, folks. Woody and Bo are gone, and the Big Ten is no longer considered the nation’s most powerful conference. Part of the reason for that, I believe, is the overemphasis on this single game—at the expense of everyone else in the conference.
If there’s one thing the SEC likes to brag on, it’s that it has depth. And usually, that’s true (not so much this year, but that’s irrelevant right now). The Big Ten has depth, too.
Unfortunately, people outside Big Ten country—even the supposedly intelligent media—judge the entire conference based on two teams: Ohio State and Michigan. This year, of course, Michigan is terrible, Ohio State is coming off a second-straight beat down against an SEC opponent in the national title game, and so the national perception of the conference is, basically, that the entire conference sucks. No other conference in the entire country is judged by two teams. Because no other conference is so embodied by two teams. The Big Ten, however, is.
And this is partially the Big Ten's fault. The folks in Chicago keep forcing Ohio State-Michigan down our throats, trying to pump it up into something that, this year, at least, it is not. In fact, the Big Ten Network went so far this as to call this game “the big game of the week,” ignoring the fact that, actually, Penn State-Michigan State is the de facto conference championship game. Which is lunacy. In any other conference, a showdown between two Top 15 teams for the conference championship would be treated as a huge event; in the Big Ten, it’s an afterthought. And this is because, to too many people in power around the Big Ten, Penn State-Michigan State is an afterthought. Delaney and gang are so wrapped up in this history—the history of the Big Two and Little 8—that they can’t see the forest for the trees. They keep milking their golden calf. They keep doing whatever they can to protect it.
And this is where the true damage is done. Let me educate you for a moment.
Believe it or not, there is a sort of informal rule by which Big Ten teams are not allowed to schedule any games after Ohio State-Michigan weekend, the idea being that playing games afterward would cheapen Buckeyes-Wolverines. But the rule also prevents other member schools from playing their own traditional non-conference rivalry games to end the season (think Iowa-Iowa State, Illinois-Missouri, Penn State-Pitt), even though this is a common practice elsewhere else around the country (see Georgia-Georgia Tech, Florida-Florida State, Clemson-South Carolina). Even worse, there is significant speculation that the Big Ten will never add a 12th team, nor institute a conference championship, specifically because such a game would rob the Ohio State-Michigan game of its season-ending drama.
Argh!
Now, I cannot confirm whether or not this is true, folks.
What I can tell you is that there are people in Big Ten country who actually believe protecting Ohio State-Michigan is more important than protecting the conference as a whole—more important than adding Notre Dame, or a conference title game in Chicago, or elevating this conference’s reputation around the country.
Which is a shame. Which is, actually, insanity. It's self-destructive, is what it is.
The Big Ten was once America’s greatest conference. It can be a great conference once more.
But the fact is, that greatness won't return until the folks in Chicago wake up and accept that the old days of the Big Two and Little Eight are over, that the Little Eight aren’t so little any more, that Penn State was never part of the Little Eight to begin with, and that their job is to represent the interests of all of the league’s members.
Not just the two who will meet at noon, this Saturday, on ABC.
Out And About: News And Notes You May Have Missed
• If Rich Rodriguez hasn’t learned this yet, well, he will have to learn it soon: You don’t coach at Michigan without making a big deal about playing Ohio State, and you don’t coach at Ohio State without making a big deal about playing Michigan. People in those states really do believe this is the most important football game in the country every year. I mean, they really believe it. So they expect their coaches to feel the same way. Or at least, they expect their coaches to pretend to feel the same way. Rodriguez’s problem is either that he’s not good at pretending, or he's not trying. And so poor old RichRod has been hammered with questions of late about why he’s not more publicly embracing the rivalry in the same way that Jim Tressel has embraced it. Some writers/fans/alumni/angry Michinganders are even going to so far as to levy the harshest criticism possible: They are saying RichRod is “not a Michigan man.” Well duh. He’s from West Virginia. Anyway, facts are facts, folks, and the facts are these: John Cooper never bought into the rivalry and went 2-10-1 against Michigan. Jim Tressel wears his hatred of Michigan like a badge of honor, spends five minutes in every practice all year preparing for the Michigan game, and says things like, “Ohio State-Michigan trumps everything." As a result, Tressel is 6-1 against the Wolverines. RichRod had better take note. Just take it from Pilejumping Ohio State Linebacker James Laurinaitis: "If you want to be a great coach in this rivalry, you have to be obsessed with it. If you look at the history of it, your job security rests with it."
