It’s so close I can taste it.
We’re on the verge of an historical reversal, the sort of which we rarely see in modern times. If the Big Ten truly is on the verge of reinstating the season by the end of Monday, the only comparison I can make to this stunning turn of events was the rescue of the Columbus Crew here in central Ohio.
Seriously, when was the last time a powerful entity made a big decision that just dumped on a big segment of fans and the fans just flat-out didn’t accept the turd sandwich they were being fed? #SaveTheCrew was an overwhelming movement that ultimately led to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam purchasing the team and the new Crew Stadium rising near downtown.
#LetThemPlay and #FIGHT have been significantly more powerful. We’re not talking about the 7th most popular professional sports league in America in one city of 2 million people here, we’re talking about the BIG TEN. Throw out first-out-of-water newcomers and the combined population of the Big Ten’s footprint states is over SEVENTY MILLION people. The Big Ten would be the world’s 20th most populous country on the planet and again I’m not even including those two eastern ne’er do wells.
OK, it’s probably not fair including Maryland with Rutgers, considering I advocated for Maryland to join the Big Ten as an underperforming football program in prime recruiting territory with a seriously good hoops program. Most of my anger is thrown at Rutgers, who should have never been part of the Big Ten, but that’s another story entirely.
Anyways, this is officially the Bucket of Optimism: I believe a return to football in October is happening and we’re going to get a chance to chase that Natty. Let’s fire off a (premature) celebratory clip!
WHY WE WILL BE PLAYING IN OCTOBER
Yesterday was an enormous day, as the Big Ten’s Return To Play Committee delivered the latest medical data to the University Presidents, including the Rutgers maroon who seemed shocked people actually care about safely playing football. The medical data was led by Ohio State’s own Jim Borchers, former player and current lead physician. He’s the co-chair of the Medical Committee and his presentation reportedly was as impressive as you’d expect in arguing for the safety of the student athletes returning to play.
Let’s be real here: There’s not a super difficult formula for safe football. Let’s do a quick review:
• Get those 15 minute tests by the hundreds from the federal government.
• Tell your players you’re playing so keep your asses out of parties and be smart.
• Test them 2-4x a week and cut off any potential spread at the break. No need to quarantine if one kid gets it when you have 15 minute tests that are 97.1% accurate.
• Refer the Myocarditis fearmongers to the Mayo Clinic for some actual medical advice.
• Don’t fly commercial or ride the Dirty Dog for road games.
• Play football.
Seriously, this isn’t rocket science. This isn’t SpaceX landing rockets vertically from freaking space. It’s a simple formula to follow!
But the real kicker is that the Presidents now have a very clear presentation (that assuredly will be released to the public should we get back to football) that will provide them with all of the cover they need to be able to give in to the roaring masses and allow football to play.
The reality is, there’s no logical reason whatsoever other than “undefined bad things could happen!” why these kids aren’t playing football. Hell, I can give you a concrete example of a bad thing that happened because there WASN’T football: Go ask Haskell Garrett if he’d have been walking down Chittenden after midnight if it was a game week, I know what the answer would be……
THE COST/BENEFIT EQUATION HAS CHANGED
Unless you believe that myocarditis magically only assaults Big Ten stadiums (thought I’m sure Iowa State wishes their season had been cancelled after it lost at home to Louisiana yesterday) there’s ample evidence football can be played across the Midwest.
Such as all of the high school games going on in Ohio, maybe?
Bottom line is that these Presidents originally assumed with massive hubris that they’d be ‘on the right side of history’ and got all antsy in their pantsy to cancel the season. Instead of leading the wave, they found only their doofus little brothers in the Pac 12 following, wondering why all of the other cool kids were staring at them out on an island. But they didn’t care, they assumed by this point in the year that campuses would be a disaster and football would be infeasible. They certainly didn’t expect to see Notre Dame and Clemson playing yesterday.
