LiveBall Sports

Expecting Arkansas to have actually competed in the brutal SEC West this year given the stature of that program and the type of competition they faced on a week-in, week-out basis was predictive folly at the beginning of this season.  It wasn’t smart.  Alabama, Auburn, LSU: these are all stronger programs than Arkansas, and while Ryan Mallett was expected to earn his high first round NFL draft projection over the course of these four games, there wasn’t great evidence that he could be a great college quarterback in the SEC.

So perhaps the biggest surprise of the SEC West this season isn’t that Cam Newton is superman, or that Alabama’s defense struggled at times, or that Mississippi tanked and lost to a Jacksonville State team that isn’t among the ten best teams in it’s own subdivision.  The biggest surprise of all may be…that Arkansas was as good or better than they were expected to be.

In fact, the Razorbacks are just a Cam Newton ineligibility ruling from being the best team in the SEC this season.

It’s a remarkable accomplishment against the schedule they played, and you could make the argument that Arkansas’ 10-2 record is more impressive than Auburn’s 12-0.  The Auburn-Arkansas game was both the most impressive win that Auburn had this season and the most deflating loss that Arkansas took, but it’s college football and the way the scoring was run up at the end of that game, Auburn might have come up on the short end had they not knocked Mallett from the game.

And if that result was different, Arkansas is potentially knocking on the door of a national championship where at one loss, they are dangerously close to overtaking TCU in the BCS standings and probably would with a victory in the SEC title game.  Arkansas couldn’t stop Auburn’s ground attack in that game, so who knows if a healthy Mallett would have made any difference?  My points are that: it was a close outcome game until the very end, and in hindsight, that was the biggest college football game of the year.

How easy would it have been at 4-2, and no chance to play for the SEC title because of head to head losses to the two frontrunners for Arkansas to fold at that point and limp to 7-5 and a forgettable bowl bid?  Really easy, I imagine.  Instead, they will wait on Auburn to go in and beat South Carolina, and then, just maybe, Arkansas will be heading to the Sugar Bowl as an at large team in the BCS.

I think it will be very well deserved.  They clearly aren’t ahead in the at large pecking order of undefeated TCU (automatic), and one-losses Stanford or Ohio State, but the BCS is ten teams.  The Big Ten can’t send it’s third one loss team as another at large, per BCS mandate.  That means, competing with Arkansas for that last at large bid are: Boise State, Oklahoma State, Nevada, and Missouri.  Anyone else who could possibly attain that at large bid is going to be playing this week in a conference championship match, where a loss would send them to three losses (out of the BCS running), and a win sends them to the BCS.

The ONLY team playing a conference championship this week that could lose the game and still make the BCS is the Auburn Tigers.  An Auburn loss to South Carolina puts the Gamecocks in, and drops the Razorbacks out of the BCS.  But when you look at the competition: Boise, Nevada, OSU, Missouri, consider that by-and-large voters are a “what have you done for me lately” group.  All Arkansas has done lately is win their last six games putting up 30 or more points in each game, and by an average margin of about 3 TDs per game.

I think that feat alone makes them more BCS-deserving than every available option this side of Boise State, and Boise cannot overcome the financial discrepancy between having two SEC teams and one SEC team in the BCS.  Pending the South Carolina-Auburn outcome, Bobby Petrino’s team is headed for the Sugar Bowl because they’ve been college football’s best team since the middle of October.  TCU and Arkansas would be a Sugar Bowl dream match-up.

This article is about Cameron Newton and the Auburn Tigers, but with all the investigative press swirling around Newton like vultures, it’s not really about Newton at all.  It’s about his team, and about the BCS, and the way that SEC teams aren’t held to the same standard as teams elsewhere in the nation.

The BCS works for the SEC.  In that conference, the system is essentially a season-long playoff, or a season-long survivorship.  You can make a coherent argument that the SEC is the strongest conference in college football, and the voters themselves enable this argument every single season.  Look around.  Right now it’s Auburn that has survived the SEC through 75% of the season.  They are the only team without a loss.  It’s accepted that this makes them the front runner to represent the SEC in the BCS Championship game.

Are they appreciably better than LSU, Arkansas, or Alabama?  Probably not, but they survived the best punches of LSU and Arkansas at home, and are at least 50-50 to beat two loss Alabama in this years iron bowl.  If they do, they will have the best resume of any SEC team this year, and provided they survive the SEC championship, they are likely either no. 1 or no. 2 in the nation.

Progressively more, however, the BCS isn’t about picking out the best teams for number one or number two.  This goes back to the SEC survivorship bias.  There’s a really good probability that every season some team will come out of the SEC without a loss, but there’s a really low probability that YOUR favorite SEC team can do it in any given year, which is the strength of schedule element.  It’s one of the reasons that Alabama can still claim to be the elite SEC program: they’ve lost two games, but because they have such a strong strength of schedule rating, they can argue that they are as good as any team they’ve lost to in the SEC.  It’s the transitive property: they may not have beaten LSU or South Carolina, but they beat Arkansas.  Arkansas beat South Carolina and Georgia.  Auburn is immune from the transitive property…until they lose, then every team in the SEC has a “we’re better” argument.

Auburn fans certainly are familiar with the 2004 season, when a 12-0 AU team led by Jason Campbell, Ronnie Brown, and Cadillac Williams finished third in the nation and missed the title game.  I think that definitely factors in here.  However, according to the rule of the law in the BCS, if Auburn isn’t the most impressive or second most impressive team in college football, they’re not supposed to be deserving of consideration at no. 1 or no. 2 in the polls.

