FanHouse Ted Roof

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.

When Thaddeus Lewis arrived at Duke as a freshman quarterback in 2006, he had already given thought to his legacy with the Blue Devils. Lewis wanted to be recognized and remembered as the quarterback that started a new trend at Duke. It is called winning, a novel approach for a football program that last experienced a winning season in 1994.

Lewis hasn't accomplished his goal just yet, but he has certainly helped make Duke football fun again. The Blue Devils won four games in 2008, as many as they had won in the previous four years combined, and won their first Atlantic Coast Conference game since 2004.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, smart guy. You're thinking this post should be one letter long, and that letter should be 'F.' It's true that the Big Ten did little to advance its reputation during the season, and even less during the postseason. In spite of it all, there are still a few diamonds among the, um, whatever else it is the diamonds are scattered among.

They're scattered among things like 35-3, a 1-6 bowl game record, the fall of the Michigan dynasty, a tragically unwarranted and completely unjustified preseason overrating, several regressions to the mean, and the worst sendoff since the last episode of "Seinfeld."

So we'll go through the league team by team, painful as that is, to build up the successes and try to understand the failures of Big Ten football in 2008. Yes, I used "success" and "Big Ten football" in the same sentence without the connecting phrase "lack of." Deal with it, Buck. Every team gets an overall grade and a quick look at its prognosis for the 2009 season. For you Big Ten fans, I promise you it's not all bad news; for you Big Ten haters, I promise you it's not all good.

Okay, it was a long shot anyway. The Minnesota Golden Gophers would have needed Ohio State to lose one more game down the stretch. Then they had to hope that the Rose Bowl committee would continue to favor tradition over justice by picking a two-loss Big Ten team over a one-loss team from some other conference. The latter is likely (they took a three-loss Illinois team last year, didn't they?); the former, quite unlikely.

Still, how could you not root for them? On a day when Michigan's plus-size bowl streak came to an end, Minnesota's Rose Bowl drought is now guaranteed to continue. How long has it been since the Gophers played in Pasadena? Here's a clue: The last time the Gophers played in a Rose Bowl, it was the first time a nationally-broadcast college football game was shown in color. That would be January 1, 1962. Current Gopher coach Tim Brewster was just a little over a year old.

Then again, it's pretty obvious the Gophers are about a year away from contending for a title. Today Minnesota blitzed early and often, gambling that Northwestern's backup QB Mike Kafka wasn't quite ready for a big game. That proved to be a bad bet.

If the Minnesota Golden Gophers aren't the most improved team in college football this season, who is? Through seven weeks of play, Tim Brewster's squad is enjoying the sort of success that always seemed to elude his predecessor Glen Mason. The Gophers are now 6-1 with a signature road win over Illinois and their sole loss coming in Columbus.

Nobody was complaining about the Gopher offense last season. They just weren't up to the task of bailing out the nation's worst defense week after week. Statistically this season's Gopher offense is mid-pack by almost any measure. The difference is on the other side of the ball.

It's not that the Gophers have moved way, way up. It's that the Gophers had nowhere to go but up. Their defensive statistics this year aren't the stuff of dreams, but the Gophers are allowing, on average, about 130 fewer yards and 19 fewer points per game than they were a year ago. New defensive coordinator Ted Roof didn't work out as a head coach at Duke. Both Duke and Minnesota are happy for that.

Anybody can post good results against a squishy schedule, however. The Gophers hung in against their most challenging opponent to date (Ohio State) but failed to win. That raises the question of whether the Gophers can stand up against the other challengers in the Big Ten.

When you own the nation's longest losing streak, sometimes it pays to lean on a few bright minds.

Duke football coach Ted Roof has connected with the university's business school (one of the nation's finest) to figure out a way to turn the football program around.

As reported by the News & Observer's Michael Moore, business school students and athletic department staffers are looking at schools around the country with similar athletic traits as Duke to figure out what they're doing. Study enough schools, the theory goes, and they'll be able to build a reliable plan for a football turnaround at Duke.

[T]his plan will go far beyond recruiting and practice time, to encompass all football, developmental and financial operations of the program. The team is, as Naedele put it, "taking it to the MBA level."

Straight out of "Moneyball," Michael Lewis' book on baseball and business, the new plan will feature statistical regressions and cold, hard data about what exactly builds a winning program.

"Strategic plans have been around, but not with the rigor or discipline that we are doing here -- ours is very much based on comparative analytics and best practices," Naedele said.

The Blue Devils could use some outside-the-box thinking. Duke owns the nation's longest losing streak at 20 games. In addition, the football program, which brings in huge profits at most BCS schools, operated at a loss of nearly $1.7 million during the 2005-06 school year, according to the university's report under the federal Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act.

I like it. College football is rich with short-term turnaround stories. Look no further than Duke which had some success under Steve Spurrier. However, the lure of a bigger program took him to Florida and the Blue Devils haven't been the same since. With this effort, Duke appears to be thinking long term, at having a say when it comes to ACC football regardless of coaching regime.

(Via: The Wiz)