In honor of the opening of Big Ten Media Days in Chicago, we wrap up the ten weird Big Ten moments with a look at what has to be the only moment of excitement or interest in the history of that venerable tradition. It came last season, when Mike Hart was chosen as one of the players to represent the Michigan Wolverines to the media.
You might remember that last spring, former Michigan quarterback Jim Harbaugh, who had just taken over at Stanford, commented in an interview that Michigan had a way of getting "borderline guys" into school. (For those of you not aware, Michigan is a very selective university. For those of you who are SEC fans, some universities have admissions standards.) Harbaugh was commenting about how Stanford (another highly selective school) had trouble attracting the very best athletes because a Stanford recruit needs qualifications beyond a good 40 time.
In context it's clear that Harbaugh was lamenting how great universities don't do their athletes any favors with the "jock majors" you find on almost every campus. It didn't really come across that way, however, and trust me, Mike Hart noticed.
If people know anything at all about Iowa football, they know two things. First, they know the punchline to the joke "If there's three Hawkeyes in a car, who's driving?" (They know that mostly because that joke is older than Joe Paterno.) Second, they know that the visitors' locker room at Kinnick Stadium is painted pink.
It has not always been thus, of course. Hayden Fry, once he'd earned a little political capital in Iowa City, ordered the visiting locker room swathed in pink. Fry claimed he remembered that pink had a calming effect on people, and that (wink wink, nudge nudge) was his sole motivation behind the curious color choice. Oh, sure, occasionally some opposing coach would get a little worked up about it, but really, that was just part of the psychological gamesmanship Fry was noted for.
See? Just for fun. But any joke fails once it's taken too far, and in 2005, that's what happened. Hayden may have spent his political capital to get the opponent's locker room redone, but then there was some actual capital involved, and, well, suddenly it wasn't so funny.
Illibuck. Paul Bunyan's Axe. The Little Brown Jug. Floyd of Rosedale. The Big Ten has some legendary rivalries, and those rivalries have some legendary trophies associated with them.
We're not here to talk about those, however. No, we're going to talk about those two things you see pictured above. One is a trophy affiliated with two natural rivals who, until very recently, didn't have a trophy to pass back and forth between them. The other commemorates a rivalry which came about because both teams involved needed a rival so their rivalry could be protected.
We'll start with the trophy on the right, the one that looks like it fell off the roof of a Ponderosa Steakhouse. That's the Heartland Trophy. It goes to the winner of the Iowa-Wisconsin game. Those two schools have been playing each other for decades but the trophy has only been around since 2004. Sure, it's not the stuff of legend, but the Hawkeye-Badger rivalry is as close as any. Wisconsin leads the all-time series, 41-40-2.
You don't want to know about that, though. You want to know about that thing on the left. That's what I'm here for.
Let's not kid ourselves: The Motor City Bowl seriously stretches the concept that there's no such thing as a bad bowl bid. Sure, it gives the MAC a much-needed bowl slot, since that conference seems to have the most bowl-eligible teams left stranded at home in the post-season. But for the Big Ten team involved, the extra couple weeks of practice are probably more of an enticement than the actual thrill of going to Detroit in late December.
Then again, the Big Ten's actual involvement with the Motor City Bowl is mostly theoretical. While the conference has had a deal with the bowl since 2003, only twice has the league actually supplied a representative: Northwestern in 2003, and Purdue last year.
So far as I know, it was I who coined the term "MACrifice" in reference to the tendency of Big Ten teams to schedule non-conference games against the dregs of that conference. The Motor City Bowl, in essence, is the revenge of the baby-sat. It's one thing to rough up a mid-major also-ran in early September; it's something else entirely to face a pretty good MAC team at a neutral site in December when everybody knows you're only there because you had a hopelessly mediocre season. The MAC team has nothing to lose; the Big Ten team has nothing to win.
Another weird Big Ten moment, another mandated rule change to deal with the embarrassment. Today we turn to the 2001 Michigan-Michigan State game, played at Spartan Stadium. Please remember that.
The Wolverines were 6-1, ranked sixth, and lossless in the conference prior to this game. Sparty came in 4-2 with two bad losses already in Big Ten play. But rivalry games are rivalry games, and even though Michigan seemed to have all the advantages, Michigan State kept it close right up until the final play of the game.
On the game's penultimate play, which started with 17 seconds still showing on the clock, Jeff Smoker ran wildly for the sidelines but didn't quite make it. The Spartans, who were out of time outs, scurried back to the line of scrimmage to spike the ball and take one last shot at the end zone. They snapped the ball with one second showing on the clock, spiked it ... and still had one second showing on the clock.