Frankly, that’s the case here: I’m not sure what the argument here for Auburn is vs. teams like Oregon, TCU, and Boise State, the other undefeated teams.  When you look at Auburns season, and look at their key games, you find the following facts:

• 3 point road win at Mississippi State
• 3 point OT win at home vs Clemson
• 7 point home win vs South Carolina
• 3 point road win at Kentucky
• 22 point home win vs. Arkansas*
• 7 point home win vs. LSU

Auburn has played in a lot of big games with a lot of media coverage.  That 22 point home win against Arkansas should be asterix’d because while the Tigers showed they were the better team, the point differential was a function of multiple defensive TDs scored against Arkansas’ backup quarterback.  The story of Auburn’s season has been relatively unimpressive home wins against quality opponents.  Would they win a bowl game against TCU, Boise, Oregon, or even Ohio State?  Based on their resume, you would expect the answer to be “no.”  Auburn doesn’t win by comfortable margins against good teams.  They’ve merely survived every test.

That’s essentially what a playoff system does, is it not?  If the BCS formula was that any team that is undefeated in the SEC conference automatically gets to play for the BCS title, Auburn clearly has qualified to this point, and is just three tests away from automatic qualification in the title game.  That’s not officially the BCS position however.  The official position is that the three most impressive teams, clearly the ones who beat opponents consistently by multiple TD margins, should be the top three in the polls.  That’s Boise, TCU, and Oregon right now.  Then you can consider other really impressive one loss teams who have run through their schedules for the most part with only losses to top ten teams before considering the first SEC team this year.  I’d say the resume of Ohio State, and of Stanford is just as impressive as Auburn’s this year.  That doesn’t mean I don’t think Auburn is entitled to be ranked above these one-loss teams: if they beat Alaabama, they certainly will have done more against a more difficult schedule.  But I mean, to honestly make a case for undefeated Auburn over Oregon or TCU or Boise, don’t they need to beat Alabama by more than a score?  Is that not what those other undefeateds have been doing all year?

That’s essentially privilege in the SEC.  In no other conference would a team receive an automatic berth for merely surviving the SEC gauntlet.  Style points are supposed to and need to matter.  Well, except for the computer average, but thats a different story entirely.  Auburn’s chances of winning the SEC as an undefeated team are somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2, which is a realistic possibility.  Their chances of being so impressive in their last four games that we glance at what TCU and Boise have done all season and think, “you know, those teams are certainly no…Auburn?”  That’s not a realistic possibility, I don’t think.

It’s in a bout of irony that this injustice will likely be rectified, as the wolves surround Auburn and Cam Newton’s status as an eligible amateur athlete.  If Auburn loses, either in the court of the NCAA or on the field, it’s unlikely that any SEC team is going to one-loss its way to the national championship (considering that LSU is the only other team with just one loss…to Auburn).  At that point, we probably would get the two most deserving teams in college football playing for the championship, even if **gasp** none of them play in the SEC.

Washington Huskies quarterback Jake Locker has his team fighting it’s guts out at 3 wins and 4 losses this year, with the most impressive victory being a last second win at the gun over USC.  With that win, Locker moves to 2-1 for his career against the Trojans, and establishes his legacy as an above average college quarterback, and one of the better QBs that Washington has had in it’s history, dating back to the early 90′s with Mark Brunell and Billy Joe Hobert.

Locker also continues to be projected as an early first round pick by television analysts.  He has now started 34 college games at Washington, and if he stays healthy, should be able to get up into the rage of 40 starts by the time he makes the jump to the pros.  That’s a good sample size to tell what kind of quarterback a player is.

In Locker’s case, the best part of his game is his legs, which makes him a great comparable for Brunell, another Husky quarterback who struggled to complete even 55% of his passes in college.  Brunell went on to have a very successful career, playing for the Packers, Jaguars, and Redskins before finishing up as a backup for the Saints and Jets.

Again though, Brunell was a fifth round draft choice, a project pick in the 1993 draft by Packers GM Ron Wolf, because it was hard to see any reason prior to 1994 to believe that Brett Favre might someday be a hall of famer.  Brunell was the pick necessary to insure that the Packers would have a quarterback.  They did, and Brunell was dealt to the expansion Jacksonville Jaguars in 1995.

At that point, two years into Brunell’s career, it was a safe bet for any team that had a quarterback that Brunell would be worth the price of two mid-round picks.  We have no idea right now if Locker is worth two mid round picks, and that’s not even particularly relevant considering that a team is going to have to use a valuable first round pick to get him.

Locker’s career completion percentage has actually declined from where it was in 2009, when it was claimed by Scouts Inc. Todd McShay that Locker was passing accurately, but just not getting any help from his receivers.  Obviously at Washington, Locker isn’t going to get the most help, so this could be the case, but it reminds me of the Michael Vick conundrum in Atlanta where Vick’s receivers were at the top of the league in dropped passes year after year, even though Atlanta overhauled it’s receivers more or less every year.  Then when Atlanta brought in Joey Harrington to replace Vick, Roddy White and Michael Jenkins both had career years.  Vick was getting screwed by dropped passes, but the dropped passes were the result of systematic inaccuracy and lack of timing, not because the receivers were bad.

That’s the argument being made for Jake Locker’s passing accuracy.  You can put the tape on him yourself if you wish, and it’s clear that Locker lacks the passing accuracy to be a great quarterback at the next level.  We know this as open-minded fans because he played so much college ball that his strengths and weaknesses are apparent.  Locker moves the chains because he can use his feet on third down as well as any quarterback in football, and plays pretty well from outside of the pocket, which is among the many things that Locker does right.  He also has a good chance to get Washington bowl eligible, needing to simply finish 3-2 on the season.

