FanHouse Bret Bielema

Every Thursday, Pickin' on the Big Ten previews the upcoming weekend's games and issues random taunts to overconfident fan bases.

Be careful what you ask for, college football fan. The very same Iowa team that so many of you desperately wanted to see lose lest the Big Ten get another team into the title game is now the only thing standing between Ohio State and the BCS. If the Hawkeyes can't pull off a ginormous upset in Columbus behind a quarterback making his first college start, you're going to get the Scarlet and Grey facing some honked-off Pac 10 team.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten previews the weekend's action, or lack thereof.

There are weeks when many of us would trade lives with Jim Tressel. This is not one of those weeks.

Not only did his Buckeyes fail to finish USC when they had the Trojans on the ropes, Tressel also saw "Tresselball" ripped apart by Chris Brown of Smart Football, faced a fan base who want him fired three days ago, had to lash back at some of those same fans, discovered that one of USC's touchdowns may not have happened, and now he has to face a Toledo team that just mashed Colorado into goo.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to be Jim Tressel this week, but "because he's on the hot seat" isn't one of them.

Bret Bielema will tell you that Fresno State is tough enough. No additional challenges are necessary when the Bulldogs pop up on the schedule, because they'll give you all that you can handle.

The Wisconsin coach couldn't just steer his team past Fresno on Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison. He also had to deal with virtually-unprecedented circumstances during the week. It showed at times on the field, as Wisconsin twice fell behind by 14 points, but they were able to rally for a 34-31, double-overtime win.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten previews the weekend's action, even when the truth is ugly.

It was a bad week for vowels.

The seven Big Ten schools whose names start with consonants played anywhere from OK to brilliantly this past weekend. The four that start with vowels -- Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio State -- all dropped a pantload on the field.

Illinois gets a partial pass because Missouri has been on a nice run lately. Ohio State played a Navy team that usually goes bowling. Indiana struggled with a Division I-AA FCS school, but they're Indiana; you kind of expect these things from them after a while.

That leaves one school. Iowa. And if I was an Iowa fan ... wait. I am an Iowa fan. Make the jump and see what has me feeling punchy. I promise I'll get around to the games eventually.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten previews the upcoming weekend's action in The Conference Everybody Loves to Hate.

Oh, it's here. It's finally, finally, finally here. No more depth-chart speculation, no more arguing about who is the best SAM in the conference, and only one more week until the game that will either restore the Big Ten's swagger or send it sobbing into the bathroom. The teams are ready, the stadiums are ready (well, except for Minnesota's), the cheerleaders and bands are ready, the vast charcoal forests of northern Michigan have been shaved to the ground, the beer cows of Wisconsin have been "milked" into millions of brown glass bottles ... it's time for some football, y'all.

So, grab a beverage, throw some cheddarwurst on the grill, and let's take a look at this weekend's action-packed slate of games, shall we?

The Wisconsin Badgers open a pivotal season in a little more than a week. Off a 7-6 season that ended with an embarrassing home win and a blowout at the hands of Florida State in the Champs Sports Bowl, the Badgers are expected to show progress under fourth-year coach Bret Bielema this season.

When they take the field against Northern Illinois Sept. 5 in Madison, they'll have a new starting quarterback. The team's depth chart for that game was released Thursday, and senior Dustin Sherer has surrendered the gig. We just don't know who won the job yet.

Every week during college football's endless offseason, The FanHouse Walk will put last week's stories to bed and deliver the essentials to bridge that agonizing space between now and September.

Good Cop Bad Cop -- The American Football Coaches Association is trying to inject some sportsmanship into an opening week pregame near you. The AFCA has put forth a non-binding proposal that teams shake hands en masse before each Week 1 game, roughly four minutes before spending the next four hours in violent, competitive, collision-heavy contact.

Kudos, I guess. It's well-meaning and doesn't necessarily do any harm, but this seems more for show than sincerity given the necessarily violent nature of the game. As AFCA honcho Grant Teaff says, "It is symbolic, but it is, we think, a very important initiative." Meanwhile, the NCAA rules committee has cooked up its own, much more dangerous plan to counter unsportsmanlike play.

After a wildly successful start to his coaching tenure at Wisconsin, Bret Bielema had a rough go of things in 2008. The Badgers started well, but slumped badly at midseason, lost three insanely close games where they blew late leads, and needed three missed extra points to beat a FCS team in their season finale. That all preceded the Badgers getting absolutely thrashed by Florida State in the Champs Sports Bowl.

These problems have led to some Badger fans grumbling about Bielema's job status. While athletic director Barry Alvarez didn't want to formally place the coach on the hot seat, his comments paint a different picture.

The college football season is fast approaching, with many fall camps set to open this week. Thus it's time to lay aside our interregional bickering and turn our thoughts to, you know, what might actually happen on the field.

The big question in the Big Ten this season is whether Penn State's conference championship was just a momentary burp in the conference's Buckeye-dominated food chain, or whether things might actually be shifting just a bit in the conference. Do the Buckeyes claim the title again? Will the Nittany Lions defend last year's crown and make a run at the national title? Will there be some giant, world-rocking surprise team that comes in and knocks them both out of the BCS?

Make the jump and all shall be revealed.

Big Ten Media Days are now under way in Chicago, hot on the heels of the goat auction that was SEC Media Days last week. This is sort of like chasing a shot of Glenfiddich with a can of room temperature Diet Squirt, but we press on regardless. The Big Ten's fortunes are muddled and murky, but the conference still matters, and not just in the Midwest, either.

Thus, it behooves us to look at some of the bigger questions surrounding The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight Big Ten football in 2009. Can anybody from the conference make a run at a national title? Are there any dark-horse Heisman candidates out there? And aren't these awfully heady questions to be asking of a conference that went 1-6 in bowl games last season? Make the jump and find out.