FanHouse JimTressel

It's barely spring here in the Midwest but spring football is well under way, and there's abundant intrigue in the Big Ten conference. Coming off what seems like the 46th consecutive disappointing bowl season, including a Rose Bowl where Penn State's Daryll Clark (right) did his best but the Nittany Lions still couldn't beat Southern Cal, nobody will be expecting much from the conference or its teams when fall rolls around. Somebody has to win it, however, and now is when the jockeying for position really begins.

FanHouse gathers around the TV to bring you insights from Bowl Season '08.

The Fiesta Bowl is tonight. You've probably seen some of the hype and discussion. Ohio State and Texas aren't exactly programs that can fly under the radar, particularly in a game worth eight figures for each school and conference. Both coaches own national championships, and the Heisman Trophy runner-up and quarterback of perhaps the best team in the land will be playing. So will many other great athletes you will see on Sundays.

So, too, will a true freshman quarterback with average numbers, and he's the source of this week's tempest in the teapot that is Glendale, Arizona. You see, Ohio State withheld their still-developing, perhaps immature phenom quarterback named Terrelle Pryor from a scheduled media event. Fiesta Bowl officials promptly flipped out.

1-5, with one game to go. One chance left to raise the conference's winning percentage to a mighty .285. And that chance rests on the less-than-broad shoulders of the Ohio State Buckeyes. Expecting the Buckeyes to show up in a big nonconference game is like expecting a bridge made out of meringue to hold up underneath a couple SUVs. It's just not something a sensible person would ever do.

It's not like anybody expected more of the Big Ten in this year's bowl games. Most folk expected the conference would be lucky to win one game and not only were they right, they were right about which game that would be. Iowa's 31-10 slashing of South Carolina is about the only thing the conference can be proud of.

Yes, Penn State had a good second half against USC. Wahoo! They almost came back against college football's laziest elite program! There's something to hang your hat on. Look at the rest of the games, if you dare. You can be a little proud of Northwestern for giving Missouri more fight than anyone expected, but there's a big fat load of Florida State 42, Wisconsin 13 festering out back, waiting for you. Crimony.

The bowl selection of Texas and Ohio State to the Fiesta Bowl is alternately disappointing (for Mack Brown's crew) and fairly thrilling (for Jim Tressel's Buckeyes). See, Texas beat everyone they were supposed to, with the exception of Texas Tech, who the Longhorns happened to lose to near the end of the season. Ohio State, on the other hand, got de-pantsed by Southern Cal in the third week of the season and later lost to Penn State in a close game.

In other words, the Buckeyes have, for all intents and purposes, done the same thing this year as they have in the past -- win against an easy schedule and luck out by not having any tough games to close the year, much less a Big 10 championship game to play in.

They finished second in a freaking weak conference, pummeling third-place finisher Michigan State 45-7, and for that they get rewarded with a BCS appearance. So, yeah, they should be thrilled.

Except they're playing a pretty cheesed-off Longhorn team that hasn't really started to complain how the BCS system is effectively screwing the best regular-season team of the year out of a shot at winning a national championship.

And even worse for the Buckeyes, Texas has a good reason to get up for this game -- a really, really strong showing by the Longhorns will give them plenty of reason to clamber about not getting a shot at a) the Big 12 championship or b) the BCS championship. And since I have zero faith in a Big 10 team coming out and dominating a Big 12 team that's fired up, I'll take the Longhorns by double digits in this one.

Hell hath no fury like a sports dad scorned, and Buckeye receiver/returner Ray Small's dad isn't pleased that his son will not play in this weekend's OSU-Northwestern game. Buckeye coach Jim Tressel suspended the younger Small for one game--"to start with," in Tressel's words--for repeatedly violating team rules.

Small's dad, Ken Small, is calling shenanigans.

"They're intentionally trying to blow his career," Ken Small told The Associated Press by telephone from his home in suburban Columbus.

There is evidence to suggest that Ray Small is blowing his own career, without any help from the Ohio State coaching staff. He was "demoted" from jersey number 4 to number 82 last spring; he is also the only Buckeye on scholarship without a biography in the school's media guide. Hence, he's clearly been in trouble before, and maybe he hasn't quite gotten the message yet.

Small's dad doesn't dispute that his son violated team rules, stating that Ray Small had been late for classes and meetings and had some parking tickets. So give him credit for staying away from the "Not My Kid" syndrome familiar to anybody who's ever worked with kids and their parents. Ken Small has something else he's pondering, though, and it's worth looking at.

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

RIGHT: Brian Hartline, the harbinger of Spartan doom.

Look, I tried to warn you. I told you last week that Michigan State just didn't have enough defense to contain the Buckeyes. The only thing that shocked me about the outcome of that game was how easy it was for Ohio State. Clearly, I failed to consider the possibility that ur-conservative Jim Tressel might start letting Terrelle Pryor throw deep. Clearly, neither did Mark Dantonio, who probably went into his office after the game and knocked all the stuff off his shelves.