The onrush of overwhelming public pressure was a shock to their systems, the outright mutinies of Ohio State, Nebraska and Iowa were stunning to their default collegial point of view. Kevin Warren and company just assumed they’d feed that turd sandwich to everyone, tell them it was ground turkey and we’d all chomp away with an idiot grin on our faces like we were being given a gift.
They’re walking around oblivious like Mama Boucher when her sweet Bobby got a black eye.
Mama Boucher : Bobby, deh ever catch dat gorilla that busted outta da zoo and punched you in da eye?
Bobby Boucher: No Mama, the search continues.
Did they really think people were going to just roll over and accept no football? Did they really think the Big Ten stayed in line out of the goodness of their hearts? Hell no!
That was fear of Jim Delany’s wrath that led this league as a solid block.
There’s no fear of Kevin Warren beyond allowing him to negotiate the next TV contract!
The reality is, this is what happens when you choose an outsider to run your league, one without the key connections at all levels to make things continue down the Delany path to massive profits, you end up having some broken wires. To be quite frank, had the Big Ten chosen Northwestern Athletics Director Jim Phillips over Warren when the new Commissioner search was down to its final two, there’s zero chance in hell we’d be in this situation. We’d still have had no Ohio State football today due to the massive wildfires making the West Coast look like Blade Runner 2049---unless the Ducks came east to play in the Horseshoe?---but the rest of the Big Ten would have likely been one or two games into the season.
You know why? Phillips had been the Athletic Director for over a decade at Northwestern before nearly becoming the Big Ten’s grand poobah. You can guarantee he’d have raised his hand and said, “Time out. All of you. Get your Athletic Directors on the phone and talk to them before making ANY kind of vote. Oh and you might really want to convene a discussion with your Trustees too.”
Not to mention every single A.D. wants to play this season and he wouldn’t have been proactively herding the league into an early cancellation like Warren did either.
But back to the Cost/Benefit analysis: Now the Presidents are faced with significant testing breakthroughs on multiple fronts across the county, a furious public, an onslaught of mutineers in their midst AND they’re now realized that cancelling football means losing big money. Enough that they have to actually start axing programs.
Minnesota’s already cut four sports in the last month. That’s a school where those four sports’ operating budgets was probably about 1/50th of their television revenue from the football games they decided to wantonly forego. You think that might not be negligence to make a hasty decision that has such weighty implications? You think various Boards of Trustees don’t have former track athletes, or wrestlers or swimmers or other sports that are on the chopping block now and are furious at the butterfly effect?
And you think those athletes won’t fight every way possible to keep their sports? If I was the parent of a Minnesota track athlete, I’d have a lawsuit fired up with the school President’s name on it before you can say “Ski-U-Mah!”
Which gets us down to brass tacks: Lawsuits.
THE FULCRUM
But the real fulcrum that has swung this ENTIRE discussion has been the lawsuit that the Nebraska’s players filed a couple of weeks ago that continues to make the Big Ten look like nincompoops. I fully believe that the fear of all of their inner workings being laid bare in the eye of the public through the invasive discovery process of the courts has been the only thing driving the Presidents unwillingly to the table.
The Nebraska football players are the Fremen and Scott Frost is Muad’Dib while the Big Ten is Emperor Shaddam IV and his desperate Navigator’s Guild entourage after the Battle of the Shield Wall. Yes, we get a gigantic dorky Dune reference the week of the trailer drop and I am zero percent sorry.
But as the likes of Tom Mars, #1 NCAA Pest extraordinaire, circle about the carcass of this poor Big Ten decision, it’s become clear that the league has done something that they desperately want to hide. I don’t care if it is:
• Failure to comply with basic parliamentary vote rules
• Political inclinations
• Damning Discussions of Amateurism
• Dirty pictures of Bea Arthur
• Kevin Warren’s terrible holiday karaoke
Or whatever other items that have been suggested over the last couple of weeks. Hell, to channel the fighter ace of the Front Row, Chip Munn, it might just be good ol’ FUD in a FUBAR situation.