A bowl game will help showcase Locker’s many talents, but with all the flaws in his game, it’s not going to help his overall draft profiled.  I doubt that’s a big deal for him.  Locker made the correct decision to stay in school, and it would be a great accomplishment should he prove able to get the Huskies back to the bowls.  Locker isn’t hopeless as an NFL talent, he’s just proving to be a poor use of a high and valuable NFL draft pick.

I have a complete list of DI-FBS Football Teams who have yet to fall this season: Alabama, Oregon, Boise State, TCU, Auburn, Arizona, Oklahoma, LSU, Ohio State, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, Utah, Missouri, Nevada, Northwestern, Michigan, and Michigan State.

That’s 17 teams out of 119 teams at the beginning of the season.  One more of those will fall for sure this week when Michigan and Michigan State meet, though it’s pretty unlikely that 16 unbeatens will get out of this week without a loss.

We can, however, look at this list and find who looks out of place.  Northwestern, Nevada, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, Utah, Missouri, and Michigan haven’t played anyone who is currently ranked.  Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma, TCU, Arizona, Alabama, Oregon, and Auburn all have quality wins over teams that are ranked or could finish ranked, but those are your power programs on the list and it’s hardly a surprise that any of them are undefeated in the first week of October.  Boise State has thrashed everyone they played since narrowly escaping over Virginia Tech.  They last lost in 2008, so their undefeated record isn’t a surprise.

On the other hand, one of the 17 teams weren’t even expected to have a winning record at this point, necessarily, and logged an upset over a conference opponent last week to reach this point.  The Michigan State Spartans are 5-0, and they’ve done it on the strength of wins over Notre Dame and Wisconsin at home.  What makes the Spartans a surprise 5-0 team is that this team wasn’t even supposed to be ready to compete at this point.  They’ve improved on both offense and defense when it would appear that they were set for a decline.

Problem with Michigan State’s early season is that they’ve played four home games, and one “neutral” site game in Detroit against…Florida Atlantic?  Sounds like a home game to me.  Michigan State now must play four of it’s final seven games on the road inside the Big Ten conference.  Of course, going to Ann Arbor to play Michigan isn’t too different than a neutral site game.  The crowd will be partisan, though by home game standards at the Big House, not really up to that partisan standard.

Still, this is a barrier that the Spartans must conquer in order to chase a Rose Bowl title.  Ohio State and Michigan State don’t play this year, so we could have a situation where both teams run the table this year.  Both teams have Michigan and Iowa as their best remaining opponents.

It’s an unlikely scenario that would result in Michigan State running the table to tie an Ohio State team that also went 12-0, but I think they have an advantage against a Michigan team this week that is really struggling on defense at the current moment.  That’s not an advantage that Ohio State will have over Michigan later in the year.  The Wolverines were worse defensively last week than in any of the prior weeks, and Denard Robinson is banged up enough right now to the point where he is going to have to start relying on his arm a bit more than in past weeks.

Robinson will be able to throw on the Michigan State defense, but probably not enough to outpace the work done by the balanced Spartan offense, and I think Michigan State wins this game over Michigan comfortably, by 9-13 points or so.  If this prediction proves correct, it’s going to be tough to stop the Spartans the rest of the year.  The Spartans have proven to be a team with many small weaknesses on both sides of the football, but no fatal flaws that will keep them out of games against better opponents.

And because of the notably soft big ten schedule, a lot more people than just me could be seeing a 12-0 Spartans season after this week.  It’s certainly not unreasonable.  It was only unthinkable prior to the season because nobody really thought Michigan State could possibly be good enough to run through the early part of their schedule at 5-0.  If Notre Dame wasn’t going to get them, then Wisconsin would.  I thought exactly the same thing.  Michigan State proved that assumption wrong, so here we are now, a 5-0 team needing to keep the other Michigan college football team from getting to 6-0 themselves.

Unlike Michigan, this game wouldn’t just mean another win for Sparty, it would validate the first five games of the year.  Michigan can’t get caught looking ahead, nor can they be satisfied with a near-disaster victory in this game.  They’re in a tough spot, and I think they’re going to be in trouble when Michigan State drops them to 5-1 this week and then yes, Rich Rodriguez is going to be pushed back into the “show me” line of fire with the Michigan faithful.  This week and this game can (and will) change the way people are looking at the Big Ten.

If I were to characterize this draft class in terms of it’s quarterbacks, we’d have to think about guys with big arms, great frames, and limited accuracy.  Of course, it’s that last skill that will make or break a prospect at the next level, and a lot of guys that were projected to go high in this next draft simply do not have it.

For Jake Locker, perhaps the most touted NFL prospect in the class, the first three weeks of the season have been a disaster of sorts.  A win against Syracuse and a loss against BYU produced acceptable — but not NFL-type — results.  Locker was up around 60% in completion percentage, he had thrown for close to eight yards per attempt in those games.  Locker just needed a game against a strong college defense to show he could match up with the big guys.  He got that opportunity against Nebraska, a program with an elite defense.  Locker completed just 4 of 20 passes, threw two INTs, and didn’t even throw for four yards per attempt (which is actually pretty good considering those accuracy problems).

Jake Lockers line through three games this year is: completed 46 of 90 passes for 7.0 yards per attempt, 6 TDs, and 2 INTs.  His target completion percentage to be a legitimate first round pick is 70%.  If he throws 300 more passes this year, he would need to complete an obscene 227 of them to meet that mark.  Washington, more or less, won’t lose the rest of the year if Jake Locker is a legitimate first overall prospect.

