FanHouse Big Ten

Here on FanHouse, I've discussed the maligned Big Ten ad nauseum. For some reason, people just love to hate the power conference of the midwest. Droves of fans and media alike cried foul when the conference received seven total bids to the NCAA tournament -- conveniently ignoring the fact that three of the teams were given double-digit seeds.

After two rounds, I believe the conference was vindicated to an extent. Michigan and Wisconsin advanced, and Purdue went to the Sweet 16. Still, a deep run was probably needed by someone to quiet the critics. Enter Michigan State, participants in Monday night's national championship game.

INDIANAPOLIS -- On his tippy toes, he might be 5-10, very easy to lose in the enormity of a football stadium where faces look like matrix dots and crowd noise drifts to the ozone. But no one strikes a larger pose in the Midwest today than Tom Izzo, public defender of the Big Ten's battered self-esteem. If trends and hipness start on both coasts in America, college basketball in the heartland also has been taking on an irrelevant, plodding look, to the point I stopped watching.

And I live in Chicago.

Welcome back, USC's national title hopes. Enjoy the pretzels. Try the dip. But don't get too comfortable.

Yes, as the Trojans paraded Penn State's corpse from end to end of the Rose Bowl Thursday night, Pete Carroll's team again entered the national title picture. Not in the BCS system, which will award its title to either Oklahoma or Florida even if the Sooners let Charles Barkley drive the bus to the game and the Gators put Matt Millen in charge of their personnel.

But AP voters are free to vote for any team and with the kind of no apologies beating the Beijing police for might be proud of, Troy roared yet again.

So exactly how many votes should USC's Rose Bowl victory account for?

Think the same number of votes Brett Favre will get for teammate of the year, the number of suits in Al Davis' wardrobe that don't require the adjective "jogging" or the same number of pairs of underwear women have ever hurled at Randy Johnson.

Think zero.

Or something close to it as we probably shouldn't rule anything out yet.

Maybe Florida and Oklahoma will play a game so horribly ugly in the BCS title tilt that if they made a movie of it, it'd have to start Kirsten Dunst and Amy Winehouse with a special guest appearance by Danny DeVito. And maybe Texas will pull a Buckeye of its own against Ohio State. But let's just say if the BCS title game plays out remotely within the realm of expectations, what the Trojans did against Penn State doesn't qualify as a national championship performance.

You beat a Big Ten team in a virtual home game in a BCS bowl. It isn't exactly curing the common cold and, statistically speaking, beating a Big Ten team in a BCS bowl game is exactly as likely as eventually catching a cold.

This is to take nothing away from the men of Troy. The Trojans had an excellent season, were champions of a solid league, became the first back-to-back-to-back Rose Bowl champions (and that there is Tom Emanski rarified air). They had a defense that could stand between John Daly and a Hooters or Pacman Jones and the opportunity to make a fool of himself, and were downright biblical in the way they went about business.

Heck, Joe Paterno called them them one of the best defensive teams he's ever seen and Paterno would know. It says here the man once recruited Moses to play middle linebacker.

But that's the beauty of college football. Its title is awarded for a season accomplishment, not the team that played best in the last game that was nationally televised.

Every Thursday, Pickin' on the Big Ten breaks down action across the conference.

ABOVE: The average college football fan's perception of Ohio State's reputation after last Saturday's USC game.

College football needs better villains.

In the wake of Ohio State's soul-shredding loss to Southern Cal last Saturday, the Grave Dancers' Union has been establishing new locals in 49 of the 50 states. It was a terrible performance by a team that was supposed to be better than they've looked so far, but why all the glee? Because the Buckeyes got humbled? I'd say the last two title games were humbling enough. Because the Big Ten got drug down? Here's a message for you, SEC Fan: We get it. We got it two years ago.

Right now hating on the Buckeyes is as useless and wasteful as hating the Buffalo Bills for losing four straight Super Bowls. It might ultimately prove as pointless as hating the New York Yankees has been for the past few seasons. The Yankees really aren't good enough to hate any more, and the Buckeyes might not be the best team in the Big Ten.

So there's no reason to act like Clubber Lang just got knocked out by Rocky Balboa. If OSU was your idea of a college football villain, what are you going to do when a real villain (think Erickson's Hurricanes, Spurrier's Gators, Switzer's Sooners) shows up?

End of rant. On to the games!

The long, long, long, long rumored Big Ten Network-Comcast deal is done:

Comcast Corporation and the Big Ten Network announced today that they have reached a long-term multimedia agreement for Comcast to carry Big Ten Network programming across television, broadband and video-on-demand in time for the 2008 college football season.

As to the key issue -- a potential move off expanded basic after an eight-month "trial" -- discussed in last night's post: sports tiers are off the table.

Under the terms of the agreement, Comcast will initially launch the Network as part of its expanded basic level of service... In Spring 2009, Comcast may elect to move the network to a broadly distributed digital level of service in most of its systems in these states.

This isn't quite "expanded basic or death" like the Big Ten wanted but it's not Bennigan's coupons. 80% of the BTN footprint already has digital and that number will only increase going forward. The important thing: no sports tiers in the footprint. Outside the footprint, Comcast can put it wherever it wants, which means sports tier. Overall: a win for the Big Ten, especially if Charter, Mediacom, and Time Warner follow suit.

One final note: we at the Fanhouse would like to bid adieu to Sparky, the jean-shorts-wearing boxing guy who was our mascot during the protracted standoff. You and your preposterously oversized gloves will be missed. Godspeed.

Let's have a parade.