Regardless, the Big Ten DOES NOT want the legal anal probe that is impending out in Huskerland. At one point, they seriously submitted a 13 page copy of their bylaws and completely blacked out ELEVEN pages, a fact we know thanks to our old friend Mr. Mars. They’re obfuscating on their BYLAWS!!! They were publicly available two weeks ago online!
And you know what these Presidents are probably more afraid of now? Being sued on thirty other fronts than COVID from athletes of ALL sports, massive blowback from their Board of Trustees and flat-out losing their jobs the next time their contracts come up.
That lawsuit and the promise of many, many, many more are why the Presidents are ‘re-voting’ in the next day or two. Bluntly, I think we should just call it a vote because I really don’t believe whatsoever that they had a formal vote the first time through and in doing so violated their own bylaws.
But who cares what it is? That leverage over the league is why we’re here and god bless those Nebraska players for making it happen.
CANCEL THE NEBRASKA GAME. SERIOUSLY.
When the new schedule gets announced (likely an 8 game season with a Big Ten Championship? Maybe nine games and we just crown a champion old school style) I really hope the Nebraska game gets dropped off the schedule. I don’t want anything to do with playing the Huskers this year.
You know why? Because I don’t want to give them a loss this year. If we have crossover games in the final schedule, don’t put the Huskers on there, even if I know it’s going to be an easy win. There’s no other school that has fought tooth and nail like Nebraska to play this year. Seriously, I think they deserve even more credit for any season we get than Ohio State.
Hear me out.
Unlike the general buffoonery that surrounds the likes of Nicole Auerbach, who actually claimed this week that the only reason Big Ten football is still talking about playing is so that Ohio State can play for a national title, there’s some serious logic that Nebraska is the lynchpin to this whole resistance. The Horsewoman of the Cancel
Apocalypse seems to forget that it was Scott Frost who first loudly and actively dumped on the Big Ten for considering a flat-out cancellation of the season, not anyone at Ohio State! We joke about Jim Harbaugh needing a lifetime contract at TSUN, but it’s damn clear that the longer Frost stays a Big Ten coach, the more likely we are to have reason from the league.
I’ve already talked at length about the Husker lawsuit that has the Big Ten by the cojones, but here’s the blunt truth: In a normal year, does Nebraska win more than seven games with their current team? Was this the great leap forward for Frost after two disappointing years to start his tenure?
Seriously, they’re an average team in the Big Ten if this was a normal year. They’re not in the National Championship discussion, hell they’re not really in the Big Ten West discussion! They’re a mediocre rebuilding football team.
And they’re right there with Ohio State, fighting their asses off to get this season started as early as possible. Ohio State’s entire resistance has everything to do with the National Championship. The National Championship this season and the ability to recruit to win the National Championship in the years to come.
Nebraska just wants to play Iowa and try to make the Detroit Bowl. They just want to release their balloons into the sky, talk about that time Scott Frost won a National Championship 25 years ago and hope they can upset Minnesota.
They have NOTHING to play for beyond just the ability to play and they are going all-out. I have so much damn respect for that.
I should probably credit Iowa too, but they’ve not been belligerent to the point that their coach and athletic director were talking about playing outside the conference in the event of a cancellation. Unlike Nebraska, I could realistically see Iowa winning the Big Ten West. They’d make for a dandy Rose Bowl replacement for Ohio State when the Buckeyes beat them in the Big Ten Championship Game and move on to the playoff.
Nebraska has no such delusions. They’re the 5th year senior special teamer who got named captain because everyone is in awe of how much they care. They’re Shaun Lane, they’re Joe Burger. They’re not Justin Fields or Trey Sermon!
Go Big Red. Forever. Or at least when they’re not playing the Buckeyes. If we ever go nuts and decide to change conferences, I want them in my league. You’re my new Number Three College Football team, Nebraska. Because after all, my second favorite team is always whichever team is playing Michigan.
WE HAD THE FOOSBALL!!
Remember the time Bobby Boucher came back at halftime and Mud Dogs won the Bourbon Bowl?
That would be the insanely hypocritical response from an inordinate number of national media people who have been leading the charge for an asinine March Rose Bowl.