Locker can’t really be blamed for any of this.  While he doesn’t appear to be much of an NFL prospect at quarterback, it’s not Jake Locker who has been going out of his way to remind you how lucky your franchise would be to have him.  That would be disinterested third parties who are trying to convince you of that.  Locker, to his credit, avoided being another Jevan Snead this year by actually going to pro executives and gauging his draft value before making the decision to come out.  On one hand, he’s probably going to hurt his draft stock going into this next draft.  But on the other hand, someone is going to take a flyer on him in some round next year, and if quarterback doesn’t work out, Locker is plenty athletic to go play another position…or baseball.

Where Locker has failed — changing his prospect make-up — is more along the lines of the status quo for a college quarterback.  There’s another potential pro prospect who is, right now, making a big deal out of himself by developing into a legitimate first-overall type quarterback right before our eyes: Arkansas’ Ryan Mallett.

What’s most impressive about Mallett’s numbers is that they aren’t unreasonably inflated by playing FCS competition.  Arkansas opened against Tennessee Tech, but Mallett threw for more yards against both Louisiana-Monroe, and Georgia, than in that first game.  He’s thrown for exactly three touchdowns in each game, with just two interceptions between the three games — and none against Georgia.  More importantly, his game-winning drive to beat Georgia included a bunch of NFL type throws, with the clock as a significant factor on the road.  While Locker was expected to have his breakout game against a strong defense, it was unquestionably Mallett who has separated himself as the early favorite to be taken first overall.

Ryan Mallett’s line through three games this year: completed 70 of 100 passes, for 10.8 yards per attempt, and 9 TDs to 2 INTs.  He’s right at the mark I set for him to establish himself as a legitimate first overall QB candidate in the next draft.  Mallett has done it against good competition as well, actually finding ways to raise his play when it matters most.

Neither of these guys is likely to be the first overall pick in next year’s draft if Andrew Luck of Stanford comes out (I don’t think he will).  Luck may be a once in a lifetime type prospect someday.  But for Mallett and Locker, the day where they have to take their resume to the NFL and try to sell themselves as leaders of an organization is drawing nearer.  Clearly at the moment, they are moving in opposite directions.

There has been plenty written about the lone college football game of this past week that lived up to the hype, a 28-24 thriller between the Michigan Wolverines and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.  This game was hardly any different in outcome from last year’s game: Michigan builds a sizable lead early in the third quarter, Notre Dame comes all the way back to take the lead, and Michigan holds for the last drive, a very successful TD drive.

Much has been written about Michigan’s Denard Robinson, who personally accounted for more than 500 yards of total offense in this game.  Much more will be written about him, because he won this game with his arm and his legs.  Michigan simply didn’t have many other valuable players and the valuable players they did have all play on their offensive line.  Non-Robinson skill positions at Michigan are simply of bad players.  When Robinson gets help from some blue chippers in future seasons, just think how dynamic he will be.

Robinson won the game, but faced a much improved Notre Dame defense in the process.  Michigan scored four TDs, but one of those was set up by turnovers, one was a long play from Robinson, and then there was the last drive.  In between, Notre Dame had the Michigan offense under wraps.  Those 500 yards can be deceiving: they came in chunks against a defense that was up to the task of stopping spread offenses.

This game wasn’t lost on defense for the Irish.  Rather, it was lost at the point when Jimmy Clausen and Golden Tate decided to fore go their senior seasons to enter the NFL draft.  Because the story in this game is that the Irish weren’t deep enough offensively to compete with Michigan.

Quarterback Dayne Crist got hurt after the teams first drive — a touchdown drive.  He did not return for the rest of the half.  True freshman Tommy Rees (Lake Forest, IL) and Junior Nate Montana (So. California) led the offense for a quarter and a half, and didn’t do particularly well.  But had Clausen still been the starting quarterback, or had Tate still been in the mix at receiver, there would have been a game-long offensive advantage for the Irish, instead of just two and a half quarters of one.

Even accounting for injury to the starting quarterback (in this case, Clausen), Notre Dame would have been prepared to beat the weak Michigan secondary with some depth at the position, or more options at wide receiver to get wide open for a green passer such as Rees.  But by losing both, the Irish went on a -21 point differential streak from the time Crist left the game, almost entirely (but not completely) due to offensive inefficiencies.

And so while we give Denard Robinson all the credit he deserves for winning this game on the road in South Bend, keep in mind that the Irish are a top heavy offense this season, and need to fill in the holes with Brian Kelly recruiting classes before they have the offensive depth to pull their quarterback due to a concussion, and play players way down on the depth chart instead.  If Charlie Weis is still coach, who knows?  Maybe Clausen and Tate stay another year, and then Notre Dame completely overpowers Michigan in a game which Robinson’s awesomeness is merely an afterthought in the coffin of Rich Rodriguez.

But the transitional aspect of this game has been wildly overlooked.  Notre Dame is a BCS team if their 5-star recruit laden offense were to remain perfectly healthy throughout the season, but they are in trouble if Dayne Crist, or Kyle Rudolph, or Michael Floyd, or Armando Allen misses any time.  Crist missed just a quarter and a half, but ND’s offensive efficiency numbers may take weeks to recover.  What ultimately puts Notre Dame 12 months away from contention is that they can’t ever count on all these players being healthy at once.

If they can’t get their seniors to stay, it’s going to be hard for the Irish to line up the pieces for a run under Brian Kelly in the near term future.  But this year’s comeback in a losing effort to Michigan suggests that they can beat anyone, when that health falls into line for Brian Kelly and his forward-thinking spread offense attack.

No conference has softened more over the last ten years than the Big Ten, which has watched Michigan, Purdue, and Michigan State fall badly from fringe title contenders in the mix for the Big Ten every year, to really fringe programs.  It’s watched Penn State have some BCS bowl bids, only to fall hard in those games (exception an overtime squeaker in the 2006 Orange Bowl over equally dying Florida State).  Wisconsin and Iowa have been among the better programs in the Big Ten, but were also-rans for most of the decade.  Iowa for a while might not have been the best team in it’s own state (though Iowa State has now decisively fallen to among the worst programs in FBS competition).

