FanHouse Bill Lynch

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten previews the weekend's action, settling the scores before the scores are settled.

Penn State has declared that Saturday night's game with Iowa will be a "whiteout" game. That distinction is usually reserved for games of the utmost importance, and if you don't know why this game is so important to the Nittany Lions, you must not remember what happened last year in Iowa City. A Daniel Murray field goal put the Hawkeyes on top and ended any hopes Penn State had of getting blown out by Florida playing in the BCS National Championship Game. It's time for revenge.

Penn State, however, is not the only Big Ten team with a little revenge on its mind this weekend.

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.

Sometimes a win is a win and you're just glad to have one. If you're Indiana, you can't afford to be too picky. The Hoosiers beat Eastern Kentucky, a Division 1-AA Football Championship Subdivision school, Thursday night, 19-13.

As the score might suggest, the EKU Colonels were in this one right to the very end. Twice in the fourth quarter the Colonels had the ball in IU territory with a chance to take the lead. Twice the defense came up with big plays. That's the only thing that saved Bill Lynch's bacon. His revamped pistol offense played pretty well in the first half but looked positively Oregonian in the second.

That's still a good sign, though, right? I mean, the defense did come up with the two big stops when they needed to, and wasn't EKU a playoff team last season?

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 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.

You can't win in college football without a few playmakers, and the Indiana Hoosiers just lost one of theirs. The team announced Wednesday that quarterback turned wide receiver Kellen Lewis is no longer part of the Hoosier football team. Lewis (right) was dismissed for the ever-classic "undisclosed violation of team rules."

This was not Kellen Lewis's first encounter with the UVOTR. He spent most of the past off-season under suspension as well, only to be reinstated just prior to fall practice. We didn't know what Lewis did back then, and we don't know what he did now, whether it was the same undisclosed violation, or a whole new one. It's clear, though, that IU's coaching staff had already lost a great deal of confidence in the one-time wunderkind.

While college football fans across the country await the start of the new season with a drooling fervor there are also some fans who dread it. Why? Because they know their season is already over before it's even started. Oh sure, their boys are still going to go out there every Saturday and play hard for 60 minutes, but it's not going to make a bit of difference.

They're going to lose, and they're going to lose a lot.

No conference can escape from having teams like this, it's just a part of the game. They still serve their purpose because the good teams in the conference need a breather once in a while, and they also need six wins to qualify for a bowl game.

These teams are the conferences dirty little secret. They're the red-headed step child that's told to stay in their room when company comes over. They are the dregs of Big Ten, and they're here to play another set of 12 games whether we want them to or not.

Troubling news out of Bloomington today, as incumbent starting quarterback Kellen Lewis was suspended indefinitely for a violation of team rules. Coach Bill Lynch declined to provide any additional details, but it doesn't sound good. One blog (DISCLAIMER: blogs are not to be trusted. Ever.) claims that multiple credible sources assert that Lewis is done, done, done.

If true, the news is devastating; put simply, the Indiana offense needs Kellen Lewis. In his first two seasons at the helm of the Indiana offense, Lewis amassed 57 touchdowns (42 passing, 14 rushing, one receiving) and well over 6,000 yards of total offense. Lewis was a freshman All-American in 2006, and was named to the All-Big 10 second team by both the coaches and the press. Meanwhile, behind him on the depth chart is redshirt sophomore Ben Chappell and, like, a traffic cone.

Making the suspension even worse is the early departure of superfreak wideout James Hardy, who will likely be taken in the first round of next month's NFL draft. With those two, the Indiana offense was a terror last season--Indiana topped 30 points in eight of their 13 contests. In light of the suspension, the Hoosiers now look positively toothless.

A few hours from now the Indiana Hoosiers will take the field to play Oklahoma State in the Insight Bowl. Depending on where you look, the Hoosiers are currently considered 6.5 or 7 point underdogs against the Cowboys. It doesn't matter though.

Whether the Hoosiers walk away from tonight's game with a victory or loss doesn't take away from a season that can only be considered a success in Bloomington. After all, the last time Indiana played in a bowl game was in 1993 when we were all singing along to Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" and Harrison Ford was still looking for the one-armed man.

Indiana would lose that Independence Bowl to Virginia Tech by a score of 45-20.