Their attitude seems to be that the Big Ten shouldn’t play and how dare they reconsider anything but in the interim…..
YAY! Youth Football!
YAY! Random lower level football!
YAY! ACC football!
YAY! Upsets like Georgia Tech over Florida State or the everyone over the Big 12!
It’s sickening, really. I’ve had little patience all along for the people who preach at you out of one side of their mouth that it’s just too DANGEROUS to play football and the Big Ten and Pac 12 CLEARLY know better than you…..but in the meantime let’s now talk about the SEC West like there’s no logical failure in this discussion.
You know exactly who I’m talking about, too.
Luckily for me, I have no such rational failings and can gleefully talk about the preview undercard of college football this week that is like the bad house salad prior to the steak main course of Ohio State football that awaits us.
First of all, if this was a normal season, oh my goodness how much fun would we be making of the Big 12 right now? Ranked Iowa State loses AT HOME to Louisiana?
Maybe Bobby Boucher really did play foosball this week!
Kansas State lost at home to Arkansas State? Kansas got boat raced by Chanticleers? Texas Tech only won by two over Houston Baptist? I thought that was a hospital or a church, not a football team!
Meanwhile, we got to watch Notre Dame struggle with Duke, Clemson beat up on a decent Wake Forest team and North Carolina rocket out of the gates. We got to laugh about how Miami wouldn’t be affected whatsoever by limited fans in attendance since they’re the O.G. of limited live fan attendance.
And the best part? No one died besides the Iowa State offensive coordinator when Matt Campbell shot him into the Sun for risking his impending job at a much richer Big Ten school in a year or two.
We’ve had a couple of weeks now where it’s pretty clear that football can be safely played. There’s plenty of reasons to start the Big Ten back up as early as possible, especially considering we may need to allow for a delayed game or two in the case of a couple positive tests.
Let’s get the Big Ten up and running on October 3rd or 10th and at least get a divisional schedule in so that the conference champion can get a shot at the National Championship. The circus extraordinaire of the last month needs to end.
Let’s play football.
We’re on the verge of an historical reversal, the sort of which we rarely see in modern times. If the Big Ten truly is on the verge of reinstating the season by the end of Monday, the only comparison I can make to this stunning turn of events was the rescue of the Columbus Crew here in central Ohio.
Seriously, when was the last time a powerful entity made a big decision that just dumped on a big segment of fans and the fans just flat-out didn’t accept the turd sandwich they were being fed? #SaveTheCrew was an overwhelming movement that ultimately led to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam purchasing the team and the new Crew Stadium rising near downtown.
#LetThemPlay and #FIGHT have been significantly more powerful. We’re not talking about the 7th most popular professional sports league in America in one city of 2 million people here, we’re talking about the BIG TEN. Throw out first-out-of-water newcomers and the combined population of the Big Ten’s footprint states is over SEVENTY MILLION people. The Big Ten would be the world’s 20th most populous country on the planet and again I’m not even including those two eastern ne’er do wells.
OK, it’s probably not fair including Maryland with Rutgers, considering I advocated for Maryland to join the Big Ten as an underperforming football program in prime recruiting territory with a seriously good hoops program. Most of my anger is thrown at Rutgers, who should have never been part of the Big Ten, but that’s another story entirely.
Anyways, this is officially the Bucket of Optimism: I believe a return to football in October is happening and we’re going to get a chance to chase that Natty. Let’s fire off a (premature) celebratory clip!
WHY WE WILL BE PLAYING IN OCTOBER
Yesterday was an enormous day, as the Big Ten’s Return To Play Committee delivered the latest medical data to the University Presidents, including the Rutgers maroon who seemed shocked people actually care about safely playing football. The medical data was led by Ohio State’s own Jim Borchers, former player and current lead physician. He’s the co-chair of the Medical Committee and his presentation reportedly was as impressive as you’d expect in arguing for the safety of the student athletes returning to play.
Let’s be real here: There’s not a super difficult formula for safe football. Let’s do a quick review:
• Get those 15 minute tests by the hundreds from the federal government.
