The new Chair of the Penn State Faculty Senate has decided to blog about his work on the Faculty Senate. The blog is called: "Show and Tell: Sharing while chairing the Penn State Faculty Senate".

The author, Larry Catá Backer, is a professor in the Law School and also teaches at the International Relations school. It seems a bit odd that neither of these schools existed at UP when I graduated ten years ago and that he's the Faculty Chair, but that's probably a good thing.

The most recent post is a wonderful critique of the recent announcement of the two new PR firms that they university has hired, at least as they relate to internal communications. You can read that post here.

He's only been in this new job a short time, so he only has two posts. The one on the PR firms and the first one, which is really just a copy of his speech to the Faculty Senate upon taking his new job. In "Remarks on Assuming the Duties of Chair of the PSU Faculty Senate," he shares a number of "lessons learned," during the recent scandal. He delves more deeply into each one in his blog/speech, but I thought I'd copy the lesson themselves below as well:

1. The administrative apparatus of a large university is not always prepared for crisis, and tends to handle crisis badly.

2. University governance structures that are based on a strong President model are especially susceptible to mismanaging crisis, especially where the crisis itself focuses on the office of the President.

3. Large bureaucracies resist nimbleness-they prefer gesture to substantive changes if only because they are less drastic and because they hold the promise of substituting formal for functional changes.

4. Faculties, and faculty organizations, did not well serve the interests of the university in this crisis when they assume that servility is the highest form of service.

While some of this might seem self-evident to anyone who's followed this debacle, the post really examines the rationale for and implications of each one. This guy seems like just the chap for the job. It's reassuring to know that there are smart, thoughtful people in positions of leadership that are engaged on improving Dear Old State.

For the Glory,

spakajewia

Nate Mink, one of the overpaid and overlaid clowns at statecollege.com, posted "Some quick housekeeping from Bill O’Brien’s appearance Thursday night on "The Goon Show," a State College-based radio program co-hosted by former Penn State offensive lineman Keith Conlin and Tim Sweeney, president of the Penn State Football Letterman's Club." Read the whole thing here.

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Yesterday I went with some friends to the Washington (DC) Catholic Athletic Conference (WCAC) tournament semifinals for boy's basketball. There were 5 Rivals 150 players (including both 2012 and 2013) in one of the semifinals: the Gonzaga-Dematha game, including the #11 ranked junior (and UNC commit), Nate Britt. ESPN has called the WCAC the best HS basketball conference in the nation and the Washington Post labeled the Gonzaga-Dematha rivalry the best HS basketball rivalry in the country.

Why do you care? Because I met Coach Chambers at the games! I noticed him during the intermission between the two games standing courtside about five feet from me, so I introduced myself and we chatted for 30 seconds. He looked tired, but was really nice. I told him I was an alum and was effusively praiseful for what he's done to the program and might have said: "you're the best thing to happen to PSU hoops in my lifetime." The vibe of our interaction was "moderately creepy," but he gave me a head nod later in the day when he walked past.

With the exception of the American University coach (the games were played at AU's gym), my guess is that Chambers was the only college head coach there, though there were definitely a ton of scouts. The fact that Chambers is taking the time to go to these games and meet the players is definitely huge for PSU basketball; frankly, I think a lot of the starters in these games who aren't top-ranked, but end up playing in the small D1 conferences, would probably fit well in Chambers scheme. And if we can just get one or two of these top guys -- even the kids who are freshmen and sophomores now -- PSU hoops can quickly be...wait for it...elite.

Another solid PSU-related article from alum Michael Weinreib. I've posted it below, and you can read it online here. Not long after Joe Paterno became the head coach at Penn State, he received a letter from an alumnus, a doctor in the small town of East Stroudsburg. The Nittany Lions had struggled to win their season opener over Maryland, and Paterno felt burdened by the legacy of his predecessor, Rip Engle, who guided Penn State to Eastern football prominence over the previous decade and a half. "If this is the kind of football I have to watch at Penn State for the next twenty years," the doctor wrote, "I want you to know I am going to start a campaign among alumni to bring in a Penn Stater to set football right with our university." This, of course, was 1966, a time when people still wrote poison-pen letters rather than spouting off in troglodytic social-media posts; still, the doctor’s criticism made little logical sense, since Paterno, a Brown graduate, had spent the previous 16 years in State College as Engle’s assistant coach. (It’s kind of heartening to note that this sort of knee-jerk petulance is not just a product of modern media; it actually predates Joe Paterno.) And yet it makes perfect emotional sense: There’s a deep-rooted sense of ownership among college alumni bases, an almost familial attachment to their respective schools. It is a unique dynamic that doesn’t exist in any American professional sport, and it is both wonderful and terrible. It explains why a college football stadium, filled to capacity, is the greatest venue in this country, and it explains why people pay for the privilege to lose their minds on subscription-only message boards that often focus on the college choices of speedy teenagers, and it explains why the majority of the Penn State community spent the weekend losing their collective mind over the hiring of the coach of one of the best offenses in the National Football League. Last Thursday evening, upon learning that Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien had been brought on as Penn State’s new football coach, a frenzy of angst ensued. On the message boards: disbelief, declarations of war, people attempting to start petitions to convince O’Brien not to take the job. Penn State had taken 58 days to search for a coach, and in doing so, unwittingly built the sort of expectations that befell the creators of Lost: If there wasn’t something transcendent awaiting behind that curtain, a Nick Saban or a Les Miles or a Jon Gruden gushing about This guy and That guy, then what was the point? At the very least, people wondered, why not hire one of our own, and not some stranger who went to ... Brown? And so that same night, several former players, including LaVar Arrington, mouthed off to Nate Bauer of Blue-White Illustrated about the school’s refusal to consult them on the hire. "I will put my Alamo Bowl MVP trophy in storage," Arrington said at one point, which I’m sure raises two questions among those of you who could not care less about my alma mater: Where does LaVar Arrington keep his Alamo Bowl MVP trophy right now, and what exactly are these Penn State people clinging to? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I mean, I get it. Of course I do. I went to Penn State; I grew up in State College. I never played football, and yet this whole saga has felt more inherently personal to me than anything that’s taken place in my adult life, other than my own wedding. Nothing like this has happened in sports before, anywhere, and hopefully it never will again. I’ve questioned everything I’ve said and written, and others have said and written, a hundred times over. I get that for people like Arrington, the potential banishment of acting coach Tom Bradley, an extremely well-liked guy who (as far as we know) had no knowledge or complicity in Jerry Sandusky’s allegedly heinous acts, is an affront to his own identity as a former Penn State All-American. At some level, it isn’t fair, but there’s nothing about this situation that’s fair, most notably the fact that children may have been harmed owing to the incompetence of their elders. The school’s new president, Rodney Erickson, has tried to reach out to both students and alumni, but the situation in State College remains fraught. (My parents and I have known the Erickson family for 30 years, and so I have no objective viewpoint on his tenure so far. Everything about this story is so incredibly fraught with complications for those of us with ties to the place.) The people who live there feel as if they’ve been branded by the actions of a few. A vocal segment of the alumni base feels that Paterno was somehow dismissed unfairly. (I disagree, since Paterno set an incredibly high standard for himself, and at the very least failed to live up to it.) And a vocal segment of the alumni base feels that Paterno’s legacy was shunted too quickly. (I get where this comes from, since we have yet to hear the coach’s testimony, though the vocal minority who seem more focused on rescuing Paterno’s legacy than on seeking the truth disturb the hell out of me. Hopefully, Paterno will be healthy enough to testify in person.) You may not understand any of that, but this is the reality. Penn State is in limbo: The past couple of months are part of history now, and college football programs feed off of their history, for recruiting and donations and season-ticket sales, but what happens when nobody knows how to regard that history anymore? Pride and shame, shaken into an indigestible cocktail. There is a sense of fury when the university tries to break from its past, a sense, among many alums, that this school they feel so deeply about has somehow betrayed them. And yet: How does it look when a community complains about a hasty and judgmental media inquiring about serious crimes, and then immediately passes judgment about the head coach hired to clean up the mess because he doesn’t fit their template? You may argue that Penn State’s search committee, comprised of (among others) a trustee and an acting athletic director and a women’s volleyball coach, was overmatched and botched the details and should have gone after (INSERT PROMINENT NAME HERE), but do you want to know why a number of qualified candidates and big names seem to have passed up the opportunity to take this job? It’s because what happened at Penn State is an ethical and emotional puzzle so daunting and infuriating and perplexing that even men as ego-driven as football coaches can’t get their heads around it. It’s because the problems at Penn State aren’t about football at all. I have absolutely no idea if Bill O’Brien will succeed or fail; in his introductory press conference on Saturday, he read a letter he’d written to football alumni, and announced he was retaining at least one assistant from Joe Paterno’s staff, and also paid tribute to Paterno himself. It was an impressive showing, and it seemed to assuage some people, though there is still overwhelming skepticism. Even before the Sandusky scandal, the task of following the winningest coach in major college football history was a daunting proposition; now it is difficult to imagine a scenario where O’Brien doesn’t suffer through two to three years of missteps and failures and Sandusky-driven repercussions before he can begin to build anything. He has to win over a provincial fan base and build a recruiting pipeline and convey rationality in the midst of a completely irrational situation. Frankly, I don’t know if there’s any football coach in America who possesses all the necessary qualities to do all of those things. It was always going to be a long road for Penn State, post-Paterno; his is the kind of coaching tenure that no longer exists in the modern world. It’s been 25 years since the Nittany Lions played for a national championship, but the ethical perception of his program as something humble and pure sustained him even in the lean years. Now that perception is gone, and perhaps the only way to set things right, at least for the near future, is to put all that history into storage and start anew. Previously by Michael Weinreb: Sugar Bowl Revisited: Basking in the Big Ten's Faux Success R.I.P.: How to Make it in America Which Minor Bowl Game Are You Most Excited About? (And Other College Football Questions)

