Losing Your Lunch: The B1G Sucks

Might I use this this picture forever more?  YESSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hello Followers.  Hope you’re doing great.

In the midst of taking a lunch break, I stumbled across a little bit of e-football news via that fancy little thing called Twitter.

After thinking about it, I decided to take a few minutes and throw together a new type of post, which I just decided to call “Losing Your Lunch.”  This series will represent a hodgepodge of things that may or may not fit together.  My goal:  Get out whatever comes out until such time that my lunch break is over (I will have 25 minutes to get this done).

Now, will I ever launch another such post under this moniker?  I don’t know.  But for today, I am going to write a few sentences about why the Big Ten sucks.  Read on.

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If you didn’t click on the above link, the news I am referring to is straightforward:  Barry Alvarez, the former coach and current AD at Wisconsin, just announced that the B1G conference has decided to no longer schedule FCS schools for football. 

The “reason?”:  The conference wants to improve its image with respect to strength-of-schedule as the BCS transitions to a playoff format.

A few thoughts (ouch!) came to mind when I read that:

Thought #1:  The NCAA sucks.  As we all know, Football is king for athletic departments everywhere.   We also know that those little 1-AA/FCS schools fund nearly all of their entire operating budget for football and other sports by going to places like Nebraska, Michigan, and Ohio State in September and getting their brains beaten out (see Sac State and Appalachian State as notable exceptions). 

Anyhow, it’s nice to the NCAA once again unable to protect the little guy, and therefore is jeopardizing the capacity of smaller schools to offer Intercollegiate Athletics, and within, to offer scholarships to kids who may not otherwise gain access to a four-year school and the experiences afforded by it. 

Nice work.

Thought #2.  The Big Ten sucks.  Why?  Well, because..

Thought #3.  Perhaps it’s time for schools in the B1G, which include some of our nation’s most elite universities, to help the NCAA and company devise a better and fairer system for evaluating strength of schedule.  For instance, maybe the BCS should penalize schools, not for scheduling ONE FCS opponent a year, but for scheduling two FCS school in the same year (see SEC schools across the board as well ASU a year ago as prime examples.)

Here’s another thought: Why not reward schools not only for scheduling teams which are good during the current year, but also teams that been good historically? 

For example, think about Notre Dame’s schedule last year.  Can you imagine a schedule that was more chalked full of heavyweights before the season began?  I mean, there was a reason why no one ranked them early—it was because no one saw them doing jack-diddly-squat against the likes of Stanford, USC, Michigan, Michigan State, Oklahoma and the like.  Of course, the problem that Notre Dame would have faced had Oregon or Kansas not lost is that those teams overall didn’t pan out the way that folks thought.   Of course, no team, coach, or athletic director can control how another team will perform—especially when schedules are arranged, 2, 3, 5, or 7 years in advance!

Similarly, there must be other mechanisms for incentivizing schools when they increase the quality of their opposition.  One strategy would be to incentivize an increase in conference games.   In this scenario, a conference like the Pac-12 would be rewarded for having the cojones to schedule 9, instead of 8, conference games.

Another idea would be for the BCS to give extra points for scheduling a non-conference opponent who turned out to be much better than expected for that year.  Here, I’m thinking about a school like Wisconsin who probably scheduled the 2014 game in Pullman thinking that they’d be playing a doormat.  Of course, they could do just that. But, when you look at our roster and the way its setting up, that WSU team could wind up being in the top 20.  And if so (and if Wisconsin actually keeps that date), shouldn’t they be rewarded for that above and beyond the typical formula (winning percentage of opponents and winning percentage of opponents, opponents)?

Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got for today, because the iPhone says I just spent 26 minutes on this, and my lunch break is over.  In other words, I just lost my lunch.

All for now. Go Cougs.