• Your Editor will now be sappy for a moment. I admit that Penn State wideout Derrick Williams is one of my all-time favorite Nittany Lions. And this is as much for what Williams has meant to the program off the field as on it. As a senior in high school, folks, this kid had offers from everywhere: Florida. USC. Oklahoma. Texas. Ohio State. Maryland (ha). And yet, instead, he chose Penn State, which had just completed its second straight losing season and had arguably one of the worst offensive systems in all of college football. Wiliams’ friends and family tried to get him to change his mind. They told him he was nuts. But Williams stuck with the Nittany Lions, telling everyone who would listen that he wanted to help rebuild the Nittany Lions program. Well, call me biased, but he’s done that. As he prepares for his last game at Beaver Stadium, Williams ranks third in Penn State history with 153 catches and his five kick returns for touchdown are a school record. He’s made huge plays when his team needed him (Ohio State ’05, Minnesota ’05, Northwestern ’05, Minnesota ’06, Notre Dame ’07, Illinois ’08, Wisconsin '08). The Nittany Lions’ record since Williams' arrival is 40-10. Maybe most importantly, he’s been one of the greatest team players and truly good kids this program has ever had (though ESPN's "Outside the Lines" did not take note of this). Asked this week what impact Williams had has on Penn State, Saint Joe Paterno said: “When Derrick was in high school and people were questioning where the program was going, I said, ‘We're so close to being a good football team; we just need a couple of people.’ And Derrick came to the front and was one of them. … I think he's had a tremendous impact. When he practices, he carries people with him on the practice field. He goes out there, works hard, and does everything well. He can just about do anything you want him to do on the football field. If I want to make him a corner, he might be as good a corner there is around. He is just a great athlete and a great football player.” OK, sappiness over. But go get ‘em, Derrick.
Quick Hits: Straight And To The Point
• When Penn State joined the Big Ten before the 1993 season, Penn State coach Joe Paterno (then a sprightly 67) received a call from his old buddy George Perles, coach of the Michigan State Spartans. Recalled Paterno: "He called me up and said, 'Hey, the Big Ten has one game that everybody has locked in at the end of the season. Why don't we lock our game in?' And I said, 'George, I think that would be great.’” And so was born the most forced rivalry in all of sports, the Battle for the Land Grant Trophy. But here’s the thing, folks. Recently, it hasn’t been so forced. This has actually become a pretty good game. And this year, it’s the Big Ten championship game. Which makes Perles, for one, very happy. Said Perles: "Finally, it's a bonanza. … Year after year after year after year, you'd hear how Ohio State-Michigan means everything and it's the most important game on the schedule. That's changed now." THAT IS THE GREATEST QUOTE EVER.
• Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh is awesome. And here’s why: He drives USC coach Pete Carroll bonkers. The latest evidence? With his Cardinal trailing USC by 28 with three seconds remaining last week, Harbaugh sent out his field goal unit to make the score a little more respectable (and drive Pete Carroll bonkers). Carroll, trying to be clever, saw what Harbaugh was doing and called a timeout so he could put together a kick-block team. But then Harbaugh, who is smarter than Carroll, changed gears before the plodding, mentally slow Carroll could respond, and just as USC sent out the kick-block team, Harbaugh sent out his offense instead. Stanford quarterback Alex Loukas promptly threw a touchdown pass against the USC special teams unit as time expired. Oh my God how awesome is that? After the game, Carroll was asked what he thought of Harbaugh’s (brilliant) decision. Said The Whiney One: "He can do whatever he wants. I don't care." I think Pete Carroll cares.
