Roughly three or so hours before Ohio State took the field for their all-important clash with Alabama in the second of the two College Football Playoff semifinals, reactions were beginning to pour in on the results of two key games. Firstly, you had the Wisconsin Badgers, fresh off that infamous (from their point of view) 59-0 drubbing at the hands of the Buckeyes, getting a 34-31 overtime win against Auburn in the Outback Bowl. No less than an hour later, Michigan State, who had their own unpleasant experience with OSU this season, pulled off an unfathomable comeback against Baylor in the Cotton Bowl, erasing a 34-14 third quarter deficit and escaping Arlington with a 42-41 win over the fifth-ranked Bears.
Suddenly the Big Ten, that much maligned entity whose best days appeared to have passed from a college football competitiveness standpoint, didn’t have the appearance of a second-rate league the way the Finebaum-esque SEC chauvinists have attempted to portray it in recent years. In fact, as the Sugar Bowl approached, you began to have that feeling (at least I did) that New Year’s Day 2015 had the potential to be one of those red letter days heralding the onset of a new era in the sport, especially if Ohio State did the unthinkable and actually beat Alabama.
Sure enough, the Buckeyes came out on top 42-35 in a game that could arguably be their biggest win since their overtime upset of heavily favored Miami in the 2003 BCS championship game. The surprise victory punched OSU’s ticket to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, TX where they will face an Oregon team that ended Florida State’s 29-game winning streak in dominating fashion with an emphatic 59-20 shellacking. College football is down to its final two teams, and for the first time in nine years the championship match-up will not include a side from the SEC.
Head coach Urban Meyer hinted that the success the Big Ten had realized in those earlier games may have played a part in galvanizing his team heading into the Sugar Bowl.
“I’ll tell you when I think the tide turned a little bit when Wisconsin beat Auburn. Everybody on our team knew that. I made sure they knew that. When Michigan State came back and beat an excellent Baylor team. And maybe the Big Ten’s not that bad. Maybe the Big Ten is pretty damned good. And it’s certainly getting better,” Meyer remarked.
This trifecta of triumphs for the conference on New Year’s Day 2015 belies the trend that had established itself ever since the SEC made its first of eight consecutive championship game appearances, a streak which will come to an end this year as already noted. Since the 2006-07 bowl season, the Big Ten is a combined 19-38 in bowl games against Power Five schools, and I’m taking into account conference members at the time (so I’m not counting bowl games involving Nebraska, Rutgers or Maryland when they weren’t affiliated with the Big Ten). Only in 2009-10 did the conference have a winning record (4-2) against teams from the other power leagues.
Though tempered a bit as a result of Iowa’s comprehensive defeat at the hands of Tennessee in Friday’s Gator Bowl, the Big Ten ended up finishing their 2014-15 bowl campaign (OSU-Oregon showdown notwithstanding) at 5-4 against the Power Five that included a 2-2 mark against the SEC. The division champions ran roughshod over those two juggernaut programs from the state of Alabama, and Michigan State knocked off a top five team in Baylor that just missed out on the final spot in the Playoff that Ohio State inevitably received and made the most of.
It remains to be seen whether or not these developments are a flash in the pan or endemic of a possible paradigm shift in terms of where the power will reside in college football in the coming years. For nearly a decade now, it has undoubtedly resided in the South and you were likely hard-pressed not to hear as much from the pundits and commentators continuously talking up the SEC.
Reasons for the Big Ten’s decline have been discussed as well and have ranged anywhere from shifting demographics to Sun Belt states, southerly based recruits aversion to cold weather and a regional talent pool not as deep as those in states such as Florida, Texas and California. If the conference is indeed in the initial stages of a revival, perhaps these factors aren’t as important or even as accurate as we’re giving them credit for. The cyclical nature of college football and the ebbs and flows associated with the teams who dominate the game could potentially be an even more essential element to the story that we’re overlooking.
In addition to Ohio State’s forthcoming appearance in the national championship game, there have been other recent developments signifying this conference could potentially be on the rebound. The Buckeyes major rival in Ann Arbor made the big splash coaching hire that was rumored for weeks, as former San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh officially made his triumphant return to the Michigan program earlier this week.
Some are comparing this move to Alabama’s hiring of Nick Saban back in 2007 in terms of the possibility being there for Harbaugh to revive a blue blood college football program that has recently fallen on hard times. All things being equal, it should make the annual hatefest between the Wolverines and Buckeyes a much more compelling rivalry than it’s been recently.
In less than a fortnight’s time, two programs will be in hot pursuit of a vindicating victory that will validate not only the direction of their programs but the upward trajectory of their respective conferences in the college football hierarchy. For the Big Ten, it’s honestly hard to believe that this league is in a position to win a national championship after being left for dead early on in the season. In many ways, Ohio State’s story in 2014 mirrors the narrative of the conference as a whole. If they can pull this thing off it will not only go down as one of the most unique and unprecedented title runs in college football history, but it could also signify that the tide of college football hegemony might slowly but surely be turning northward.
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