The Fanhouse has told you this at least thrice before, but here it is again: the Big Ten Network and Comcast are about to make a deal. So says everybody. This one's from the Chicago Tribune:

Comcast and the BTN are prepared to put nearly two years of bitter negotiations aside to announce a long-term partnership, the Tribune has learned.

"For all intents and purposes, it's done," one source close to the negotiations said Sunday. Technically, it's not done. But sources expect the deal will be completed and unveiled this week.

(Link via Spartans Weblog.) What's more, the Big Ten Network will provide on demand content including classic games and condensed "snap to snap" replays.

The price? somewhere between 70 and 80 cents, which is some way off the $1.10 that was bandied about as the BTN's asking price during the contentious PR battle waged last summer but also way, way higher than the 25 cents a Comcast vice president told me was the most they'd pay for the network.

FanHouse's Top Five scans the sports blogosphere for the best posts of (about) the last 24 hours so you don't have to. Got something for this feature? Hit us up at fanhouse@googlegroups.com.

1) MGoBlog looks at the pros and cons for some of the teams rumored to be added to the Big Ten. Me? I'm really liking Louisville. Seriously, Rutgers? Syracuse? No thanks.

2) The Boston Red Sox season is pretty much dependent upon Phil Mickelson. Sound dumb? Doesn't make sense? Well, thanks to Ken Tremendous over at Fire Joe Morgan, we have a paragraph by paragraph breakdown of this flawed logic.

3) Man, sports caricature shirts used to be all the rage in 1992. I loved those things. If you're in the same camp as me, hop on over to the Sports Hernia to get some solid analysis of those beauties.

4) Awful Announcing has a new look. And it's hot. Seriously, it's melting my monitor as I type this.

5) Although I'm more inclined to think this is one rather low-percentage coincidence, Jay Mariotti and the sexy Chicago-based blogger at Foul Balls seem to have a curiously close choice of words.

Back in my day, Joe Tiller thinks, kids ate their oatmeal and watched Cocoon and didn't get drunk and stabbed unless someone was accused of being a glabdang Tory.

The back-to-back housings of Michigan and Ohio State seem to have thrown the entire Midwestern football-industrial complex into a frenetic mania. As Charles Rich detailed earlier, the conference is spitting out arrests at a rate so prodigious it would make Dennis Erickson blanch. The latest miscreant is Purdue linebacker Jeff Lindsay:

The 19-year-old freshman was arrested by campus police Saturday and charged with public intoxication, minor consumption and resisting law enforcement. Lindsay posted $250 bail and was released from Tippecanoe County Jail that afternoon.

(Strenuous efforts were made by Fanhouse staffers to construct a William Henry Harrison joke out of this information but to no avail.) This is bad timing for Lindsay in the immediate aftermath of wide receiver Selwyn Lymon's stabbing and the arrest hours later of teammate Torii Williams for DUI, but a MIP is probably no more than a stairs-running offense. Throw another one on the pile.

Last Year: 4-8, unranked.

Fans Are: Still in shock over the untimely death of Randy Walker and adjusting to the Pat Fitzgerald Era. Results on the field won't really start mattering until next year.

Expectations: Low, unless you're Fitzgerald:

"I expect to win a Big Ten championship and go to the Rose Bowl every year," Fitzgerald said. "We could have some success and go to bowl games, but if we don't do that, the season is a loss. When I look at last year, it was as much adversity as a football team can go through, and we left three or four victories on the field."

A more reasonable goal is one of the rinky-dink bowls at the bottom of the Big Ten ladder.

1. Can CJ Bacher stay healthy?

Northwestern was two different teams last year: a trainwreck without Bacher and an almost mediocre team with him. The California quarterback was anointed the starter last spring after four-year starter Bret Basanez (finally) graduated, but a stress fracture in his leg held him out for the first half of the season. In his stead, Andrew Brewer -- now a starter at wide receiver -- and Mike Kafka -- now a beetle -- took turns driving the Northwestern offense nowhere except into the ground. When Bacher returned, Northwestern suddenly rejoined the ranks of teams able to use the forward pass and the offense ground to life, most notably in a turnover-plagued but impressive game against Ohio State. Northwestern racked up a ton of yards but no points, presaging the Buckeye D's collapse in the last two games of the season when the yards came but the turnovers didn't.

So that would all be well and good, except that Bacher is missing spring practice with a toe injury suffered during that OSU game. He's coming dangerously close to the dreaded "injury-prone" tag. Northwestern's already proven that there are no good options behind him; any bowl hopes they have rest squarely on Bacher's arm... and his glass legs.

Purdue wide receiver Selwyn Lymon can't catch a break:

Lymon arrived at a hospital about 2:45 a.m. with a stab wound to the upper chest and told medical workers that he was attacked at a near-campus nightclub, said John Walker, deputy chief of West Lafayette Police Department. Lymon, 20, of Fort Wayne, was in stable condition before going to surgery at St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Lafayette, police said. An updated condition was not immediately available from hospital officials.

Lymon doesn't appear to be in any serious trouble but -- stab wounds to the chest not being a common athletic injury outside of Thailand and people who've crossed Ray Lewis -- no prognosis is immediately available.

If Lymon is unavailable early in the season, it would be a blow to the Boilermaker's admittedly vague hopes for a big year. Notre Dame fans, though obviously concerned for the young man's well-being, might say a little prayer he and his 238 receiving yards -- a Notre Dame opponent record -- are absent for this fall's Purdue game.

Previously on Fanhouse:
Spring Practice Questions: Purdue Boilermakers
Selwyn Lymon Has Never Seen 'A Christmas Story'