Bill O'Brien was not my first choice to become the next head coach of the Penn State football program. (I was always a Chris Petersen guy, to be honest.) But I think a lot of the pitchfork waving and general freakout about his suspected and reported hire has been completely off base. And let's be honest, no matter if they hired Bill O'Brien, Tom Bradley, or Chris Petersen, no one can reasonably judge how good this hire is for another two or three years.

There are, as far as I can tell, at least four solid reasons why this might be a good hire.

#1 In theory, NFL coordinators are the best up-and-coming coaches in football. As I tweeted earlier, "In 2007, a beloved PA football team hired an unknown NFL assistant who'd been a DC for 1 year. Mike Tomlin was a great hire."

Sure, there are lots of examples of NFL coordinators becoming terrible head coaches, including most of Bellicheck's disciples. But Bellicheck himself was a coordinator before he was a head coach. If Penn State wanted an under 50-year old coach who's stock was rising, then an NFL coordinator or a MAC coach was the best play, since it's clear that Al Golden wasn't interested.

#2 O'Brien has legit college football bona fides. Among all of the NFL guys rumored for this job, he had far and away the most college experience. Before he started for the Pats in 2007, he'd been exclusively a college coach.

#3 BO'B's roots are in the right part of the country. O'Brien grew up in Massachusetts and coached throughout the ACC, including a stint with Maryland. While Pennsylvania's important, Penn State's big recruiting advantage in the B1G and in the country is the dominance of the areas directly east, north, and northeast from State College. You're crazy if you think Cam Williams - a key PSU recruit and Pats fan from New England who recently has been flirting with OSU - doesn't stay at Penn State now. (And if O'Brien stays on the Pats staff through the playoffs, that will be great for recruiting, because every high school football player will be watching those games, and the announcers will definitely talk about O'Brien. PSU is going to get a ton of press on this hire.)

#4 He's smart and feisty. Brown graduates are smarty. Dudes that pick fights with Tom Brady on the sidelines are feisty. They also deserve the benefit of the doubt, because Brady's a douche bag.

Sure, there are lots of reasonable knocks on O'Brien. He has no head coaching experience. He has no Penn State ties. Paterno would have been very wary about recommending an Irishman to follow in his footsteps.

Finally, I think it's worth noting that one of O'Brien's biggest problem with the fans is the unrealistic expectations that were established during this coaching search. Mike Munchak was never going to leave a good situation to coach Penn State. Same with Chris Petersen, not to mention Nick Saban and Les Miles. I love State College and Penn State, and it's one of the best football coaching jobs in the country, even at a time like this. But NO coaching job in college gets NFL coaches who are having success to leave their current team. Same with Alabama coaches and Georgia coaches that are successful.

My biggest fear with O'Brien is that he's a reincarnation of Charlie Weis, one of my least favorite people in the world (though I've never met him). But it's worth noting that Charlie Weis had a very similar resume to O'Brien's and was hired at Notre Dame - a job that's just as attractive as Penn State's is now, maybe even more attractive. This is not evidence of Penn State purposively sabotaging the football program. This is a reasonable hire. And with any luck, Bill O'Brien will be nothing like Charlie Weis with the exception of having prolific offenses.

I'm willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. There are plenty of solid reasons to think he'll have success. Here's to hoping he does.

Big Lead wrote a story about Boise State coach Chris Petersen and the misunderstanding held by many -- including Rick Reilly -- that he has "special needs." Apparently Petersen's son was diagnosed with cancer when he was one, but is now a happy and healthy 11 year old.

Assuming Petersen wants to leave Boise, I think he's the best candidate for Penn State, despite the lack of ties to PSU or Pennsylvania. First and foremost, he's an exceptional coach, arguably the best in the country given the way in which he's built the Boise State program into a national power. Moreover, his personal connection with the purpose of THON is really a great PR story that would help focus attention on Penn State's good works.

In other news, Darren Perry -- former Penn State and NFL defensive back (2nd all-time on PSU career interception list) and current Packers Secondary coach -- evidently asked his agent to tell the media that he would consider the Penn State job.

Other names for the job that I hadn't heard of been have seen around the interwebs: Gus Malzahn - Auburn OC; Kirby Smart - Bama DC; Paul Pasqualoni - Current UConn head coach, former Penn State player; Troy Calhoun - Air Force head coach; James Franklin - Vanderbilt head coach, PA native.

As some of you know, I enjoy arguing that the current NCAA system of compensating football and men's basketball players is unfair. An excellent piece on this topic written by Esquire's Charles Pierce for Grantland.com was posted today.  You should read the entire piece here, but I've also pasted about half of it - the particularly juicy bits - below. Enjoy! 

Something like that has happened over the last 20 or 30 years in regard to college athletics. Every few years, some angry, stick-waving prophet would come wandering into the cozy system of unpaid (or barely paid) labor and start bellowing about how the essential corruption in the system wasn't that some players got money under the table, but that none of them were allowed to get any over it. Sooner or later, these people said, the system would collapse from its own internal contradictions - yes, some of these people summoned up enough Marx through the bong resin in their brains from their college days to make a point - and the people running college sports had best figure out how to control the chaos before it overwhelmed them. Nobody listened. Very little changed, except that college sports became bigger and more lucrative, an enterprise of sports spectacle balanced precariously on the fragile principle that everybody should get to make money except the people doing the actual work.

Now, though, the indications are that the reckoning is finally here. In its role as the protector of the lucrative status quo, the NCAA is under assault from a number of different directions, and the organization seems to be cracking from the pressure. Just in the past two years, we have seen the lawsuit brought by former UCLA star Ed O'Bannon in which O'Bannon and several other former NCAA athletes challenged the NCAA's right to profit from their "likenesses" in perpetuity. Earlier this month, legendary center Bill Russell joined that suit. In the October issue of the Atlantic, historian Taylor Branch took a mighty whack at the entire system and made a case for paying college athletes on the grounds of simple fairness. Branch's credentials as a chronicler of the civil rights movement gave his critique a profound resonance in places where nobody much cares if Alabama beats LSU this weekend. Yesterday, Congressman Bobby Rush of Illinois, a former Black Panther who once escaped being murdered by the Chicago Police Department through the expedient of not being at home to get shot, and still the only man to defeat Barack Obama head-to-head in an election, likened the NCAA to Al Capone, which is not a compliment, not even in Chicago. And, perhaps most significant of all, a petition is being circulated by current football and basketball players requesting (politely) a cut of the vast ancillary revenues that the colleges and the NCAA are raking in.