Only one program, Ohio State, survived the overall decline of the Big Ten to remain an elite program.  Ohio State returns as the prohibitive favorite, but the conference as a whole figures to be much stronger this year than in any of the past three.  Michigan isn’t going to win the title (or beat Ohio State), but they are good enough to win eight games.  Wisconsin, Iowa, and Penn State all could win the conference, and they all should win at least seven games, and potentially as many as nine.  But once again, the only program that is bound to put up double digit wins this season is Ohio State — and they may just barely hit that threshold, given the inevitability of a bowl appearance.

One thing that went really well last year for the Big Ten, perhaps the only thing, was that they did very well in bowls across the board.  They went 4-3, but Northwestern, Michigan State, and Minnesota had the three losses, and two of the three opponents (Auburn, Texas Tech) are expected to return stronger this year.  Minnesota may only have received a bowl bid because Notre Dame declined one and because Michigan came up a game short of eligibility.  The conference’s 4-3 record included a 2-0 mark in BCS bowl record, with Ohio State winning the Rose Bowl, and Iowa taking home the Orange Bowl.  PSU beat LSU, so that was hardly a cupcake walk.  Wisconsin’s win over Miami may have been even more impressive.

Michigan is the focal point of the regular season in the Big Ten, where every game for Rich Rodriguez is the biggest game of his career.  They still schedule quite well: Michigan dipped into the ranks of the FCS to play UMass this year, but they aren’t a cupcake opponent (Delaware State, on the other hand…).  Michigan should have the edge over Penn State when they go to Happy Valley in the middle of the season, but that game only has relevance in the Big Ten Championship picture if Michigan can protect the Big House against either Iowa or Wisconsin.  Putting away in-state rival Michigan State shouldn’t be much of an issue, but it’s something they have now failed to do in consecutive years (though Chad Henne’s impressive comeback in 2007 still stings Sparty as much as ever).  The key to Michigan’s season may be avoiding an 0-2 start against UConn and Notre Dame.  Few college football teams open up that difficult, that is to say, there are plenty of scheduled two game non-conference schedules tougher than two borderline-unranked teams, but most teams have a cupcake at the beginning of the season as not to begin oh and two.  Michigan had the right idea in 2007 when they scheduled Utah in the second week, and then to make sure they started at least 1-1, they brought in, uh, Appalachian State.  Well, at least they won’t be caught off guard this time.

Penn State is notorious for scheduling softly non-conference, so they did about as well as they could this year for a team that still pays Youngstown State to come in and get beat: they play at Alabama.  Temple is about as strong as any team in the MAC this year, save CMU, so the Penn State/Temple game might be more than just an in-state game that must be played this year.  Still, a 3-1 start for the Nittany Lions would be expected.  Then, at Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium, where Penn State tries to break a two game losing streak to the Hawkeyes, clearly the game of the year on their schedule.  The toughest stretch here involves a three game stretch with Michigan, Northwestern, and then at Ohio State.  If Penn State can overcome Iowa, they can possibly see a very successful 6-2 conference record, probably coming up a bit short of the conference title, but 9-3 would be a good finish given the improved schedule.

Iowa has a difficult game this year at Arizona, a long trip to play one of the better Pac Ten teams, but if we assume that Iowa is done playing close games against vastly inferior opponents, a 3-1 (or better) start for a top ten team is practically insured.  This is the team that can take down the Buckeyes this year at home, but it means nothing if they can’t also handle the Badgers.  Combine that with a Penn State team who also comes to them looking for a measure of revenge, and Iowa has all the meaningful games on their schedule at home this year, but also has the pressure of needing to win all home games to preserve their fast track to the big ten title.  This pressure, I imagine, would make them not the favorite to do so.

I think, with the Big Ten rebounding a bit this season, Wisconsin is going to reap the benefits of a weaker non-conference schedule with a 6-0 start, and I also predict that Bret Bilema’s team will head to a BCS bowl this season.  Position for position, they aren’t the team best suited to beat the Buckeyes on the field, but this is a team that is built for the long haul.  Over the season, they should outlast the Hawkeyes, running their regular season record to 10 or 11 wins (all losses in conference is going to hurt them), and seal up an at large berth for the Orange Bowl (or potentially, the Rose) even if they aren’t technically the Big Ten Champs.

That’s because, even though the competition is at an all time high, Ohio State is still the best team in the conference.  Ohio State has the scheduling advantage of playing all four non-conference games at home.  Miami is good enough on the field to threaten them at home, and possibly beat them late (one of the few QBs in college football more dangerous than Terrelle Pryor is Miami’s Jacory Harris).  Miami’s ability to hang with (or beat) OSU will put on display some of the weaknesses of the Buckeyes as a viable title contender.  But when they get in to conference play, the Big Ten will be decided when Ohio State rattles off six straight comfortable conference wins before getting tripped up at the end of the year by Iowa, and by Michigan in “The game”, which Ohio State still wins for a seventh straight year.

It’s a conference that is a lot better, but Ohio State can help show it’s not all the way back yet by running through all other teams as the only true title-contending team in the conference.

LiveBall Sports Projected Order of Finish

1. Ohio State (7-1)
2. Wisconsin (7-1)
3. Penn State (6-2)
4. Iowa (6-2)
5. Michigan (5-3)
6. Purdue (4-4)
7. Northwestern (3-5)
8. Michigan State (3-5)
9. Indiana (2-6)
10. Illinois (1-7)
11. Minnesota (0-8)

The Big East is traditionally one of the latest conferences to begin conference play.  This year, no two teams in the conference meet until October 8th, when Rutgers faces Connecticut.  It’s not until the next week that the conference really starts to play each other, and as a small eight team group, the title is decided in a relatively short period of time.

