One last go around with Legends and Leaders. If you need to wipe your eyes, I'll wait.
Ah yes, the Big Ten. The land where no offense dares to tread. A conference where wide-open spread offenses perform at 2/3 the pace of Woody Hayes' 1969 team (in fairness, that team ran a ludicrous 92.1 plays per game). Before the move to geographic divisions, a cynical play to preserve sanctity of The Game and re-establish intra-conference hegemony (you can read more here: http://pittsfieldindex.blogspot.com/2013/04/delany-and-competition.html), will we all have to live through the gushing about not one, but two Michigan-Ohio State games in 7 days?
No, we won't. Michigan loses a crazy game in Evanston to lose the tiebreaker. Ohio State wins with ease in the title game.
I think this conference will be poor again this season and the teams with superb records will flatter to deceive. I have Ohio State losing to a not-very-good Cal team (OSU secondary v. Bear Raid? Advantage: Cal) and then waltzing through the conference. Michigan wouldn't get to double-digit regular season wins if they played a QB other than Tommy Rees in week 2. Michigan State is going to win games like Florida did last year without any sort of offense, bludgeoning teams (and viewers) to death. Gary Andersen strikes me as an 8-win coach in the Big Ten. I see a lot of the bottom-feeders losing to the MAC teams they play, which is Northern Illinois and Ball State in a few cases.
7 bowl-eligible teams, and one of them is Indiana. Sums it up, I think.
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