 

On October 27, undoubtedly in response to all of this, and in an obvious attempt to keep order within the help, the NCAA voted to allow its member conferences to decide whether to pay their athletes an annual stipend of $2,000 to cover the "incidental costs" of a college education. NCAA president Mark Emmert was firm in his denial that this constituted "pay for play."

Nonsense.

 

Of course, it is.

And that's the ballgame right there. As soon as you pay someone $2,000, you cannot make the argument that it is unethical to pay that person $5,000, or $10,000, or a million bucks a year, for all that. Amateurism is one of those rigid things that cannot bend, only shatter. Amateurism is an unsustainable concept. It could not last in golf. It could not last in tennis. It couldn't even last in the Olympics, where it was supposed to have been ordained by Zeus or someone. It is the rancid legacy of a stultified British class system in which athletes were supposed to be "gentlemen" and not "tradesmen." Which is to say that sports are supposed to be for Us and not Them, old sport.

It was particularly badly suited for transplantation to this country, where we - theoretically, anyway, and against a preponderance of available evidence today - believe that we are a classless society based on upward mobility and the essential fairness of our system.

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Pardon me if this has already been decided (in which case, someone please take this post down), but I was gone from vacation last week, and it seems like we still don't know who the starting QB will be on Saturday.  By my math, the first game is less than a week away....

 

So, because I think it will be interesting to see the results and because I still need to add additional words to the post I am going to keep writing...

Poll

Who Should Start at QB?

85%

Robert Bolden

175 votes

14%

Matthew McGloin

29 votes

204 votes | Poll has closed

Picking up on a theme in two posts by the staff, I thought I'd throw out three things that we, as Penn State football fans, should do this year. To paraphrase Goethe, all generalizations are false, including these ones. Please feel free to add your own suggestions for what I should have covered (and omitted).

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I'm sure some of you are sick of this argument, but it's still the off-season. Wilbon does a good job of demonstrating that, indeed, the logistical difficulties inherent in paying players could be possibly managed.

Check it out: College athletes deserve to be paid
By Michael Wilbon
ESPN.com

 

I used to argue vehemently against paying college athletes. Tuition, room, board and books were compensation enough. And even if, increasingly, it wasn't enough and virtually every kid who accepted a scholarship was in the red before Christmas of his freshman year, the notion of pay-for-play was at best a logistical nightmare. Where exactly would the money come from? How could you pay college football players but not baseball players or members of the women's field hockey team? And how in the world would you pay men in a way that wouldn't violate Title IX?

So you know what caused me to do a 180 on the issue? That $11 billion deal -- OK, it's $10.8 billion to be exact -- between the NCAA and CBS/Turner Sports for March Madness between 2011 and 2024. We're talking $11 billion for three weekends of television per year. On top of that, there's a new four-year deal with ESPN that pays the BCS $500 million. So, if those two deals were worth, say, a combined $10 billion instead of $11.3 billion, would the games not be televised? Would the quality of the broadcasts or the coverage or the staging of the events be somehow diminished? What if people in the business of money took $1.3 billion off the top, invested it, sheltered it and made it available to provide a stipend to college athletes, how could anybody stand on principal and argue against paying the people who make the events possible in the first place?

Let me declare up front I wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in distributing the funds equitably or even paying every college athlete. I'm interested in seeing the people who produce the revenue share a teeny, tiny slice of it. That's right, football and men's basketball players get paid; lacrosse, field hockey, softball, baseball, soccer players get nothing. You know what that's called? Capitalism. Not everything is equal, not everything is fair. The most distinguished professor at the University of Alabama won't make $5.9 million in his entire tenure in Tuscaloosa; Nick Saban will make that this year. So I don't want to hear that it's "unfair" to pay the quarterback of Alabama more than all the sociology students in the undergraduate college.

Using the inability to distribute the funds equally as an impediment is an excuse, a rather intellectually lazy one at that. Nothing about the way hundreds of millions of dollars is distributed is equitable or even fair. The BCS' new deal with ESPN was based, in part, on paying more money to schools/conferences with regard to what has been called "population centers." Of the $174 million distributed from five bowl games, 83.4 percent went to six conferences in 2011. In question right now is whether the BCS even conducts its business dealings in a manner consistent with principles expressed in federal anti-trust laws. So, the equitable-application excuse for not paying athletes doesn't hold water; at the very least there's a level of hypocrisy here that ought to make the opponents of paying athletes uncomfortable.

Don't get me wrong, paying players out of individual athletic department budgets is beyond impractical; it's probably not feasible. Because so many athletic departments run at a deficit, it's difficult to make the case that schools should pay regular salaries to athletes, even football players who produce more income than anybody. But it's another thing entirely for the students who play for revenue-producing teams (at UConn and the University of Tennessee, this would include the women's basketball teams) to be somehow compensated from the lucrative television/radio/Internet rights fees they make wholly possible.

It's commendable that the NCAA has paid millions into a fund for in-need athletes to cover clothing purchases, emergency travel and medical expenses. There's also a special assistance fund and a student-athlete opportunity fund. Why can't hundreds of millions of dollars be directed into those, and in turn make money much more accessible to athletes for the kinds of regular day-to-day expenses regular college students pay by working jobs that are off-limits to intercollegiate athletes?

In the meantime, if they cannot be paid outright, surely the scholarship athletes should be able to engage in entrepreneurial pursuits that currently leads to costly NCAA investigations that have proven to be mostly a waste of time since, one, such activities historically haven't been checked and, two, the kids who commit the "infractions" aren't effectively punished. Their revelations, short of Heisman Trophy winners having to return their statues, wind up penalizing only the kids and coaches who remain on the team and in the vast majority of cases have done nothing to merit a penalty themselves.

If somebody is willing to give A.J. Green $750 or $1,000 or even $2,500 for his Georgia Bulldogs jersey, fine, good. If one of his teammates, a tackle, can fetch only $50 for his jersey, then it'll be a good marketing lesson for both of them. It's called supply and demand, and if both men are fortunate enough to reach the NFL it'll be a lesson worth learning because that dynamic will exist their entire careers. If a soccer player can't get a dime for his jersey, well, there's a realization in that, too.

The question from the opponents of paying college athletes inevitably comes back, "What would stop a star player from agreeing to shake hands at a local car dealership for $50,000?" The answer is, nothing. If a car dealer wants to strike that deal then good for the player in question. If a music student goes out in the summer and earns 50 grand, who objects? Who even knows? The student-musician is no less a college student because he struck a lucrative deal. Neither is the student-journalist who spends his nights writing freelance stories and picking up as much money along the way as he can.

If the student as athlete can find a way, he/she should be able to endorse products, to have paid-speaking gigs, to sell memorabilia, as Allen Sack, the author and professor at the college of business at the University of New Haven has suggested in recent years. The best college athletes in the two revenue-producing sports have always been worth much more than tuition, room, board and books. The best football and basketball players in the Big Ten have produced to the degree that a television network has become the model for every conference in America, a network worth at least tens of millions of dollars to the member institutions. Yet, no player can benefit from that work. The players have become employees of the universities and conferences as much as students -- employees with no compensation, which not only violates common decency but perhaps even the law.

 

Michael Wilbon is a featured columnist for ESPN.com and ESPNChicago.com. He is the longtime co-host of "Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN and appears on the "NBA Sunday Countdown" pregame show on ABC in addition to ESPN. Wilbon joined ESPN.com after three decades with The Washington Post, where he earned a reputation as one of the nation's most respected sports journalists.

 

March is arguably the greatest time to be a fan of college sports.  Every year, no matter how awful Penn State basketball has proven to be, I'm able to convince myself that if we can just catch lightening in a bottle in the Big Ten Tournament, we can dance.  And even if Penn State doesn't win the tournament or qualify for the field of 64 68, there's still a chance that the Nittany Lions can win once against a beatable opponent, then get lucky in the quarterfinals, and I can feel part of it and share the exuberance of Springtime hope.