• Tell your players you’re playing so keep your asses out of parties and be smart.
• Test them 2-4x a week and cut off any potential spread at the break. No need to quarantine if one kid gets it when you have 15 minute tests that are 97.1% accurate.
• Refer the Myocarditis fearmongers to the Mayo Clinic for some actual medical advice.
• Don’t fly commercial or ride the Dirty Dog for road games.
• Play football.
Seriously, this isn’t rocket science. This isn’t SpaceX landing rockets vertically from freaking space. It’s a simple formula to follow!
But the real kicker is that the Presidents now have a very clear presentation (that assuredly will be released to the public should we get back to football) that will provide them with all of the cover they need to be able to give in to the roaring masses and allow football to play.
The reality is, there’s no logical reason whatsoever other than “undefined bad things could happen!” why these kids aren’t playing football. Hell, I can give you a concrete example of a bad thing that happened because there WASN’T football: Go ask Haskell Garrett if he’d have been walking down Chittenden after midnight if it was a game week, I know what the answer would be……
THE COST/BENEFIT EQUATION HAS CHANGED
Unless you believe that myocarditis magically only assaults Big Ten stadiums (thought I’m sure Iowa State wishes their season had been cancelled after it lost at home to Louisiana yesterday) there’s ample evidence football can be played across the Midwest.
Such as all of the high school games going on in Ohio, maybe?
Bottom line is that these Presidents originally assumed with massive hubris that they’d be ‘on the right side of history’ and got all antsy in their pantsy to cancel the season. Instead of leading the wave, they found only their doofus little brothers in the Pac 12 following, wondering why all of the other cool kids were staring at them out on an island. But they didn’t care, they assumed by this point in the year that campuses would be a disaster and football would be infeasible. They certainly didn’t expect to see Notre Dame and Clemson playing yesterday.
The onrush of overwhelming public pressure was a shock to their systems, the outright mutinies of Ohio State, Nebraska and Iowa were stunning to their default collegial point of view. Kevin Warren and company just assumed they’d feed that turd sandwich to everyone, tell them it was ground turkey and we’d all chomp away with an idiot grin on our faces like we were being given a gift.
They’re walking around oblivious like Mama Boucher when her sweet Bobby got a black eye.
Mama Boucher : Bobby, deh ever catch dat gorilla that busted outta da zoo and punched you in da eye?
Bobby Boucher: No Mama, the search continues.
Did they really think people were going to just roll over and accept no football? Did they really think the Big Ten stayed in line out of the goodness of their hearts? Hell no!
That was fear of Jim Delany’s wrath that led this league as a solid block.
There’s no fear of Kevin Warren beyond allowing him to negotiate the next TV contract!
The reality is, this is what happens when you choose an outsider to run your league, one without the key connections at all levels to make things continue down the Delany path to massive profits, you end up having some broken wires. To be quite frank, had the Big Ten chosen Northwestern Athletics Director Jim Phillips over Warren when the new Commissioner search was down to its final two, there’s zero chance in hell we’d be in this situation. We’d still have had no Ohio State football today due to the massive wildfires making the West Coast look like Blade Runner 2049---unless the Ducks came east to play in the Horseshoe?---but the rest of the Big Ten would have likely been one or two games into the season.
You know why? Phillips had been the Athletic Director for over a decade at Northwestern before nearly becoming the Big Ten’s grand poobah. You can guarantee he’d have raised his hand and said, “Time out. All of you. Get your Athletic Directors on the phone and talk to them before making ANY kind of vote. Oh and you might really want to convene a discussion with your Trustees too.”
Not to mention every single A.D. wants to play this season and he wouldn’t have been proactively herding the league into an early cancellation like Warren did either.
But back to the Cost/Benefit analysis: Now the Presidents are faced with significant testing breakthroughs on multiple fronts across the county, a furious public, an onslaught of mutineers in their midst AND they’re now realized that cancelling football means losing big money. Enough that they have to actually start axing programs.
