FanHouse CjBacher

The inaugural UFL draft took place on Thursday night, and at least a few names of the 96 called were recognizable ones.

Quick primer: The United Football League, which begins its first season of play in October, consists of four teams (Las Vegas, New York, Orlando and San Francisco). Each team has 20 players allotted to it -- we do not know the identities of those guys yet -- plus 24 draft choices. The four 60-man rosters would then be filled by players who are cut during NFL training camps, or who sign contracts in lieu of attending camps, like we hear J.P. Losman will do.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten tries to explain what's going on in the nation's least explicable conference.

RIGHT: What it felt like to be a Big Ten fan this week.

You had to expect a certain amount of grave-dancing and dead-horse abuse in the wake of Penn State's loss in Iowa City last weekend. What was unexpected was the number of pundits who spun this loss as a good thing for the Big Ten. Another title game loss (which everybody assumed would've happened) would have damaged the conference's reputation even more, if that was even possible.

Still, the loss actually is good from the Big Ten's point of view. It shows some of the second-echelon teams are beginning to come back to life. It also bears out Hasty's Law of College Football: Competition creates competitors.

Yeah, I know. The Big Ten's non-conference schedule is as weak as nursing home coffee. Whose isn't in the BCS conferences? In-conference competition creates competitors too, even though I created Hasty's Law to poke fun at Bill Snyder's nearly-annual November collapse.

Penn State hadn't really been tested, at least not in the way Iowa had been. They played a close game at Purdue and another close one at Ohio State. The Hawkeyes played four close games and lost all four by a total of fourteen points. They knew they didn't want to lose a fifth one. They felt the burn, and they did what they had to do.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten breaks down action across the conference. Except for the weeks when it just breaks down, period.

Okay, sure, but what about the rest of the conference? Once again, I get it; nobody outside of State College wants Penn State to win out and make it to the title game, particularly if it comes at the expense of a one-loss champion from the Big XII or SEC. The Coke-Bottle Glass Guy must pay for the coaching sins of the Sweater Vest Guy, and the whole conference suffers until, you know, they actually win something.

So I'm guessing that whatever SEC teams wind up in the Capital One and Outback Bowls will have it penciled in as an Insta-Win; ditto the Big XII and the Alamo Bowl, the likely destination for whoever is unfortunate enough to win the North Division. I don't know what to say, other than that it's hard to argue with somebody when they're probably right. Who knows? The conference might not even win the Motor City Bowl this season, given that it's likely they'll be facing a bevy of honked-off Ball State Cardinals.

Blame, of course, is like fruitcake: Somehow it seems like there's always enough to go around. Who do I blame for the fact that the Big Ten keeps getting force-fed giant bowls of Scorn Flakes? Go back to the first paragraph.

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

RIGHT: A typical offensive gameplan dreamed up by Woody Hayes.

So now there's one. One team all alone in first place, controlling its destiny. But hey, they have the week off.

The question is, "Has anything really changed in the Big Ten?" and the answer is a qualified "Maybe." The road to the Big Ten championship has run from Ann Arbor to Columbus ever since Murray Warmath hung up his whistle in Minnesota. In eight of the last ten seasons, either Michigan or Ohio State has won at least a share of the conference title; the last time anybody else won an outright title was 2001.

A shakeup in the conference might lead to a change in philosophy. If you can't win the Big Ten without a vertical passing game and the ability to defend same, we've seen the last of "three yards and a cloud of dust." Good riddance. The old-school power running game is ill-suited for the kind of football played in the other BCS conferences. Ball control works great in a game where neither team scores 30 points, but if you're down by ten with five minutes to play, you don't want to (and probably can't) start throwing the ball.

So, while I know Buckeye fans are in pain right now, it's a necessary pain. College football has reinvented itself in the past decade and, as usual, the Big Ten was the last to get the memo.

Sigh. Onward.

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

ABOVE: Minnesota native and Montana State alum Craig Kilborn is probably anticipating a different game than you are this Saturday.

Are you excited?

Are you REALLY excited?

I mean, it's not every week you get a matchup of this caliber, one between two teams who basically set the bar for other programs aspiring to mentioned in the same breath as them.

Every detail, every nuance, every last matchup on the field up to and including the training staff has been and will be dissected, analyzed, and compared as we all try to figure out just who has the edge, hoping that maybe we can make a solid prediction which later will allow us to say "Ha! I told you so!"

All across this great land of ours, this momentous date has been circled for months. Plans have been changed, vacations moved, even weddings accelerated or postponed, all to accommodate this very weekend. Yet "weekend" seems too, well, weak of a word to describe this truly ... epochal experience that may never come our way again. You will never forget The Game. Even if you, by some stroke of outrageous misfortune, happen to miss The Game, you will at least remember where you were when you heard The Score. It will be engraved into your mind's eye as surely as if it were chiseled in granite.

But enough about the Minnesota-Montana State game. Let's look at some of the other games first.

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.