Maybe The Big 10 Isn't Terrible?

For college football fans, there are many running jokes we all know and love. Joe Paterno is old. When in doubt, Florida State is probably cheating. Tim Tebow will circumcise you. Most anything will make for a better quarterback than Jonathan Crompton (including a catfish).  Another common refrain is that the Big 10, as a whole, is a bad conference.

They play slow, muddy, boring football, the teams are incapable of scoring points and when they get their shot on the national stage, they blow it (see: Ohio State). But is it all just a case of their reputation sullying their good name? The Rivalry, Esq. presents their case that, if you look at the BCS standings, the Big 10 isn't having a down year. In fact, they're only getting better.

So far, it would seem that the Big 10 is actually having a year identical to last year - and an improvement over the 2006-2007 era. Of the major conferences, the one conference with a significant down year appears to be the Big 12. This intuitively makes sense. Sam Bradford's injury woes at Oklahoma along with the mediocrity of former representatives such as Texas Tech, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas A&M has contributed to the decline in their overall conference representation.

They go on to point out -- with the aid of some snazzy graphs -- that for the second year in a row, the Big 10 has four teams in the Week 1 BCS rankings and that it is in fact the Big 12 that has suffered the biggest drop of schools in the top 10 from 2008 to 2009. So why all the Big 10 hatred?

First, the ascendancy of the SEC over the last several years and the great year that the Big 12 had in 2008 seems to have pushed those two conferences to the forefront of commentators and voters thoughts when evaluating the conferences relative power among the BCS, regardless if this is matched by play on the field or not. [...]

Finally, while the middle schools of the SEC, the Big 12, and the Pac-10 are mediocre and the bottom schools truely rotten, the dominance of the conference power houses (Florida, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, and USC) casts a halo around the rest of the conference that makes their conference look stronger as a whole.