Minnesota’s already cut four sports in the last month. That’s a school where those four sports’ operating budgets was probably about 1/50th of their television revenue from the football games they decided to wantonly forego. You think that might not be negligence to make a hasty decision that has such weighty implications? You think various Boards of Trustees don’t have former track athletes, or wrestlers or swimmers or other sports that are on the chopping block now and are furious at the butterfly effect?
And you think those athletes won’t fight every way possible to keep their sports? If I was the parent of a Minnesota track athlete, I’d have a lawsuit fired up with the school President’s name on it before you can say “Ski-U-Mah!”
Which gets us down to brass tacks: Lawsuits.
THE FULCRUM
But the real fulcrum that has swung this ENTIRE discussion has been the lawsuit that the Nebraska’s players filed a couple of weeks ago that continues to make the Big Ten look like nincompoops. I fully believe that the fear of all of their inner workings being laid bare in the eye of the public through the invasive discovery process of the courts has been the only thing driving the Presidents unwillingly to the table.
The Nebraska football players are the Fremen and Scott Frost is Muad’Dib while the Big Ten is Emperor Shaddam IV and his desperate Navigator’s Guild entourage after the Battle of the Shield Wall. Yes, we get a gigantic dorky Dune reference the week of the trailer drop and I am zero percent sorry.
But as the likes of Tom Mars, #1 NCAA Pest extraordinaire, circle about the carcass of this poor Big Ten decision, it’s become clear that the league has done something that they desperately want to hide. I don’t care if it is:
• Failure to comply with basic parliamentary vote rules
• Political inclinations
• Damning Discussions of Amateurism
• Dirty pictures of Bea Arthur
• Kevin Warren’s terrible holiday karaoke
Or whatever other items that have been suggested over the last couple of weeks. Hell, to channel the fighter ace of the Front Row, Chip Munn, it might just be good ol’ FUD in a FUBAR situation.
Regardless, the Big Ten DOES NOT want the legal anal probe that is impending out in Huskerland. At one point, they seriously submitted a 13 page copy of their bylaws and completely blacked out ELEVEN pages, a fact we know thanks to our old friend Mr. Mars. They’re obfuscating on their BYLAWS!!! They were publicly available two weeks ago online!
And you know what these Presidents are probably more afraid of now? Being sued on thirty other fronts than COVID from athletes of ALL sports, massive blowback from their Board of Trustees and flat-out losing their jobs the next time their contracts come up.
That lawsuit and the promise of many, many, many more are why the Presidents are ‘re-voting’ in the next day or two. Bluntly, I think we should just call it a vote because I really don’t believe whatsoever that they had a formal vote the first time through and in doing so violated their own bylaws.
But who cares what it is? That leverage over the league is why we’re here and god bless those Nebraska players for making it happen.
CANCEL THE NEBRASKA GAME. SERIOUSLY.
When the new schedule gets announced (likely an 8 game season with a Big Ten Championship? Maybe nine games and we just crown a champion old school style) I really hope the Nebraska game gets dropped off the schedule. I don’t want anything to do with playing the Huskers this year.
You know why? Because I don’t want to give them a loss this year. If we have crossover games in the final schedule, don’t put the Huskers on there, even if I know it’s going to be an easy win. There’s no other school that has fought tooth and nail like Nebraska to play this year. Seriously, I think they deserve even more credit for any season we get than Ohio State.
Hear me out.
Unlike the general buffoonery that surrounds the likes of Nicole Auerbach, who actually claimed this week that the only reason Big Ten football is still talking about playing is so that Ohio State can play for a national title, there’s some serious logic that Nebraska is the lynchpin to this whole resistance. The Horsewoman of the Cancel
Apocalypse seems to forget that it was Scott Frost who first loudly and actively dumped on the Big Ten for considering a flat-out cancellation of the season, not anyone at Ohio State! We joke about Jim Harbaugh needing a lifetime contract at TSUN, but it’s damn clear that the longer Frost stays a Big Ten coach, the more likely we are to have reason from the league.