Tressel did it the way you're supposed to do it. He used the running abilities of Pryor and Beanie Wells as bait. Once the Spartans were forced to stick close to the line of scrimmage lest they give up another 20-yard (or more) run, Pryor hit Brian Hartline on a 56 yard pass. That marked the official beginning of the "we don't know what to do next" phase for Sparty. Enter fumbles and interceptions; exit, Sparty's hopes of being a dark horse.

The Spartans get to recoup against a doddering Michigan team which once again wasted a good half of football in order to become the latest thing stuck to the bottom of Joe Paterno's shoe. The Buckeyes move on, too, for their second Clash of the Titans remake of the season.

Blame it on Bob Stoops. If you don't want to blame it on Stoops, blame it on Jim Tressel. If not Tressel, then Urban Meyer. All three of those guys took over high-profile programs. All three won national titles in their second seasons. Now any school thinks it can do the same thing. If you're a coach and you can't get your program turned around by the middle of the third season, there will be a fire(yournamehere).com website. And you can look forward to a variety of stock arguments as to why you should be unemployed.

The problem, of course, is that most of these arguments are completely worthless. Don't believe me? Let's investigate.

"We can't let this program sink any further into mediocrity!" Yeah, that's what Steve Pedersen said when he fired Frank Solich and brought in Bill Callahan. I suppose you could argue that Pedersen was correct; instead of sliding into mediocrity, he let the program degenerate into irrelevance. Unless your team just went 0-12, "up" isn't the only possible direction a new coach can take your program.

Look, I'm not the one saying Charlie Weis is underpaid. It's the fine folks over at Coaches Hot Seat who claim that the best-paid coach in college football isn't making enough. Notre Dame's head coach makes $4.2 million a year, but Coaches Hot Seat says he ought to be paid $5.25 million.

Where do they get off saying this stuff? They didn't just pull that number out of thin air. Coaches Hot Seat figures that a coach should be paid 7.5% of his school's football revenue. Why 7.5%? I don't know, but they claim that the average coach takes in 7.61% of the team's football revenue, so their numbers seem reasonable. Still, take all this with a grain of salt.

Weis is getting shafted by more than a million bucks a year, so is he the most underpaid coach in college football? Nope. Not even close. The school getting the biggest bargain, as measured in sheer dollars, is Georgia. Few can argue with Mark Richt's record as the head Bulldog and, at $2.2 million a year, he probably doesn't remember what ramen noodles taste like. CHS says he ought to be getting just under $5 million. Mack Brown? Underpaid. Jim Tressel? Ditto.

The list of underpaid coaches doesn't stop there.

After getting embarrassed by the USC Trojans two weeks ago, there were plenty of people in Columbus saying that Terrelle Pryor should take over the starting quarterback job, and that Todd Boeckman should be relegated to clipboard holding. Well, as I said at the time, if Jim Tressel wanted to give his freshman phenom a shot, it would be best to do it in the Buckeyes two games against Troy and Minnesota before moving on to face Wisconsin.

Well, Jim listened to me (or himself, whatever) and Pryor played nearly every snap last Saturday, and though the Buckeyes sputtered in the first half, Terrelle threw four touchdowns in Ohio State's victory. It looks like coach Tressel liked what he saw, because he's named Terrelle the starter this weekend against the Golden Gophers.

"I would call Terrelle the starting quarterback," Tressel told The Repository. "I don't know that that means 95 percent of the snaps or 65 percent, or whatever. But I would consider him that.

"From a knowledge standpoint, he's further along than I've ever seen a freshman quarterback. Then you add the dimension of what he can do with his feet, maybe it makes up a little bit for when you're a little shorthanded at running back compared to what you thought you were going to be. ... What's important is we do what we think is the best thing that can help us at the moment."

All of this combined with the fact that Beanie Wells should be returning this week, and now maybe the Buckeyes can start playing like the team everybody thought they were. You know the Trojans are hoping they do.

After their latest national spotlight embarrassment, this time at the hands of the USC Trojans, there isn't much to be happy about in Columbus, Ohio. Tack on the fact that many of Columbus' citizens are currently without power thanks to the remnants of Hurricane Ike hitting Ohio over the weekend, and the Buckeye faithful are downright surly at the moment.

If there was anything in the Buckeyes blowout loss that was a positive for Ohio State, it was the play of Terrelle Pryor. Pryor looked like the only Buckeye who even deserved to be on the field with the Trojans on Saturday night, as he completed seven of nine passes for 52 yards and rushed for another 40. As you'd expect after such a loss, the calls for Pryor to take over the starting job have already begun.

It may make a few people in the Buckeyes locker room uneasy, most notably coach Jim Tressel, but there would be no controversy. Pryor, an all-world talent, showed Saturday night against USC that he is ready, maybe not to run all of the plays Boeckman does, or to read defenses the way Boeckman does, or to hang with the upperclassmen the way Boeckman does, but ready to help the Buckeyes regain some of their lost national respect.