It`s open season on the Big 10.
Or is it the Beleaguered 10?
The Big One?
Even worse, the Big Zero?
Respect for Big 10 football is a thing of the past. Listen to Boston College quarterback Glenn Foley, whose Eagles shut out Michigan State and Northwestern this year:
”I`ve always thought of the Big 10 as boring. They always seem to be running the ball. When you think of college football, you think of Miami. You really don`t think of Michigan and Ohio State.”
The potshots even come from within the conference. When asked whom the Big 10 should go after as its 12th team, Michigan State basketball coach Jud Heathcote said Notre Dame would be an ideal choice.
”But, on the other hand, maybe we should take De Paul,” Heathcote said. ”De Paul`s football team is on par with most of our league.”
It seems everyone is laughing at the sorry state of the Big 10 this year- except those who hold the conference`s honor in their hearts. Even they have to admit the obvious.
None other than former Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, the Big 10`s patriarch, is pained in a year when the league might send only three teams to bowls for the first time since 1980.
”The Big 10 is undeniably down,” Schembechler said. ”The Big 10 is the worst I can remember it being.”
The current coaches can`t even argue.
”We`re not as good as we`ve been,” said Michigan coach Gary Moeller.
”The facts are the facts,” said Michigan State coach George Perles.
The facts show that, going into the final Saturday of the season, this might be the bleakest year for Big 10 football in recent memory. For most of the fall, Michigan was somewhat of a beacon, but Saturday`s 22-22 tie against Illinois underscored that even the best team in the conference isn`t that good.
Penn State, a top-10 team earlier this season, is supposed to bolster the conference`s sagging respect when it starts league play in 1993. But the Nittany Lions have dropped four of their last five games, including last weekend`s last-minute, one-point loss at Notre Dame.
Beyond the Wolverines, it`s look out below. After Michigan and Ohio State, no other team has six victories, the minimum to qualify for a bowl.
As many as four other teams still could finish with six victories, but the Big 10`s non-conference record argues mediocrity rather than parity. It went 13-17-1, the worst mark since 1988, and five of the victories came against schools such as Northern Illinois, Bowling Green and Miami of Ohio;
two of the losses came against Central Michigan (Michigan State) and Toledo
(Purdue).
Against ranked opponents, the Big 10 was a mere 2-11-1, highlighted only by Ohio State`s victory over Syracuse and Michigan`s tie against Notre Dame. Purdue did wallop California, which was ranked at the time but since has fallen to 4-6.
The meek perception hardly is a one-year trend for the Big 10.
”I can`t remember a year where people said the Big 10 is strong,” said Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez.
The league has lost nine of the last 11 Rose Bowls. In the last 10 years, its postseason mark is 20-29-1.
And of course, the ultimate stigma: The Big 10 hasn`t won a national championship since Woody Hayes` Ohio State team in 1968. Every other major football conference has claimed at least one title since the last time the Big 10 could say, ”We`re No. 1.”
There are plenty of theories on the Big 10`s sorry plight, but Alex Agase, the former Northwestern and Purdue coach, came up with the most succinct explanation.
”Not enough good players,” Agase said.
Here are the main factors for the decline:
– Integration: ”This all started in 1970,” Agase explained.
The segregated South had been a boon to the Big 10. Southern schools didn`t take black players. As late as 1970, Texas won the national
championship with an all-white team.
As a result, the black players went north to play, and many landed in the Big 10-players such as Leroy Keyes at Purdue and Bubba Smith and George Webster at Michigan State.
However, during the 1970s, Southern teams, led by Alabama coach Bear Bryant, started to take black players. Most of the Big 10 schools lost a major pipeline. The exceptions were Michigan and Ohio State, who Agase said didn`t depend on Southern players. Thus, the birth of the ”Big Two and Little Eight.”
”Sure, it hurt,” Agase said. ”You`re talking about a lot of good players who all of the sudden weren`t coming to the Big 10.”
However, that was 20 years ago, and as Big 10 Commissioner Jim Delany says, conference teams currently are populated with many outstanding black players. It may have been a problem back then, but clearly the conference has had time to adjust.
– League of their own: The coaches, though, say they have had more trouble adjusting to a myriad Big 10 rules throughout the years, which have been enacted unilaterally and are tougher than NCAA standards. For instance, a 1987 conference measure calling for tougher standards to admit junior college players virtually has knocked the Big 10 out of a key source for talent. There`s also the prospect that the league`s move toward gender equity will cost teams valuable walk-ons.
”(The presidents) have got to understand the Big 10 is a football conference,” Schembechler said. ”It always has been. But football has been minimized. They`ve put us behind.”
– Shrinking prospects: Schembechler and his successor, Moeller, started to notice the trend in the 1980s. In part because of a population shift to the South and West, they contend Midwest high school football had fallen off, while the South and West got stronger.
”Too many high schools in Illinois are relying on part-time instructors as coaches,” said former Illinois recruiting coordinator Randy Rodgers, now with Texas. ”In states like Illinois and Indiana, basketball is driving things. In Florida and Texas, the best athletes are out for football. That`s not necessarily the case in the Midwest.”
The football Wolverines decided they had to go national. This year, Michigan recruited as many players from Florida as it did from its own home state.