But nearly every year the Nittany Lions disappoint me. Since the Big Ten Tournament's inception in 1998, Penn State is one of only three teams to have never won the automatic bid, with Northwestern and Indiana (surprisingly) as the others. (Technically, Michigan has never won the tournament either, because they vacated their records from the 1997-98 season, including their Big Ten Tourney win, due to NCAA sanctions.) Penn State is 6-13 in the history of the Big Ten Tourney, never having received a seed of 5 or higher, and so never having avoided the first round. In the 13 Big Ten Tournaments that have been played, Penn State has advanced to the quarterfinals only four times, the semifinals only twice, and never made it to the final game.

As the sixth seed this year, Penn State plays in the 6-11 game on Thursday, a game in which they have plenty of experience. In fact, they've played in that game 7 times with a record of...wait for it...1-6. The good news is that the sixth seed has won in each of those seven matches. In fact, the 6th seed has only lost in the first round of the tournament once, in 1999, when #11 Illinois beat #6 Minnesota. Iowa even won the whole tournament as the #6 seed in 2001, when they beat the 7^th seed Nittany Lions in the semifinals. That lose to Iowa in 2001 ended Penn State's two-year streak of success in the tournament.

In 2000, as a 9 seed, the Nittany Lions dispatched 8^th-ranked Michigan in the first round and #1-ranked Ohio State in the quarterfinals (by 15!) before losing to #4 Illinois in the semis. Both Jarret Stephens and Joe Crispin made the all-tournament team. In 2001, when Crispin made the all-tournament team again, 7^th-ranked Penn State again beat Michigan in the first round, then beat 2^nd-ranked Michigan State in the quarterfinals before failing to Iowa in the semi's. Despite their upset loss to Penn State in March that year, Sparty still got a #1 seed in the field of 64 and made it to the Final Four where they lost to Arizona.  Penn State certainly was a giant-killer that year, because, as I hope you remember, after beating Providence in the first round, 10^th-ranked PSU defeated the University of North Carolina in the second-round of the Big Dance in what was arguably the biggest victory in modern PSU basketball history.

Indeed, 2001 was something special. The "riots" that broke out in State College after Penn State lost to Temple in the Sweet Sixteen were little more than a bunch of zealous young Turks drunk on the glory of March and college sports fandom. First-hand reports from the riots suggest that several students were maced by Borough policemen but able to quickly "walk it off" because they were so high on drugs and March Madness.

Those that experienced 2001 will never be satisfied with a deep run into the NIT because it's just Not Important. At this point, we have vague notions of what Penn State might need to do to don Cinderella's slipper, but we know that a run into the semifinals of the Big Ten Tournament is likely a prerequisite. Let's hope that recent history is no guide to what will happen in the Big Ten Tournament this year and let's let the Madness begin. 

News came out yesterday that the "Columbus Five" -- quarterback Terrelle Pryor, running back Dan Herron, receiver DeVier Posey, left tackle Mike Adams and defensive linemen Solomon Thomas -- that have been suspended for the first five games of the 2011 season (pending an Ohio State appeal) are all returning to play for the Buckeyes in 2011.

Even though all of the players publicly pledged to return to Ohio State in the run-up to the Sugar Bowl, there was plenty of speculation that 4 of the 5 players would just enter the NFL draft this spring rather than sit out for nearly half of next year.  Without question, this news means that Ohio State stays among the favorites to win the Big Ten next season. The Buckeyes should even be back in the national championship discussion, because i) the suspension will probably be shortened and ii) even if it isn't, Ohio State's first five games next year are:

            v. Akron

            v. Toledo

            at Miami (Fla)

            v. Colorado

            v. Michigan State

They're all winnable. All the games are at home except for the trip to South Beach against a Miami team under their new coach, some guy who's never beat a MAC team with a winning record. Michigan State should be weaker next year, even though Kirk Cousins returns. My first reaction: Penn State's schedule gets tougher.

My second reaction: I can't believe these guys are coming back. I'm firmly in the camp that thinks that big-time college athletes who play major roles for huge revenue-generating teams get screwed by the current rules. Yes, these guys broke the rules and as such they deserve to be punished, but the rules stink and their infractions were relatively minor.

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The first year I actually gambled a decent amount of money on football, I used a bookie. The best part about using a bookie is also the worst part: credit. If gambling were legal, the online websites you use require you to put cash into an account before you can make bets, but with a bookie, you usually just place bets until you get up or down so significantly that either you or the bookie needs to pay the other party.

That first year was glorious until Christmas. I went on hot streaks, hit three team parlays, always won the big bets, and was up a pretty big chunk of change going into the bowl games. And then the bowl season started, and I started losing, and I kept on losing, I committed the cardinal sin of increasing my bet size during a losing streak, and ended up owing a lot. A half decent NFL playoffs kept everything reasonable, but I vowed that year to never lose so much during the bowl season.  And I haven't, though I haven't ever made a killing either. Until this year.

During a solid seven years of betting on the bowl games, I've come up with a system: I first look at the coaches. If there's a decisive advantage on either side, I take that team (and the points). If not, I move onto quarterbacks. If there's a decisive advantage there, I take that team (and the points). If I'm still stuck, I flip a coin and hope for the best.

Others have their own rules. Chad Millman who writes and records podcasts for ESPN Insider about sports betting, gave four factors for betting on the bowl season:

1. How a team ended the regular season: "Were they on a run to make the bowl or did they lose a lot?"

2. How much excitement is a team going to have headed into the bowl: "You're looking for a team that is thrilled to be there and looking forward to the game."

A subset of No. 2 is bowl experience, but not for the reason you think: "I'm more likely to give a team a higher ranking if it hasn't been to a bowl for a while, because that will generate excitement amongst the program and fans."

3. How much time off a team has had before the bowl: "When you are not playing it's hard to simulate game speed. It's like walking on the highway at 30 mph."

4. The weather on schools' respective campuses: "The SEC, Pac-10, even the ACC tend to do better in the bowls than the Big Ten, Big 12 and Big East. I think the warm weather has a lot to do with that. Thirty days of practice in warm weather before a bowl game helps you get a lot more done than practicing in a bubble or outside in a cold climate."

My friend Chas thinks that the bowl season is a complete crap shoot and tries to bet on "whichever team is less hungover" from the night before.  But Chas' argument is actually very similar to mine-and number two in Millman's scheme-it really all comes down to motivation. And to me, the best way to judge motivation is by judging the coach and his staff. Of course, coaching is always important in football, but it takes on extra importance during the bowl season because the coach essentially has to keep his guys focused for a whole month to play something that for the vast majority of teams is nothing more than an exhibition game. The fact that Joe Paterno has the most bowl wins of any coach by far only helps my case. 

In addition to coaching, I like to look at what kind of leadership there is in the locker room. If graduating seniors really want to go out with a win or if underclassmen are hungry to get prepared for a run next season, the team will take the bowl game and their preparation for it more seriously. Because it's difficult to really know the dynamics of the locker rooms for teams you don't follow closely, I use the quarterback as a proxy for leadership. 

Let me apply my system to tonight's game, the first bowl game of the season involving a Big Ten team:

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With the lone exception of Illinois playing Friday night against Fresno State, the regular season is over for the Big Eleven forever. While I'm often sentimental and nostalgic for the traditional aspects of the college football structure, like the bowl system, I'm officially excited that we never have to have a three-way tie again in the Big Ten. No more co-champions, no more letting BCS rankings determine who wins the conference, no more bogus claims of consecutive conference championships, no more possibilities of viable conference champions not playing each other.

Even though I doubted them pretty much all year, I think Wisconsin is the rightful team to represent the conference in the Rose Bowl. After the loss to Sparty, they steamrolled the rest of the conference, and did it old school, with a bunch of sh$t kickers on the o-line and an impressive mix of speed and power in the backfield. The only conference win that was ever in doubt was the one in Kinnick, well before the Hawkeyes self-destructed.

