It might get worse before it gets better

If you’re a fan of Big Ten football, your 401K might not be the only thing that fails to bounce back at the speed you’d prefer.
Here on Cinco de Mayo we’re exactly four months from the start of the 2009 conference season and already there are signs the league won’t be any more competitive nationally than it was a year ago.
You remember last year? Sure, you do….like a recurring nightmare that haunts you every night for, oh, about six years.
The Big Ten’s record in bowl games over the last half-dozen seasons sank to 15-28 following a worst-in-history 1-6 showing last December and January.
The post-season mark was only part of the problem. During the regular season, Ohio State got hammered by USC (35-3), Pitt beat Iowa, Notre Dame, Utah and Toledo defeated Michigan and Michigan State lost to California.
Optimists figured things had to get better in 2009, but the prospects don’t look great for that.
Ohio State lost the guts of the team that went 10-3 when James Laurinaitis, Malcolm Jenkins, Brian Robiskie, Marcus Freeman, Alex Boone, Brian Hartline and Donald Washington departed for the NFL.
Penn State, which suffered its own embarrassment at the hands of USC in the Rose Bowl (38-24), lost most of its offensive line, defensive backfield and wide receiving corp.
There appears no other team capable of keeping OSU or Penn State from being the class of the Big Ten in 2009, so the league could be even worse this year than it was a year ago.
Conference commissioner Jim Delany hopes that isn’t true, but even the guy paid to be the Big Ten’s No. 1 lobbyist concedes that “hoping and wishing doesn’t change reality.”
Delany was a guest Monday on The Big Show on Sports Radio 97.1 The Fan and said of the league’s 15-28 record in bowls over the previous six years: “I think it’s fair to look at any five-year period and draw conclusions. The conclusion you would draw is, we’ve played in a lot of big games and we didn’t win many of them in that time frame.
“I would also say that these things run in cycles. I remember in the 70s and 80s, the conference was primarily a Michigan-Ohio State conference. It didn’t win a national championship in those 20 years. It rarely won a Rose Bowl. It rarely played SEC teams.
“If you look at the last 15-to-20 years, we’ve won a couple of national championships (Michigan 1997, OSU 2002) and we’ve played for five. We’re about .500 against the SEC and a little under .500 in the Rose Bowl. We have four squads — Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State and Wisconsin who are capable of playing elite games and winning elite games.”
Michigan didn’t play in the post-season last year for the first time since 1974 and OSU, Penn State and Wisconsin all lost their bowl games.
Since 2003, the Big Ten has gone 3-5, 2-5, 3-4, 3-3, 3-5 and 1-6 in bowls in succeeding years.
That’s six straight years without a single winning post-season record, meaning only three of the league’s coaches (Tressel, Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz and Penn State’s Joe Paterno) were in the conference when it last won more bowl games than it lost.
“We’ve competed, sometimes close, sometimes not,” Delany said. “If Texas would argue that it was one of the best teams in the country last year, then I think Ohio State would have had an argument that it was in the same class as Texas. They weren’t in the same class as USC, and I’m not sure anybody was. But certainly, they did not show up out there. “…I just think we have to take our medicine until we go out and win. Ohio State won four BCS games in row, I think, before it went on the streak it’s on now. They won at Texas, played well against Notre Dame, Kansas State and beat Miami, so I think they have a lot to be thankful for. One way I look at it, as a player more than a commissoner, is that you should never be embarrassed about playing against the best.
“That’s what we do, whether it’s USC in Pasadena, Texas in Austin, LSU in New Orleans or Florida in (Glendale). We’re playing against the best and we’re not going to stop doing that. We’re not playing against the Little Sisters of the Poor in our bowl lineup. We’re moving teams up. You’re going to have patches, perhaps, where you’re not playing as well as you’d like.
“I don’t think we need to apologize for playing for championships. We’re going to keep playing against the best. In a 20-year period, you’re going to have five years where you don’t measure up as well as another five years. I think we’ve accomplished a lot and I think our coaches and playerrs are always looking for the next big game.”
Big Ten teams will have plenty of regular-season opportunities this year to gain some national respect.
Ohio State plays host to USC on Sept. 12.
In other games during the year, Illinois plays Missouri, at Cincinnati and home against Fresno State.
Michigan, Michigan State and Purdue play Notre Dame.
Minnesota plays California; Iowa plays Arizona and Wisconsin goes to Hawaii on Dec. 5.
The Badgers, though, are one of only two Big Ten teams that will play after Thanksgiving.
So, once again, the bulk of the league, and the bulk of its bowl teams, will have extended layoffs before post-season play because of a regular-season schedule that has them playing 12 consecutive weeks with no off week.
That changes next year, when the final week of the regular season falls after Thanksgiving and each team in the league gets a bye week.
“I believe the fact that we’ll be playing after Thanksgiving will help us a little bit,” Illinois coach Ron Zook said. “Now, the season will be prolonged a little. That will help us, but until we go win the big bowl games, we have to keep our mouths shut.
“I tell anybody who will listen, ‘The Big Ten Conference is just as good as any other conference. There are teams in this league who can play with anybody in the country. But on that certain day, we haven’t performed the way we’re capable of performing. I think all the coaches understand that until we go play and until we go win, we have to just bite the bullet.”