”The Midwest isn`t producing the number of prospects it used to 20 years ago,” Schembechler said. ”We realized the only way Michigan could stay competitive was to recruit nationally.”
But Michigan is Michigan, with its money and name to open doors throughout the country. Other schools aren`t as fortunate, and therefore have been left behind, not only in the Big 10, but nationally.
”(To get skill players) we have to leave the state,” Alvarez said.
”The farther you go, the tougher it is to recruit.”
”It`s going to be difficult (for the Big 10 to improve) without going national,” Rodgers said. ”You can do it if you could corner all the talent. If Illinois could lock up Chicago, or Ohio State lock up all of Ohio. But the problem is, everyone comes in there to recruit.”
– Speed trap: College football has become a speed game or, as Alvarez says,
”fast-break football.” And the Big 10 still is moving in slow motion.
Former Florida State linebacker Kirk Carruthers recalled size differentials when the Seminoles played at Michigan last year. Carruthers doesn`t go much above 220, and the rest of the Florida State defense wasn`t much bigger. Michigan`s offensive line was bolstered by 322-pound Greg Skrepenak.
Speed won, as Florida State ran to a 51-31 victory.
”Michigan wanted to be physical,” Carruthers said. ”A team like Miami runs and you try to chase them. It required a lot of thinking. Michigan was more basic. Less sophisticated. Every time we played a Northern team, we were head and shoulders above them speed-wise.”
The same scenario happened in last January`s Rose Bowl when Washington`s superior speed up front blitzed past Michigan. As a result, the Wolverines decided they had to get quicker. The rest of the conference, though, has trouble keeping up.
”We haven`t adjusted to the speed game that`s being played in the South and West,” Delany said. ”We rely on strength. The other conferences have changed their approach.”
North Carolina State and Miami clearly had more speed in their victories over Iowa. Houston used its superior speed to beat Illinois, only to get routed the next week at Michigan.
Jim Wacker is suffering through his first season at Minnesota in no small part because of a lack of speed. The Gophers may not get better, but they`re definitely going to get faster.
”I`m a better coach with speed,” Wacker said.
– The second wave: Washington defensive coordinator Jim Lambright believes one of the main reasons why the Pac-10 has emerged as perhaps the dominant conference in the country is because of coaches who are willing to be innovative. Lambright was the designer of Washington`s pressure defense that has dominated opponents and has been copied by other Pac-10 schools.
The Big 10 wouldn`t be described as a conference that`s on the cutting edge. One coach watched a Big 10 game, saw the laid-back zone defenses and complained, ”They`re living in the past.”
As for offense, Miami defensive coordinator Sonny Lubick said, with respect, of the Hawkeyes: ”They ram it at you. A lot of I-formation. We play a lot of teams that don`t operate like that.”
”(The coaches are) never on the cutting edge,” said former Purdue quarterback Gary Danielson, who does commentary on Big 10 football for ESPN.
”They`ve always been on the second wave.
”They`ve been slow to adjust to the new trend of spreading out the offense and attacking with defense. Everyone else has been doing it for a few years.”
New Northwestern coach Gary Barnett has opened up his attack, using a one-back offense, and Wacker isn`t shy about throwing. Iowa coach Hayden Fry has had some success with the pass, and Illinois with Mike White went to the Rose Bowl through the air, not on the ground.
”It`s one-back, no-back time,” Wacker said. ”Look at Miami and Washington. You don`t find a lot of teams winning the national championship running out of the power-I.”
Moeller also has opened it up, but he`ll be the first to say that if you can`t run, you usually can`t compete in the Big 10.
Weather plays a part in it, because it`s hard to pass up North in November. Yet the Big 10`s offense goes beyond weather. For so many years, Schembechler and Hayes set the tone for the conference by playing ”smash-mouth football,” and that stymied innovation.
The only way to beat Michigan and Ohio State was to top them at their own game.
”If you had any chance, you had to match up against Michigan and Ohio State,” said former Illinois coach John Mackovic, now with Texas. ”Iowa decided to do that. Michigan State decided to do that. They worked to get bigger and stronger. On a one-game basis, a team with speed may win a game. But that team might not be able to hold up for eight weeks. This is a physical league, and you have be physical to win.”
Added Alvarez: ”You better have some big old linemen. You better have some depth.”
So, consequently, Big 10 teams beat up each other, never more so than this year. Some experts say what`s going on is parity, not only in the Big 10, but throughout the country.
”I don`t think the Southeastern Conference is as strong,” said ESPN`s Mike Gottfried. ”Tell me the great teams in that league. The Atlantic Coast Conference, other than Florida State, isn`t any better than the Big 10. When you look around the country, I`m not so sure they`re not experiencing the same things that are occurring in the Big 10.”
Yet comparing the ACC, known for basketball, to the Big 10 in football would have been considered ludicrous five years ago.
A real Big 10 man can`t look himself in the mirror and say it`s just parity. He knows, everyone knows.
”For a number of years, people used to take shots at us for being the supreme conference,” Schembechler said. ”But they`ve got statistics. We`re not really good right now.”
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Next: Are Big 10 presidents preventing their coaches from succeeding?