Michigan, of course, argued that the game should have ended. But did it?
There's probably no more unlikely final point total for a football team than four. There's only one way to achieve that score, and that's with two safeties. The only less likely total is one, the winner's score in any forfeited game.
In October 2004 two teams with killer defenses and iffy offenses met in Happy Valley. The Iowa Hawkeyes were having a pretty good season; the Nittany Lions weren't. A botched snap on the first possession of the game led to a PSU safety, giving them their first lead in a Big Ten game all season. Iowa, behind QB Drew Tate, couldn't find the end zone all day; if not for two Kyle Schlicher field goals, they'd have gone scoreless. But Penn State couldn't even accomplish that much on offense. Quarterbacks Zack Mills and Michael Robinson combined for 96 yards and four interceptions, including a game-icing pick late in the fourth quarter. Nit rushers contributed an additional 66 yards, for a game total of 162 yards of offense. Iowa's numbers weren't much better.
For fans like me who love to watch great defense the game was a treat. But late in the game came one of the harshest on-the-field disses one coach has ever laid on another.
Hayden Fry was, for the media, like having an Instant Money Quote button. The West Texan coach was always good for something lively and interesting with which to season an otherwise bland story. Fry's flamboyant, down-home verbiage was an especially welcome contrast to the usual tight-lippedness of Iowans and their public figures.
Big Ten Media Day 1983, however, was a slight exception.
On that day, a reporter asked Fry if he thought college football players should receive a salary in addition to their scholarships. Fry said yes, noting that times had changed since his playing days at Baylor in the late 1940s. Back then, he said, players got $15 a month just so they could do their laundry, though few players washed their own clothes. "That wasn't any big deal," said the coach, "because you could find a little dumplin' to do the wash and then take her out to eat."
Now, there are a lot of ways in which Waco and Iowa City are not alike. Iowa City is as progressive as people tend to think it won't be. Fry's comment may have been innocent, but it certainly wasn't taken that way.
Of all the ephemera associated with college football, probably the worst is that dreadful institution, the coach's TV show. While I can hardly claim to have seen them all, the ones I have seen have been (a) pretty much all the same, and (b) terrible. The production values are just a notch above something you'd see on the public access channel. The game film is nothing but the highlights your local news showed the night of the game. The commentary from the coach is usually empty of any non-obvious content. And you just know they only pick the fat, juicy hanging curveballs for the "Ask the Coach" segment. The shows are just a way to generate some additional income for the coach, because as we all know, college football coaches at the Division I-A Football Bowl Subdivision level don't get paid very well.
So today we turn our attention to what might be the only interesting moment in the entire history of these wretched programs. It involves a coach who ... well, he made a rather curious decision about how to remind people that the season wasn't over yet.
FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in Big Ten football history. ABOVE: Touchdown Jesus wept. Or would have, if only Hesburgh Library had been built in 1953.
You're the coach of the #1 ranked football team in the nation. It's 1953, and your school doesn't accept bowl bids. You're trailing at home, 7-0 to an unranked team. It's just before halftime. You have the ball deep in their territory. The clock is running. You're out of time outs. What do you do? Do you (a) run a quick pitch towards the sidelines, (b) spike the ball, (c) take a knee and regroup at halftime, or (d) order your players to flop around like carp thrown on the riverbank, hoping the referee will call an injury time out so you can run one more play?
Now let's say it's late in that same game (very late) and you're now down 14-7. Again, no time outs. Would you dare try (d) again, assuming you got away with it the first time? Would you even suggest that more than one player fake an injury, just to be sure the refs have no choice but to stop the clock? You would? Well, you know what that makes you?
It was a stupid rule, and everybody knew it was a stupid rule.
Rule 3-2-5-e went into effect for the 2006 college football season. The rule required that, on kickoffs, the game clock would start when the kicker made contact with the ball. (The old rule was that the clock started when the receiver touched the ball; on touchbacks, the clock didn't move at all.) The whole point of this rule was to speed up college football games, because as we all know, the biggest problem with college football is that the games just aren't over soon enough. That's why tens of thousands gather in stadiums and millions watch on TV, just so they can all share the same thought: Hurry up.
The rule was a blatant sop to the real power in college football: the television rights holders. They're the ones who want the games to fit into neat timeslots, lest they have to give money back to the advertisers because the commercials for the new Bacon-Looped Cheesy Ranch Chicken Meatball Wrap aired during the fourth quarter of the East Carolina-Duke game instead of the first quarter of Auburn-LSU, like the account executive promised.
Fortunately, Bret Bielema was there to save college football from itself.