The Big East doesn’t feature any elite, must see programs, so they take advantage of an ability to showcase their games on national television on weeknights.  This small stage gives the Big East to display a rare meritocracy: rarely will one of it’s teams begin in the preseason top ten because they are tough to distinguish from each other based on hype.  Usually, however, a team from this conference ends up in the top ten, a worthy inclusion in the BCS field, and another invades the top 20.

This year, Pitt begins as the highest rated team in the AP Poll at no. 15, with West Virginia checking in at no. 25.  Cincinnati, who lost for the first time in last year’s Sugar Bowl, is unranked.  Same with Connecticut, who may soon find themselves at the high point in the history of their football program.  So while the Big East may not be at it’s level established a year ago, where it clearly plays at a higher level of football than the Big Ten, it’s still closer to a middle-of-the-pack BCS conference than the ugly stepsister of the bunch.

Pitt probably deserves to be the highest rated team, pre-season.  They enter the year the toughest team, player for player, and they play the most difficult schedule in the Big East.  They travel to East Hartford, they travel to Tampa, and they conclude the season at Cincinnati.  Those are long trips for Pittsburgh.  Their local rival, West Virginia, travels to them this year, where home field advantage has little meaning.  Pitt also scheduled difficultly in the non-conference portion of their schedule: a long season-opening trip to play at Utah, a team who can match Pitt player for player and does it all with a more progressive approach.  Then they bring in one of the most talented teams in college football, the Miami Hurricanes, to play at Heinz Field.  And of course, because Dave Wannedstedt is haunted in his dreams by Brian Kelly’s comeback machine, he gets to travel to South Bend to play the Irish this season.

That would be a really difficult schedule for any program, but for a Panthers team that has been marred by inconsistency prior to a put-it-altogether 2009 season, it may well be a death sentence.  Now, while the non-conference schedule has no bearing on who will win the Big East, it could combine to drop Pitt out of the top 25 before they begin conference play.  A 3-2 team is unlikely to be ranked in the top 25 as they trade wins for losses.  But the Panthers are unlikely to even run through their Big East schedule cleanly.  They have two easy conference wins: at Syracuse, and vs. Louisville.  Every other game could potentially trip up Pitt.

The difficult stretch for the Panthers comes in the final four weeks.  Pitt is on the road three times and plays West Virginia at home in that stretch.  They could come into this stretch on a roll — a mid-season run of Syracuse, Rutgers, and Louisville isn’t exactly the toughest part of their schedule, but Pitt would be fortunate to save 2-2 in November to close out the year.  The key is making sure the wins and losses fall to the right teams…they almost certainly can not win the Big East by losing to Cincinnati, and a loss to either WVU or Connecticut might cause some tiebreaker scenarios as well.

Connecticut has scheduled considerably softer out of conference than Pitt, but not for lack of effort, as their opening week match-up at Michigan is one of the more intriguing games of that (this) week in college football.  Then they play Texas Southern, Temple, Vandy, and Buffalo in the next four weeks.  Temple is a potential pitfall in what is basically a road game, but you’d still have to expect a Connecticut team to win those games.  Whether they enter conference play in the top 25 is entirely based on if they can beat the Wolverines on opening day.  Michigan doesn’t do anything that isn’t highly publicized, which makes this a winning match-up for a UConn team that certainly doesn’t need that win to make noise in the Big East this year.

The other thing that Connecticut has going for it is that it’s road schedule in the Big East is very soft this year: Rutgers, Louisville, and Syracuse are all games that can be won, and the only reason not to expect a 3-0 run against those teams is because they are all road trips.  The other road game is against USF in December, which is a nice draw for a team that plays it’s home games in the great northeast.  The home schedule is brutal: WVU, Pitt, Cincinnati, in that order.  Connecticut might not be good enough to make a stab at the conference title, but a 2 out of 3 at home puts them in excellent position to do so.  And better now, for a growing program, than later when expectations demand production.

West Virginia plays a really tough game against LSU on September 21st in Death Valley, one where a win could put the Mountaineers on the map in terms of crashing the BCS Championship party.  It’s a long trip to Baton Rouge, but that’s less of an upset than a 50-50 game.  At that point, West Virginia has one of the most favorable travel schedules in the entire nation.  They only have three road games in conference, and two of them are to Louisville and Pittsburgh, which are short bus rides.  Their game at UConn is significantly further, and aside from a home game against the Bearcats, could be the lone place where their schedule bites them in their bid for the Big East Championship.

The real story here is Cincinnati and their quarterback, Zach Collaros.  Cincinnati has *never* been projected to win the Big East in their short affiliation with the conference.  This, despite losing just one conference game in the last two years.  This, despite running the table in the regular season last year (playing Collaros plenty along the way), and dominating the Big East in competition most of the year.  All of this in spite of a game on the road against Pitt where the Panthers dominated the first half, and Tony Pike threw the Bearcats back into sole possession of the Big East tile by coming from 3 TDs down to beat Pitt.  What does a team have to do to begin with a top 25 ranking?

A Bowl win would be nice.  The drubbing at the hands of Florida is likely why the Bearcats aren’t getting any love in the preseason this year, and it didn’t help that they team was blown out without Brian Kelly, who accepted the Notre Dame job before that game was played.  Observers, as a group, are somehow skeptical of both Notre Dame with Kelly, and Cincinnati without him.  Not really sure how that works out, but it is apparently possible to have your Haterade and drink it too.

