Originally this post was going to be a tongue-in-cheek jokey kind of thing where I was going to lavish praise on Wisconsin, Sparty, and Penn State for beating up on MAC teams.
The idea was that I would talk about the Big Ten's amazing victories over out of conference foes this weekend, and then every time the actual name of the team would come up, I'd just write [REDACTED] and then come up with a bunch of really terrible fake names for Eastern Michigan's players and coaches. I was even going to take a bunch of pictures from the games, erase all MAC players and insert poorly drawn stick figures with "???" on their helmets. I thought it was a pretty funny concept (which would've ended up taking at least a few hours in MS Paint), but apparently Kevin Wilson and the Indiana Hoosiers thought otherwise because they went out on the road to Missouri, beat a ranked SEC team, and ruined the whole joke behind my article.
Which at the time I felt was very rude and inconsiderate of them, but in time I came to understand that what Indiana did yesterday was pretty easily the most entertaining positive thing the Big Ten has managed in the young 2014 college football season: they beat a non-conference team that people care about, on the road, as significant underdogs, which is something that other teams from the slowest, rustiest, soy bean-iest states in America have yet to accomplish.
Or honestly Indiana themselves in like the last 25ish years. Indiana's last bowl win came in 1991 against Baylor, which in 2014 counts as kind of significant if you're 12 and your mom just started letting you watch college football a few years ago.
If not though, you should take some time to step back and appreciate the fact that Indiana just landed the biggest fish the Big Ten has seen in 2014 so far. You could make a (crappy) claim that maybe Iowa's win against Pitt or maybe Nebraska taking out Miami are better wins, but you'd be wrong because none of those teams have much going for them aside from name recognition at this point. Note that I could be talking about any of those four teams.
Ohio State of course had a shot at a legitimizing win, as did Michigan State, and we both blew it. As a result, the Big Ten was repeatedly and justifiably maligned both in the press:
Troubling trends in recruiting and some reluctance by schools to invest the way it's done in the Southeastern Conference have been dragging down Big Ten football in recent years. This season looks as if it could be rock bottom.
The gory details through three weeks:
— 1-10 vs. other Big Five conferences.
— 24-14 overall in nonconference games, worst among record among the Big Five conferences.
— 5-3 against the Mid-American Conference
— And this one from Mlive.com, 2-12 in nonconference games against FBS teams with winning records.
Big Ten schools are far too willing to accept bad football. Grace periods last too long, and the excuses follow. The next time a Big Ten university claims it’s more of a basketball school, call its bluff. That’s just a school not winning to invest in football.
These aren’t tiny charities we’re talking about. They’re major universities with millions and millions of dollars available. To win at the highest level, a program must invest in top-notch facilities, bring in the best coaches — not a flash-in-the-pan MAC success story — and each must expect to win.
are two of about a billion completely correct examples of this.
BTN.com is now crowing about this week's bounceback, but frankly there was only one win that really mattered to college football fandom at large.
Indiana came into their matchup with Missouri as almost two touchdown dogs, mostly owing to the fact that the game was on the road, they had just lost to Bowling Green, and are the Indiana Hoosiers.
A couple of pluses in their corner were the fact that their head coach isn't completely incompetent as offensive football, and they actually have the players to pull off whatever crazy thing Kevin Wilson drew up on a napkin the night before. Running back Tevin Coleman, for example, has rushed for 569 yards in three games, which against BG and Indiana State might be a fluke, but against Missouri seems less so. Coleman again and again gashed a Tiger defense that probably should be equipped to have an answer for a Hoosier running back, but came up with nothing.
The way Indiana won was impressive, too. Twice they came back from deficits to score timely points, including the game winning touchdown with 22 seconds left. They took the best punches from a decent SEC team, on the road, and still came out clean on the other side. Indiana doesn't show up on the OSU schedule for a while, but if they suddenly gain an interest in playing defense then I might start to worryingly look up players' names on BOTH sides of the ball this year.
So hail Hoosiers! Sorry that this post wasn't as funny as me making dumb jokes around painstakingly drawn stick figures, but you know what is funny? Life. Life is hilarious. And sometimes a Saturday in the fall shows up where the Indiana freaking Hoosiers, for all I know potentially made up of a roster containing the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter or a bunch of angry stoats, beats what was last year one of the best teams in probably the best conference in America.
Are the Hoosiers good? Or good at pretending to be good? I don't know, and I don't think Kevin Wilson does either. But who cares, because for one three and a half hour period, the least likely team in the world carried the water for the entire damn conference.
Well done, Bloomington.