I’ve already talked at length about the Husker lawsuit that has the Big Ten by the cojones, but here’s the blunt truth: In a normal year, does Nebraska win more than seven games with their current team? Was this the great leap forward for Frost after two disappointing years to start his tenure?
Seriously, they’re an average team in the Big Ten if this was a normal year. They’re not in the National Championship discussion, hell they’re not really in the Big Ten West discussion! They’re a mediocre rebuilding football team.
And they’re right there with Ohio State, fighting their asses off to get this season started as early as possible. Ohio State’s entire resistance has everything to do with the National Championship. The National Championship this season and the ability to recruit to win the National Championship in the years to come.
Nebraska just wants to play Iowa and try to make the Detroit Bowl. They just want to release their balloons into the sky, talk about that time Scott Frost won a National Championship 25 years ago and hope they can upset Minnesota.
They have NOTHING to play for beyond just the ability to play and they are going all-out. I have so much damn respect for that.
I should probably credit Iowa too, but they’ve not been belligerent to the point that their coach and athletic director were talking about playing outside the conference in the event of a cancellation. Unlike Nebraska, I could realistically see Iowa winning the Big Ten West. They’d make for a dandy Rose Bowl replacement for Ohio State when the Buckeyes beat them in the Big Ten Championship Game and move on to the playoff.
Nebraska has no such delusions. They’re the 5th year senior special teamer who got named captain because everyone is in awe of how much they care. They’re Shaun Lane, they’re Joe Burger. They’re not Justin Fields or Trey Sermon!
Go Big Red. Forever. Or at least when they’re not playing the Buckeyes. If we ever go nuts and decide to change conferences, I want them in my league. You’re my new Number Three College Football team, Nebraska. Because after all, my second favorite team is always whichever team is playing Michigan.
WE HAD THE FOOSBALL!!
Remember the time Bobby Boucher came back at halftime and Mud Dogs won the Bourbon Bowl?
That would be the insanely hypocritical response from an inordinate number of national media people who have been leading the charge for an asinine March Rose Bowl.
Their attitude seems to be that the Big Ten shouldn’t play and how dare they reconsider anything but in the interim…..
YAY! Youth Football!
YAY! Random lower level football!
YAY! ACC football!
YAY! Upsets like Georgia Tech over Florida State or the everyone over the Big 12!
It’s sickening, really. I’ve had little patience all along for the people who preach at you out of one side of their mouth that it’s just too DANGEROUS to play football and the Big Ten and Pac 12 CLEARLY know better than you…..but in the meantime let’s now talk about the SEC West like there’s no logical failure in this discussion.
You know exactly who I’m talking about, too.
Luckily for me, I have no such rational failings and can gleefully talk about the preview undercard of college football this week that is like the bad house salad prior to the steak main course of Ohio State football that awaits us.
First of all, if this was a normal season, oh my goodness how much fun would we be making of the Big 12 right now? Ranked Iowa State loses AT HOME to Louisiana?
Maybe Bobby Boucher really did play foosball this week!
Kansas State lost at home to Arkansas State? Kansas got boat raced by Chanticleers? Texas Tech only won by two over Houston Baptist? I thought that was a hospital or a church, not a football team!
Meanwhile, we got to watch Notre Dame struggle with Duke, Clemson beat up on a decent Wake Forest team and North Carolina rocket out of the gates. We got to laugh about how Miami wouldn’t be affected whatsoever by limited fans in attendance since they’re the O.G. of limited live fan attendance.
And the best part? No one died besides the Iowa State offensive coordinator when Matt Campbell shot him into the Sun for risking his impending job at a much richer Big Ten school in a year or two.
We’ve had a couple of weeks now where it’s pretty clear that football can be safely played. There’s plenty of reasons to start the Big Ten back up as early as possible, especially considering we may need to allow for a delayed game or two in the case of a couple positive tests.
Let’s get the Big Ten up and running on October 3rd or 10th and at least get a divisional schedule in so that the conference champion can get a shot at the National Championship. The circus extraordinaire of the last month needs to end.
Let’s play football.