Cincinnati’s schedule is easier than Pitt’s.  They have the toughest game of anyone in the big east, as they will play the Oklahoma Sooners, a national title contender, at Paul Brown Stadium (where the Bengals play).  OU is probably going to out-talent the Bearcats on the field in that one, which means that it will be a good litmus test to see where Butch Jones is at as a coach of a team with a recent history of success against good opponents.  Does he help close the talent gap against OU, or does it really appear to be a big program drubbing on a wannabe team?  I have OU winning the game regardless, but it’s an important game for Cincinnati to prove they belong after last year’s bowl disaster.

Like Pitt, Cincinnati faces it’s toughest tests in the final month of the season, including a trip to Connecticut that resulted in Cinci’s last conference (and regular season) loss.  But for the Bearcats, all games are winnable.  And with the homefield advantage versus a Pitt team that they came back on in the fourth quarter of last year’s effective Big East Championship Game, it looks like we will see another Pitt-Cincinnati match for a BCS Bowl berth.

And with both seasons hanging in the balance, Collaros and Cincinnati will be victorious once again, and head back to the BCS with a chance to deliver on their promise in this, less tumultuous, bowl season.

When schools across the nation went in very public search of more dollars for their already wealthy athletic programs, a very vocal minority feared for the continued existence of their sense of college football history.  Indeed, the development of the “Super Conference” was going to take it’s liberties with history, and in some cases, common sense (Texas schools having to travel to Pullman, WA for fairly regular intra-conference matches), but the overriding principle in the madness was survival, not greed.

Football-first conferences like the Big Ten, Pac Ten and Big 12 are only barely relevant today.  That’s not because of the fact that the conferences of the pacific and of the midwest tried (and in select cases, succeeded) at taking the useful pieces with loose Big 12 North affiliation, but because tradition established over fifty plus years of athletic competition have only sentimental value, which is an excellent talking point — until someone shows up with a bigger, better television deal.  This is why the Pac 10 had the right idea to pillage the Big 12 South for all of it’s top football programs, and it’s also why the ten-team Big 12 eventually wins in the end: they — not the Pac 10 — landed the big television revenue.

In the end, no one lost.  The Pac 10 failed to pull off the biggest conference ripping in the history of college athletics, but is still in good position to start their own network to cover that expected gain in revenue.  The Big 12 needs not it’s own network because Fox has ponied up a record deal surpassed only by the SEC’s deal with ESPN in it’s value.  The Big Ten remains a cash cow, despite a 12 team conference where at least four of the member schools are athletically irrelevant, and decreasing academic standards.

In the future, survival is going to be more about bigger, bolder moves, than any sort of tradition, or perhaps, even money.  Only one trend that seems obvious to me, at least, is that the most successful conferences are not the ones looking to be bold and aggressive, but rather the smaller-sized conferences that have a few member schools with strong facilities and academics, and can still build around the concepts of parity and competition.  Superconferences seem to work on a geographic level: the south (both near the gulf and on the coast) has been able to handle the structure of power — in football, at least — and are better for it.  However, the northeast, the west, plains, and (in particular) the midwest cannot seem to adjust to the same disparity.  For these groups, pursuing a Super Conference is an active exercise at the self destruction of a brand.

If the Big 12 had a shortcoming, its that it was too large for it’s own good.  It had included doormats like Iowa State and Baylor since its inception in the mid-nineties, and as Texas rose as a power (and to a lesser extent, Texas Tech under Mike Leach), a really obvious disparity developed between the North division and the South division.  The Big Ten is going to have to make a similar split in order to achieve the conference-game-that-they-need, but beware of a west division that features the Wisconsin-Iowa game to decide a Big Ten championship participant every year.  What works in the SEC where there’s a national power in each division, and what has pretty much always worked in the ACC doesn’t seem to work elsewhere, where football powers exist, but aren’t so highly concentrated.

Which is why the most successful groups of schools have not pushed towards a super conference, rather, the focus has been on fewer annual losers.  The Big East has won more games in the last five years, since losing Virginia Tech, Miami, and Boston College, than at any point in it’s history, which is astounding.  It’s winning percentage is on par with that of the SEC and Big 12 over the same timeframe, and well ahead of the Pac 10 and Big Ten and ACC.

Good academic facilities, tightly knit (and most importantly, active) rivalries, reasonable travel expectations, and a smaller conference have all assisted the Big East in remaining a football powerhouse without having any football powerhouses.  Also, the fact that losing powers is never a zero sum game.  When Boston College, Miami, and Virginia Tech bolted to the ACC, they have helped to join a previously basketball-intensive conference and make it a true powerhouse of football, more than offsetting the decline of Florida State.  But it’s the opportunity created in the Big East that has improved it.  Without losing those programs, Cincinnati is probably still a Conference USA team being eyed by the Big Ten, Louisville doesn’t have those seasons it did under Bobby Petrino, and South Florida is still a young, anonymous program with no national following.  College Football is better with a strong ACC, and an up and coming Big East.

All of this is why the Big 12 is probably better off with a single-division conference that features 7 teams who can win the conference in any year, plus a K-State program that will improve, someday.  There’s no lack of national powers there now that Oklahoma and Texas has been retained, and the competition really does matter.  While the Big 12 and the Big East have yet to discover the formula for making money long-term via its brand, college football is better with those conferences which produce the best week to week match-ups with the strongest teams this side of the American south.

It’s something that the revenue generating conferences out west and up north don’t quite seem to grasp, at least to this point.  However, if it comes down to making as much money as possible for the academic institutions in your locality, and fostering the long term growth of competition and overall improvement in the quality of Division I college football, there’s little doubt that the traditional power conferences are going to see the dollar signs before they realize there’s a choice to be made.