• One more reason that ESPN “analyst” Todd McShay is a moron: This week, he actually said on an ESPN podcast with Andy Gresh (quite entertaining, by the way) that “some people” believe the 2008 USC defense is the “greatest defense in the history of college football.” Now, folks, I guarantee you. “Some people” aren’t saying that. Todd McShay is saying that. God, he drives me nuts.
• Earle Bruce is a crazy old man who has lost touch with reality and doesn’t know anything about football anymore (see his comments prior to Penn State-Ohio State, in which he said Penn State’s defense wasn’t any good; the Nits promptly held Ohio State to its lowest scoring output in a quarter-century). But I will say this much for coach Bruce: He is about as loyal as it gets. Decades after he was fired (fired!) by Ohio State, he loves the Buckeyes (and the people who fired him?) as much as ever. And he hates Michigan has much as ever. Which is why The Vest invites Bruce to address the Buckeyes each year before the Michigan game. Asked this week to explain Bruce’s feelings toward the Wolverines, Buckeyes punter A.J. Trapasso said the coach has a “full-blown hatred” for the entire state. "If he could,” Trapasso said, “he'd take it off the map.”
• Stunning stat of the week: The Ohio Bobcats rank 118th in the country in red-zone efficiency, managing to score points just 64 percent of the time when they get inside their opponents’ 20 yard line. But that’s not the stunning part. The stunning part is this: The 119th ranked team in America is Auburn. Yes, Auburn. The Tigers only score 57 percent of the time in the red zone. Southern Speed Being Used To Fail As Quickly As Possible.
• Well, here’s some much-needed good news for Clemson fans: The future of your program is “extremely bright.” That’s according to Clemson president Jim Barker, who was asked about the state of the program during a meeting with students this week. Barker added that some “really top flight” candidates had expressed interest in the Clemson job (vacant now that coach Tommy Bowden has been shown the door). But according to the Clemson bureau (yes, there is a Clemson “bureau”) of the Greenville News, Barker added that the new coach will have to be someone who will “buy into the idea of One Clemson.” If anyone out there can tell me what the “idea of One Clemson” is, I’d love to know. Maybe I can put it work here. “One TCFA.” “One Your Editor.” “Three Martinis With Blue-Cheese Stuffed Olives.”
• Soon after Bob Stoops was named coach at a struggling Oklahoma program in 1999, he tried to hire then-Kentucky coach Hal Mumme has his offensive coordinator. But since Mumme wasn’t interested a demotion, he declined. So Stoops went to Plan B: He hired Mumme’s top assistant instead. That guy’s name was Mike Leech, and in a matter of months, Leech turned the Sooners offense into one of the nation’s best. Leech left a year later to take over at Texas Tech, but Stoops, whose team will try to knock off the Red Raiders this week, credits Leech for changing the image of the Oklahoma program. Said Stoops: "That part of it really got us going as far as having some quarterback play and being able to attract other quarterbacks, like Sam Bradford now.”
• Bold Prediction of the Week: ESPN ‘analyst’ Desmond Howard said this week that Rich Rodriguez will have Michigan playing in the national championship game in five years. At least that’s what I think what he said. Just for yourself. Said Howard: "If Rich Rodriguez is able to stay in Ann Arbor for three seasons … he will be in the national championship game in five seasons." Got that, folks? If Rodriguez is able to stay for three seasons, he will be able to play for the national title in five seasons. That should be a Puzzler on National Public Radio's "Car Talk."
• One more note about Ohio State-Michigan, aka the Big Ten junior varsity game of the week: I got a kick out of the following message, posted by an Ohio State fan the comments section under an Ann Arbor News story previewing the Ohio State-Michigan game: “Too bad you guys don't have Terrelle Pryor, nor any other semi-talented players, coaches or cheerleaders. Maybe next year will be better. Remember Obama's redistribution of wealth? Maybe OSU will be forced to give UM a few people from their scout team.” Ah, rivalries.