Speaking of the Hawkeyes, the out-Sparty'ed Sparty this year. Indeed, in my mind, there are two prospects for "storyline of the year" in the Big Ten. One is that the Michigan State never collapsed. The other is that Iowa did.  Sure, Michigan State nearly lost to Purdue at home on Senior Day, and Penn State had a legit shot to take them down this past week, but Dantonio, Kirk Cousins (aka McGloin Sr.) and company took care of business. Meanwhile, Iowa just collapsed down the stretch. After barely beating Indiana, they took a couple of tough losses against Northwestern and Ohio State, before the wheels came off and they lost to Minnesota to finish the season .500 in the Big Ten. The only thing worse than being bad is being good and underachieving.

Now onto a rant about the Big Ten 2010 Football Awards, which were announced yesterday.

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There was an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday explaining that the Notre Dame-Army games at Yankee Stadium used to be such a big deal that during the Battle of the Bulge American soldiers asked unfamiliar faces what the score of the 1944 game between the teams was to detect German spies wearing American uniforms. Sixty-six years after #1 Army's 49-0 beatdown of #5 Notre Dame, the two teams meet in Yankee Stadium again this Saturday.

Only this time, a game between two unranked, middle-of-the-pack Big Ten teams -- Illinois and Northwestern -- is a bigger deal, at least according to ESPN's College Gameday. Some ND apologists argue that Gameday is only going to Wrigley Field for the Zook/NW game because that game's on ESPN, unlike the ND game, which is on NBC (7:00 kickoff). But that argument holds little water, as anyone who watched Gameday's appearance in Salt Lake City for the TCU-Utah game a few weeks ago can attest.

Notre Dame football has become a shell of what it used to be. Indeed, the scores of stories about the Yankee Stadium rivalry all remind the reader that Notre Dame is a lot like Army: a program that used to be great, but that now just has a great tradition.  The ND faithful will insist that their program still can land great recruiting classes. But ND's highly-rated recruits are just another way of proving the Deon Butler Postulate: college players are best judged by what they do on the college gridiron, not by how they were rated by some guy who earns his living obsessing over the athletic prowess of teenagers.

The program at ND has been in free fall for some time, and Brian Kelly has not been the panacea that some, myself included, expected him to be. Between the tragic death of the student videographer, a home loss to Tulsa, and their 3^rd loss in four year's against Navy, it's hard to put your finger on what's gone and continues to go wrong in South Bend. Personally, I think it all goes back to ND's firing of George O'Leary for lying on his resume about academic credentials that had little to do with his hiring. Between that and firing Ty Willingham for being black, Notre Dame made some rash personnel decisions that upset the football gods and banished the program into mediocrity.

All things considered, it's probably better that we ended up with Nebraska instead of the Irish in the Big Ten. Onto the games and the gambling:

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Silas Redd got caught for public urination this weekend. The Penn State team got publicly exposed as underaged and inexperienced in the second half in Columbus. Who else was publicly embarrassed in the Big Ten this weekend?

The Indiana Hoosiers football program. There's little one can do to further belittle a football program that schedules a "home" game in the recruiting backyard of its opponent simply for the cash, but if there is anything that can further embarrass that team, it happened in Madison on Saturday. What's worse than losing an in-conference game by 63 points? Losing by 63 points when you score 20 yourself.  I have a soft spot for Indiana; they're football's version of Penn State (or Northwestern) in hoops. But for any Big 10 team to be outplayed so badly makes me think the Big11 should consider adopting a system ala English Premier League soccer in which abjectly awful teams in the conference are relegated to some non-BCS wilderness for a few years to hone their skills and prove they deserve to play with the big boys.

Ron Zook. Oh, the Fighting Zooks, how I missed you.  After indoctrinating this Penn State team to the instantaneous (but somehow irresistible) misery of the pick six, the Illini looked poised to play in a pretty good bowl game. After Saturday's loss to the now 2-9 Minnesota Golden Gophers, the 5-5 Illini might be lucky to play in a bowl game period, with their remaining contests @ Northwestern and @ Fresno State. If the Illini lose both of those games and finish below .500, the Zook family is going to be looking for a new home.

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I'm a big Charlie Rose fan. He's the best interviewer in the business. Case in point: last week Charlie interviewed the editor of Sports Illustrated, Terry McDonell.  Towards the end of the interview, Rose doesn't even ask McDonell a question, he just says,

"You don't really even care that much about sports, in the end....Sports is just where you see the human experience played out."

There's been plenty of human experience playing itself out in the Big Ten this year. The fall of Tim Brewster. The (momentary) rise of Sparty and Mark Dantonio. Purdue's grit amid endless injuries. Indiana's neverending incompetence. Wisconsins' toughness, Michigan's finesse, and the zany Fighting Zooks. But the best story of the year is likely the one in our own backyard. Matt McGloin's challenge to Herbie and unexpected rise to stardom, while propelling this season back from the dead and Joe Paterno to 400 lifetime wins.

Maybe that's not the best story, and I'm just biased. But I'm biased for a reason: it's easy being a Penn State fan. In the drama that is Penn State football, the good guy always wins. Loyalty is rewarded, as is merit. Success with honor, and winning through superior preparation. No names on the jerseys.

Believe it or not, though, the rest of the Big Ten fandom has plenty of reasons for liking their teams, and they probably don't even include that their team has uniforms similar to the Steelers.  I salute the rest of the Big Ten fans, because they like their teams for reasons I can't even fathom.  

Onto the games and the gambling:

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Joe Paterno took questions from the media yesterday afternoon. You can read the whole transcript online, or just check out our select snippets below. As you would expect, Joe praised Ohio State up and down, was pretty evenhanded about the QB situtation, and thinks the team is improving.

On the quality of this Penn State team:

We're getting to be where we're a pretty good football team. Pretty good. We have a long ways to go before we can go around thinking we're better than pretty good.

On the quarterback situation (McGloin is listed first on the depth chart):

I think both kids (Rob Bolden, Matt McGloin) are doing a good job, practicing and working hard. They've both been effective up to a point. And, in all fairness to Bolden, he was in there when we were having more troubles holding on to the ball, running the football and all those kinds of things.

We were working with an inexperienced offensive line. So, I don't want to take anything away from him. But obviously the other kid's come in there in a couple of football games and made some big plays. But I'm hoping that Bolden will be ready to play. In fact, I had Bolden all set to play just before the end of the first half. Told him to get ready and (then) we made that drive. Obviously, McGloin had a hot hand and I wasn't about to change at that stage.

McGloin has benefited from the fact that the offensive line is a little bit more consistent, has a little bit more confidence in the timing, the backs have a little bit more confidence in what they're doing. We're catching the ball a little better.

On leadership:

I thought last week it was a good experience for [the team]. They realize that you can get behind and you can stick together and everybody tends to their knittin' and a lot of good things can happen. And hopefully that will be a carry-over and we can keep building on that.

As you've heard me say a thousand times, our job is to get better each week, to just keep working on the little things and understand we've got a young bunch of kids that haven't played a lot, haven't been in a lot of - you know, haven't been in situations as they were at halftime against Northwestern. So I think the leadership is slowly developing.

On Terrelle Pryor:

He's older. He's more mature. He's more polished. And so all those little things that you would expect an athlete as good as he is and as conscientious as he is, you'd expect him to get better and that's what Pryor's done. It's really done ....and he's a good kid. He really handles himself well.

He's all business. He's not out there trying to out-do anybody. He's just out there trying to get his football team to win. He's the kind of guy a coach likes to see have success. I don't want him to have too much this week, but he's, I think he's been good. He's done well. He's done very well. And he's getting better all the time.

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At the end of Tom Bradley's interview with ESPN Radio yesterday, the host tried to steer the conversation from JoePa's 400^th win to the Ohio State game by saying, "Terrelle Pryor sleeps for no man." I have no idea what that means, of course, but regardless, it prompted Tom Bradley to mention a few interesting things regarding his relationship with TP.

"We're good friends," Bradley said. "[Pryor's] already texted me a few times this week....We have a nice banter."