I think, if Jake Locker ends up becoming the first overall pick in the NFL draft in 2011, he’ll be a very, very good player for a very, very long time.  I think he did the right thing by himself, by his coaches, and for his future by returning to the University of Washington for his senior season in 2010.  I’ve always enjoyed watching him as a player, and thought he was big enough, physical enough, and fast enough to play defense at the next level, or he could go play baseball.  Locker is a good enough athlete to choose a whole bunch of paths for a career as a professional athlete.

It seems certain, as of today, that he’s got his eyes set on the prize of being the first overall pick in the 2011 NFL Draft.  He’s going to work at it, aim to win a bunch of games for his team this year, all while preparing to be the very next player drafted into the NFL.  For me, at least, it’s going to be a tough sell.  Jake Locker has a very projectable skill set, but he has not been a great college quarterback in three years at Washington.

Locker’s College Stats

Locker’s first two college seasons weren’t exactly disappointing, but, he could have been easily replaced.  It says something about him that he won the job as a first year player under Ty Willingham, but he struggled through much of his first year, which is understandable considering the team was terrible, and he had never faced a level of competition on par with the Pac-10.  After going 3-9 as a freshman, he came back to high expectations as a Sophomore.  Against a brutal early schedule, the Huskies began 0-3, unable to produce any semblance of offense, but Locker was wise enough to not hurt his team with an interception.  The team finally got a winnable game against Stanford, but Locker threw only nine passes before leaving with a season ending injury.  The Huskies did not win a game in 2008, and Ty Willingham, who had recruited Locker, was fired.

Everything about Locker’s career to that point suggested that he was a pretty special player, and that he could do big things in 2009 when healthy again.  Steve Sarkisian was hired to take over the Washington program, and what he and Locker accomplished in just three weeks of football was pretty much not projected by anyone.  First, they took LSU to the very last second, then beat up on Idaho, and capped off their three week run with Locker managing a beautiful game to upset no. 3 ranked USC, 16-13.  Washington was an impressive 2-1, Locker had thrown 5 TDs to 1 pick, and the hype machine for the 6’3″ 225 lb QB was just getting started.

Problem was, it’s like the draft analysts stopped watching Locker at that point.  The slate of defenses he played over the last nine games of the season was among some of the worst in college football, including: Stanford, Notre Dame, Arizona, and Washington State.  Against the rest of the schedule, Locker broke 7.5 yards per attempt only once, completed 60% of his passes just twice, made his decisions at a rate that was even slower than he did as a freshman (sack rate increase by 1.5%), and threw 16 TDs to 10 INTs.

Locker’s numbers within his own conference were decidedly mediocre.  He ranked fourth in completion percentage behind Sean Canfield, Nick Foles, and Matt Barkley.  He was second in the conference in both TDs (Canfield), and INTs (Barkley).  He was just 5th in yards per attempt behind Andrew Luck, Canfield, Barkley, and Kevin Riley.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that based only on existing evidence, and ignoring that there’s at least one more season for all of these guys, Locker is not a decisively better prospect than Andrew Luck, and figures to be rated lower coming out (eventually) than Barkley.  Luck and Barkley were first year starters who have plenty of time to establish themselves as worthy pros.  Locker has just one season left.  It might just be my opinion here, but Locker needs to have a considerably better season than he has ever had to merely hold onto that first-overall-pick in waiting status he currently has.

Furthermore, out of all the teams that need a quarterback, there’s no guarantee any of them will pick with the first overall choice.  When I go through all the teams that could lose 13 or 14 games this year, some have established quarterbacks for the future, and others do not.  The teams that I would throw out there as potential first overall pick candidates: the Buffalo Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars, Cleveland Browns, Kansas City Chiefs, Denver Broncos, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and St. Louis Rams.  You can scratch the Rams from the list of teams that need a quarterback, as you can with the Broncos, and the Bucs are probably less than reasonably likely to hold a pick high enough to where they would have to replace Josh Freeman after just two years.  So, how reasonable is it for one of the teams that need a quarterback to actually end up with the first overall pick?  More likely that not, I’d say, but closer to a coin flip than a certainty.

Locker, along with potential early entree draftees Luck and Ryan Mallett (Mallett is a lot more likely to declare next year than Luck, I think) round out a group of athletic but inaccurate quarterback prospects, who might ultimately lose their edge in the draft to a guy like Christian Ponder of Florida State if he has a strong year.  One of the things I’ll be doing over the next 6 months at LiveBall Sports is the Jake Locker completion percentage watch.  He has roughly 1/3 of all college attempts remaining in 2010.  He currently sits at a 53.3 completion percentage for his career.  To complete 59% of his passes in his career, Locker will need to complete 70.4% of his passes over about 415 attempts.  That will put Locker at the Matt Ryan mark for collegiate accuracy and experience, and given his size advantages, would make it hard to argue against him as the number one pick.

Basically, if Locker carves up defenses this year, it makes his projection very easy: greatness.  Every eye in the football universe is on him all year long, and he blows away his career numbers, then people were right about him.  But in reality, this is highly unlikely.  Locker has shown little ability to win games at the college level, avoid critical mistakes against bad defenses, make good decisions, or light up a scoreboard against a quality opponent.  I do tire of the assumptions about Locker’s career.  I don’t think any team would have taken him in the first round this past year because of his lack of production, and I think that’s why he’s back at Washington.  As a senior quarterback, he has every advantage to nail down his first overall selection now, it’s reasonable to conclude that the failure to do so will be in part because he never warranted such elite hype.

America’s eyes: they’ll be watching.