A nice banter?!?! Banter! BA! Anyone in the comments want to guess what these two are texting to each other?

While Ohio State was off last week, texting opposing teams' coaches and make sure the stickers on their helmet looked just so, the rest of the conference provided some excitement.

Well, the rest of the conference except Minnesota and Michigan State, who played the game you might have expected from those two: plenty of defense, an impressive performance by Sparty, and an utterly forgettable game.

Meanwhile, Purdue hung tough with Wisconsin long enough to make me think that the Badgers might not be as unbeatable in its remaining contests - Indiana; at Michigan; Northwestern - as they once appeared. Wisconsin's very good upfront, but they can struggle on the road, as they showed in the first half of Saturday's game.

Indiana demonstrated why they're much better than their 0-5 conference record suggests, leading Iowa for much of Saturday's game, only to go down in the final minutes and lose because NFL prospect Damarlo Belcher couldn't squeeze a very catchable ball in the end zone on 4^th down with 30 seconds to play.

And Illinois and Michigan played a thriller in Ann Arbor. Tate Forcier line-danced the Wolverines to a win in the third overtime after Denard Robinson got hurt in the second half. Even though the high scoring affair included a mind-blowing 132 total points, Michigan's defense actually played pretty well in the second half.

That game really caused me to rethink my aversion to the NFL's current regular season overtime policy. For a long time, I've advocated for the NFL to switch from sudden death overtime to something more like the college system, but the college system is broken, too. The college system is exciting, but it's a little too much like deciding a tied hoops game by moving the game to half court.  I'd probably be fine with each team getting the ball at the opposing team's 25 an equal number of times if they didn't force the issue with the requirement to go for two after the second OT. That Illinois-Michigan game was a gem, even if I lost too much money on it, and it was a shame that it ended because Illinois couldn't convert a two-point try. I suppose I like the NFL's approach to overtime for the playoffs this year, where if the team that receives the kickoff only kicks a field goal, the other team gets a chance to score. I might like the high school version best of all, if only because giving each team the ball at the opposing team's ten yard line always reminds me of 10-Yard Fight.   

An early look at the line's in this week's Big Ten contest:

• Iowa Hawkeyes -9.5 at Northwestern Wildcats
• Michigan Wolverines -13 at Purdue Boilermakers
• Wisconsin Badgers -21.5 v. Indiana Hoosiers
• Illinois Fighting Illini -21 v. Minnesota Golden Gophers
• Ohio State Buckeyes -18 v. Penn State Nittany Lions

Halfway through the Big Ten season, it's already pretty clear that the Big Ten championship will likely be shared again this year. With Wisconsin's exclusively playing teams with a .500 record or worse in the remainding schedule, and the fact that someone has to win the game between Ohio State and Iowa, it's hard to reasonably predict a scenario in which at least two teams aren't tied at the top again this year.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled decrying the inanity of the current Big Ten championship, in which two teams are "co-champions" if they have the same record, even if one beat the other in the regular season. Somehow it's fitting that in the last year in which such a sham co-championship is possible, given the introduction of a conference championship game next year, we'll likely get one.

Arguably the best part of college football is the tradition: the mascots, the marching bands, the tailgating, the rivalries. It's a uniquely American sport and culture unto itself. Most other universities in the world don't offer athletic scholarships or have anything above what we call club sports, much less anything like Purdue's World's Largest Drum or the 120 games between Minnesota and Wisconsin dating back to 1890. Given the tradition of college football, I tend to be somewhat agnostic about the introduction of a playoff system. While I'd love to watch the matchups if we ever get one, I'd hate to lose aspects of the bowl tradition and diminish the preeminence of the regular season.

Nevertheless, some traditions are stupid and should be abolished as soon as possible, like the Big Ten's sham co-championship. Good riddance: you won't be missed.

Onto the games and the gambling:

Illinois Fighting Illini at Michigan Wolverines (12:00, ESPN)

43 and sunny; Michigan -3; o/u 57

Occasionally Vegas puts out a line that makes little or no sense. Case in point: Michigan, a team that clearly has little to no ability to stop even a mediocre Big Ten offense, is favored by three this Saturday against a surging Illinois team that's won its last two conference games by an average of 32 points. The winner of this one becomes bowl eligible, and given the context in Ann Arbor, this is a huge game for Rich Rodriguez. Nevertheless, there's absolutely no reason to expect Denard Robinson and company to be able to so fully dominate a resolute Illini defense that they're able to overwhelm the points the Wolverine d is certain to give up to Nathan Scheelhaase and company. Some people call games like this "traps," because they assume that the line is "too good to be true." I don't buy the theory of trap games. Take Illinois on the money line (+135).

Prediction: Illinois 44 - Michigan 28

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 The most interesting game in the Big Ten this past weekend was played in Beaver Stadium, starred the pride of Scranton, and sent the visiting team's fans reeling. Elsewhere, the games were a whole lot of meh. Nothing illustrates that better than the fact that the closest game of the weekend came when Northwestern traveled to Bloomington to take on the Hoosiers.

Neither QB played particularly well in a game that was advertised as the matchup of the two best passing signal callers in the league from a statistical standpoint. Northwestern only won by 3, but that was due to a garbage touchdown in the last minute by Indiana (to help them cover the 3.5 point spread). Indiana's folk hero Ben Chappell looked exceedingly ordinary, routinely overthrowing his receivers. Northwestern's Dan Persa played pretty well -- 18-28, 221 yards and two touchdowns -- before leaving the game halfway through the fourth quarter with an apparent concussion. When asked about the post-concussion evaluation, Bob Saget Persa said,

"There were a bunch of questions. I don't know if I could answer them without a concussion."

Persa passed the post-concussion test on Sunday, however, will practice Wednesday and is set to start this week against the Nittany Lions.

In other games, Illinois embarrassed Purdue, Ohio State did the same to Minnesota, and Iowa added Michigan State fans to the list of those who now hate the Hawkeyes for ruining a reasonable shot at a MNC.

Indeed, thanks to the Hawkeyes ritual disembowelment of Sparty, the Big Ten now has four teams -- Iowa, MSU, OSU, and Wisconsin -- with one loss in the conference and no team with a viable chance to play in the MNC. 

The cream has begun to rise to the top in the Big Ten and we can see some definite separation within the league. While the four teams listed above are clearly the conference's brightest lights this year, Minnesota, Indiana, and Michigan are the dullest. That leaves Illinois, Penn State, Northwestern, and Purdue in the middle. Illinois now looks to be one of the elite teams in the conference and unless something unexpected happens, will likely finish the year 9-3 and attend a high profile bowl.  Very much to head coach Danny Hope's credit, Purdue appeared to have rebounded from its slate of injuries to start conference play 2-0 by beating Northwestern and Minnesota.  But they'll lost their last two games on the road at Illinois and Ohio State by a combined 83 points.

Northwestern was supposed to be in a rebuilding year, but they're an uncertain 6-2, including 4-0 on the road. But they still haven't beaten anyone. Their two conference wins are against Indiana and Minnesota, and their high-profile out-of-conference win was in week one at Vanderbilt, which is among the worst teams in recent SEC history. Nevertheless, they gave both Purdue and Sparty tough games in their two losses and are not to be overlooked this Saturday in Happy Valley.

Other random thoughts:

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In the virtual grotto where your humble BSD bloggers plan world domination, there was a lively debate this week about whether we should spend front-page time talking about Penn State's "rivalry" with Michigan or lack thereof. The discussion more or less settled down to a consensus view that any time Michigan and Penn State play it's a big game, but let's not get bogged down labeling it.

In a certain sense, that's true of most of this Saturday's Big Ten games. None of them deserve the label "rivalry" by any objective measure, but all of them, save Bucky/Goldy, are big games, at least for the teams involved. Three of the games -- NW/IND, MSU/Iowa, Mich/PSU -- are perhaps the fulcrum upon which the balance of the season depends. If everything goes as planned, the Illinois/Purdue game won't really make much of a difference, but maybe everything won't go so swimmingly for the Illini. (Actually, I think it will.)

I'm particularly fond of this Saturday's slate of games because it exemplifies what I love about Big Ten football: nearly every game is interesting. This week's Penn State game is more about bowl eligibility than the conference championship, but it's still a big game for the teams and fans involved. The MSU/Iowa game may be the defining game of this year's Big Ten season, and someone has to win Indiana/Northwestern, even if we'd rather assume that neither team can. In other words, every game matters.

Enough of the love fest. Check out http://joepasdoghouse.com/ for some HATE. Onto the games and the gambling:

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After the guys from the Daily Gopher stopped by last week to give their two cents about how the Nittany Lions' trip to Southern Canada would go, a popular sentiment emerged: at least we're not Minnesota. The argument was more or less "be thankful that Penn State fans get to support a team that has a strong football tradition and routinely competes for the Big Ten championship."

That argument didn't make any sense to me at the time and still doesn't. Case in point, Iowa. The Hawkeyes suffered their second loss of the season on Saturday, ending hopes for anything more than a share of the Big Ten title and officially closing the door on their preseason hopes to have one of the best seasons in school history. The kids over at BHGP expressed their frustration in the crazy and hilarious way of breaking the internets that is their signature.

For my money, it's way easier to be a Minnesota fan today than it is to be an Iowa fan. As we well know, Iowa fans have a bad taste in their mouth that probably won't go away even if they win out the rest of the way. Great expectations lead to great disappointments. Meanwhile, fans of Goldy have probably been ice-fishing without a care in the world since Saturday afternoon.

Same deal, different sport: Being a Penn State hoops fan is a lot easier than being an Indiana hoops fan, because I never expect the Nittany Lions to do anything special. If they do: bonus. Bob Dylan said it best: if you ain't got nothin, you got nothing to lose. And Iowa had something to lose this year. We do every year. Minnesota almost never does.

Other thoughts from last weekend:

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I've been struck by the vagaries of conference play in college football this year. By any objective measure, Alabama is a better team than South Carolina: they have better players and win more games. The talent differential between the two programs isn't especially close. But South Carolina can beat Alabama because of the familiarity they have from playing every year, and because the players, the school, and the crowd recognize that one Saturday has the potential of being the biggest day in the school's football history. And then that same South Carolina team can lose the following week to Kentucky, a team that now unbelievably holds the college football belt.

In fact, I'd argue that "Any Given Sunday Saturday"-esque parity is more pronounced within conference play in college football than it is in the NFL, regardless of Al Pacino movies. While that unpredictability can make college football intensely frustrating, it also makes it endlessly fascinating. Particularly because the lack of a college football playoff gives every game the potential of being part of the college football playoff.

Take our first game this weekend, for example. If the NCAA were to abandon the BCS system in favor of some 8 or 16 team playoff, Northwestern would virtually never participate. But this Saturday, they have the potential to dramatically alter the state of the 2010 college football championship by ending Michigan State's unbeaten streak and with it the odds that any Big Ten team plays in the MNC. Fair or not, the current college football system for determining a champion is unlike anything else in sports, and it helps to make the conference games even more intense and interesting than they otherwise would be.

Onto the games and the gambling:

Michigan St. Spartans at Northwestern Wildcats (12:00; ESPN)

61 and 40% chance of rain; MSU -5; O/U 53

The nation's most accurate passer, Dan Persa (78%), and his Wildcat teammates return from their bye-week to host a surging Michigan State team that plays just its second road game of the year. This game and next week's game at Iowa are the biggest obstacles stopping Sparty from being undefeated when they visit Happy Valley the last Saturday of November. Northwestern only has one loss this year, but that loss was against Purdue, which is arguably the toughest squad Pat Fitzgerald's team has played yet. Evanston can be a tricky place to play, and the Wildcats will give Kirk Cousins and his teammates a run for their money, but I think ultimately, Michigan State's is just too good at too many facets of the game for Northwestern.  Close through the first half; Sparty takes control by the fourth quarter.

Prediction: Michigan State 31 - Northwestern 17

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Vaguely lost among the hoopla surrounding Nebraska's ascension to the Big Ten and the debate over divisions and cross-over rivalries has been the fact that this is the last year that Penn State will finish its regular season playing half-hated, sorta land-grant rivals, the Michigan State Spartans.  If things shake out, the game we've all been clamoring to get rid of could be the biggest of our season.

Somewhat unbelievably, the Spartans are currently ranked fourth in the computer polls that help determine the BCS rankings. They're seventh overall in the BCS polls, trailing two SEC teams - LSU and Auburn - two mid majors - Boise St and TCU - and Oregon and Oklahoma.  Michigan St. has a relatively easy schedule the rest of the way: home games against Minnesota and Purdue and road tests at Northwestern this week, at Iowa next week, and at Happy Valley to close the season. If they can take down Stanzi and company in Kinnick, there's a good chance that Penn State will have an opportunity to end their bid to play in the BCS championship game on November 27. That kind of win could completely change the way this season is remembered and render moo a lot of the complaints about how "elite" the Penn State program is or is not.

Four other quick thoughts going into week four of the Big Ten season:

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This Saturday will bring what many Penn State fans seem to be calling for after a 3-3 start and an embarrassing homecoming lose to Illinois: a Saturday in October without Joe Paterno on the sidelines. Of course, the lack of our bespectacled, cuffed, tie-laden octogenarian isn't because he's stopped coaching, but because the good guys got a week off to regroup before the second half of the season.

On Saturday, none of the coaches patrolling the sidelines for Big Ten teams will have won more games than any other college coach in Division 1 history. None will have a library named after them. None will have conceived of and executed a "grand experiment" to combine education and athletics. None will have goofy glasses; none will lack an email address; none will coach the great grandson of someone they coached fifty years ago; none will have been listed in the "pros" side of the list I made in deciding to matriculate at Penn State.

In the five days since the Illinois Incident, I've found two arguments about why Joe Paterno should no longer be the coach at Penn State to be the most compelling. First, Paterno no longer has the energy and enthusiasm to meet the demands of the head coach position at a major D-1 program. Second, under Joe Paterno, Penn State has failed to consistently compete in and win big games against the top teams for the better part of ten years. Both arguments boil down to stating that Penn State should find a new coach because they cannot compete at the level that the fans, alumni, players, etc expect with Joe Paterno at the helm. The irony, of course, is that Joe Paterno is responsible for those expectations. Beaver Stadium holds 110,000 people, Penn State competes in the Big Ten and is considered one of a handful of national college football programs because of one person. But what if that person can no longer do their job?

I know that every other Big Ten program would have likely fired their head coach if they had five years like Paterno did from 2000-2004. As we all know, Penn State tried to fire Paterno before the 2005 season, but Joe prevailed and restored order to the world. Until now.

Joe Paterno took a risk -- and continues to take a risk -- by holding his players to high standards in the classroom and in their personal lives. That risk has paid big dividends on the field and for the reputation of Penn State as a football team and as a university. Penn State now, presumably, has an opportunity to take a similar risk. We -- the fans, alumni, students -- can risk having an exceptional football team, can risks wins, by stating that we want Joe Paterno to be our coach for as long as Joe Paterno wants to be our coach. It's a risk that's similar to the risk inherent in the grand experiment. It assumes that there are things that are more important than wins and losses; it assumes that character and loyalty are paramount; it assumes that we are going to be different. And it assumes that can make us great.

Would any of the teams playing on Saturday extend that courtesy to their coach? Does it matter?

Onto the games and the gambling:

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Every time I made a mistake, my old man would tell me about it. But he would also always mention that "making mistakes is part of life; everyone makes mistakes. The trick is to learn from them." I heard that line so often that it became part of my worldview. In some bs liberal arts class at State -- modern and contemporary rhetoric, I believe -- I even wrote a mid-term paper trying to prove the argument that all real learning requires making mistakes.

With the silver lining now drawn around the ominous cloud that is Penn State's early Big Ten season, let's take a look back at the mistakes I made in picking last week's games, in an effort to learn from them. As I went 2-3 against the spread, and 2-3 in picking winners, there's evidently a lot of learning to be had.

1.      Michigan State is for real. I thought the Spartans would lose in the Big House on Saturday, but cover the spread. They covered alright, and absolutely dominated Michigan in Ann Arbor. Clearly the Wolverines have a poor defense, but anytime you rush for more than 250 yards on the road in a rivalry game in the Big Ten, you can move the ball on the ground. Michigan State looks so good so far that I would be really worried if we weren't only half way through October. There's still plenty of time left for Sparty to fail in some epic manner, and you could actually read their start of the season as simply the rise before the fall.

2.      Northwestern isn't. I've clearly been too high on a Northwestern team that's now 5-1, but still hasn't beaten anyone. Northwestern had won close in its two previous wins against BCS opponents--Vanderbilt and Minnesota--and it was only a matter of time before their myriad mistakes caused a loss. Well the clock struck midnight on Saturday against Purdue, and Northwestern lost due to a blocked and missed field goal in the closing minutes.

 

3.      Illinois is better than I imagined and clearly in the top half of the league. Somewhat lost in the soul-searching we've been doing here and throughout the Nittany Nation is the reality that we lost on Saturday to what appears to be a pretty solid football team. This isn't last year's Fighting Zooks. Illinois plays solid defense and they have a diverse offense that can move the ball. That offense got into a rhythm in the second half against Penn State's depleted defense and looked better than it is. Nevertheless, Illinois is no slouch and could very likely end up in the top 3 of the league at the end of the year.

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The forecast has Big Ten country looking like Southern California this Saturday as clear skies and 70 degree temperatures dominate the region. With most of the over/under's in the 50s and 60s, Vegas apparently expects to see scores reminiscent of the Mountain West. Some of the traditional rivalry games are underway this week, and the number of undefeated big ten teams will necessarily drop from four to at least three, as Michigan and Michigan State face off in Ann Arbor.

Indiana Hoosiers at Ohio State Buckeyes (12:00, ESPN)

71 and sunny; OSU -22; O/U 57.5

The Hoosiers were as good as advertised on offense last week against Michigan, and as bad as advertised on defense. They get a little lucky heading into Columbus this Saturday as the quad that Terrelle Pryor injured in the second half against Illinois last week still isn't fully healed. Ben Chappell and Indiana's high octane passing attack is even more fortunate that OSU safety Tyler Moeller is out for the year and will be replaced by freshman Christian Bryant. Nevertheless, OSU's front seven should be able to get plenty of pressure on Indiana to slow down their passing game, and look for the Buckeyes to have a field day running the ball against what's likely the worst defense in the Big Ten.

Prediction: Ohio State 38 - Indiana 20

Minnesota Golden Gophers at Wisconsin Badgers (12:00, Big Ten Network)

78 and partly cloudy; Wisconsin -22; O/U 58

Wisconsin is a much better team than Minnesota, but there's a fair chance they don't play like it as they'll be sulking from last week's loss to Sparty and looking ahead to next week's game against Ohio State before they travel to Kinnick in two weeks. Minnesota's a mess, and Tim Brewster is likely headed out the door, but he has managed to keep his team focused even as they've lost four straight. The Golden Gophers are 1-4, but 3-1 against the spread. Look for a similar result here for Goldy, with a loss on the scoreboard, but a win for the gamblers. This is my favorite bet of the weekend, and I actually think there's an outside chance that Minnesota could shock the world, be the rare unranked team to win in Camp Randall and take home Paul Bunyan's Ax.

Prediction: Wisconsin 31 - Minnesota 27

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Keeping up the theme from Mike's post this morning, in today's review of the Big Ten, I'm comparing Big Ten teams to prominent characters and teams from everyone's favorite sports movie: Hoosiers.

Before we get there, though, a quick review of what we saw this weekend. All the home teams covered the spread, as did every underdog, except Penn State. In other words, the games, except the Saturday evening massacre, we're all quite competitive. Illinois stayed with Ohio State, Minnesota and Northwestern each played equally badly, Michigan State beat an over-ranked Wisconsin team despite losing the turnover battle by 3, and Indiana and Michigan played a first-to-40-wins-barn-burner that was as entertaining as advertised.

Given that most of the games were closer than anticipated, you might be tempted to argue that there's not a big difference between the top and the bottom of the conference. You would be wrong. Ohio State is still head and shoulders above everyone else in the conference until they are in real danger of losing. Playing a tight game in their first road contest against a mercurial Illinois team that never led in the second half doesn't count. The last third of the conference-Purdue, Minnesota, Illinois-is still pretty bad. But they can also upset anyone on any given Saturday, except Ohio State and, probably, Iowa. Everyone else is certainly susceptible to a playing a bad game against a bad team at the wrong time, but I don't expect it to happen regularly.

Onto the comparisons:

Ohio State is South Bend Central, the team Hickory High plays in the state finals. Ohio State is bigger, stronger, and faster than everyone else and will be expected to win every game they play. They can lose, but it's going to take a great game from the opponent, with a dramatic pre-game speech, a great performance from the underdog's best player, and it will likely come down to the last minute.

Illinois is Buddy, the solid defender who leaves the team to play for Terhune early in the season only to mysteriously return later and become a solid contributer. We don't know what to expect from Illinois, maybe they'll show, maybe they won't. But they can play defense.

Michigan is George, the ex-coach who hates discipline, defense, passing, fundamentals and common courtesy. They play the villain well in plenty of good sports movies -- Dan Devine in Rudy, Harris in Major League -- and could do so again this Big Ten season, particularly Halloween weekend in Happy Valley.

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Before Major League Baseball expanded to 12 teams in both the American and National Leagues in 1969, there was no playoff system in professional baseball in America. The teams with the best regular season records in each league won the pennant and met in the World Series. When MLB expanded, however, they began playing the League Championship Series, and the preeminence of the regular season in baseball died.

Say what you will about Big Ten expansion (I like it), but let's be clear that Saturday begins the last season of a dying format for picking a winner in American sports. Once we invite Nebraska into the fold next year and start playing a championship game, the importance of the Big Ten regular season will be diminished. The advent of the BCS has already taken some of the luster away from the Rose Bowl, but as things stand now, there are no "post-season" games to determine who gets to play in Pasadena on the first of January. But this year will be the last year we can say that. We're going to gain a lot with Nebraska and a conference championship game. But let's not forget that we're going to lose something too, and let's enjoy that something while we have it.

The first week of Big Ten games will never be this important again.

Ohio State Buckeyes at Illinois Fighting Illini (12:00, Big Ten Network)

65 and partly cloudy; OSU-17.5; Over/Under 50.5

Illinois hasn't looked great thus far in 2010, but they haven't looked awful either. After a relatively close lose to Missouri on opening week, they dispatched both Southern and Northern Illinois and took a week off to prepare for Saturday. Junior running back Mikel Leshoure leads the Illini with 398 yards rushing through three games with a gaudy 6.9 yards per carry. Traveling to Champaign-Urbana to play the well-rested Illini will be a bigger challenge than the Buckeyes have faced in recent weeks against Ohio and Eastern Michigan, but the defense and Terrelle Pryor should be ready. The Buckeye defense hasn't pitched a shutout yet, but I think they get one on Saturday as they can concentrate on the run and not worry much about Illinois' anemic passing game.

Prediction: Ohio State 37-Illinois 0

Northwestern Wildcats at Minnesota Golden Gophers  (12:00, ESPN)

56 and sunny; Northwestern -5.5; O/U 54.5

Saturday's game in the Twin Cities is a big one for both teams. It won't make either teams season, but it could break them. If Minnesota loses, they will drop to 1-4, will have lost three straight after barely beating Middle Tennessee State in the season opener, and will almost certainly have quit on coach Tim Brewster. If Northwestern loses, their win at Vanderbilt in week one suddenly looks like no big deal, as do QB Dan Persa's impressive numbers against weak competition. I think home field advantage helps the Gophers keep this one close for a while, but Pat Fitzgerald has a pretty strong team that keeps improving.  

Prediction: Northwestern 33-Minnesota 24.

 

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