With the anti-Big 10 nonsense that is currently dominating the media, many overlook one shining example of Big 10 superiority: coaching.

Of course, great coaching is not limited to a particular conference. There are examples of excellence from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Starting on the left coast, consider Carroll & Tedford. One is considered a genius by general consensus, the other a rising superstar who does scary things with average players and sub-par facilities.

Crossing the Rockies into the Big 12, one first has to scale the wall erected by Bob Stoops to keep the best players from the Plains states in-house, where 10-win seasons and national title contention is the minimum acceptable level of performance.

Continuing east across the Mississippi, men like Les Miles and Urban Meyer stand out as consistently above their peers, even during those off-years when the talent they’re coaching is not. Steve Spurrier and his dominant teams of the 90s should also be mentioned, here.

But cross north of the Ohio River Valley and you enter a land dominated by coaching excellence, tradition, skill, and competitiveness that is unequaled anywhere else in college football. Other conferences have their leaders, but none is as deep as the Big 10. Consider just a few examples:

Jim Tressel
The Sweatervest is the only active coach in Division I-A with five or more national titles in any division. Since taking over OSU’s job in 2001, he has an 83% winning percentage, which includes the aberrant 7-5 record earned his inaugural season after taking over the team from the fired John Cooper. In the seven years since joining the Big 10, his teams have earned the conference title four times and gone 4-2 in bowl games, including two BCS title games (one win, one loss in each). In 2007, despite losing a Heisman-winning quarterback and seven “skill position” starters to the NFL, he coached his team to another Big 10 championship and third BCS title game appearance. With a victory against LSU, he’ll be the only coach in history to have two BCS titles.

Ron Zook
Zook’s coaching success started at OSU in the 80s, followed shortly thereafter with a stint with that dominant 90’s Spurrier staff. In 2005, he inherited a rock-bottom Illini program and improved it from 2-10 to 9-3 by his third year. Zook recruited and trained most of the starters on Florida’s 2006 national championship squad. In 2007, his team finished tied for second-place in the Big 10, which included a road victory over #1 Ohio State, and his 2008 team will be favored by many to win the conference.

Lloyd Carr
What can one say about Carr that hasn’t been blogged about incessantly over the past few weeks? I’ll plagiarize Brian, here:

Michigan in the Carr era: 121-40, one national championship, two BCS bowl wins, five conference titles, five bowl wins, no losing seasons.

‘Nuff said. Sure, we’ve had our fun with Carr, but we wouldn’t dare argue that he wasn’t a pillar to the college football coaching community.

Joe Paterno
Is there really a need to list JoePa’s career accomplishments here? He’s the winningest coach in history for a reason.

Joe Tiller
I list Tiller here because he is more responsible than any other coach for bringing in the modern era to the Big 10. Tiller’s “Basketball on Grass” made the rest of the Big 10 sit up and take notice of how best to combine speed and spread formations. If Tiller had ever acquired a competitive defensive coordinator, the past decade of Big 10 champions might have looked a lot different.

Bret Bielema
Since being selected by Barry Alverez as his successor two years ago, he’s gone 21-4, including a 12-1 inaugural season (which has only been done three times in NCAA history). That’s something that Tressel didn’t even accomplish at OSU, and Bielema’s done it with Alverez’s recruits. No doubt UW will become even stronger as Bielema’s initial recruiting classes get more playing time over the upcoming seasons.

Mark Dantonio
As of 2007, Dantonio is still getting settled in as new coach of MSU, but his history of success at multiple levels and for multiple teams is proof of his coaching prowess. Dantonio served as an assistant coach on all of Tressel’s dominant staffs, from YSU to OSU, including coaching the national-champion 2002 Ohio State defense. As head coach of Cincinnati, in his first year alone he led his team to its first winning season in 23 years, and directed the team into the Big East (where they beat an undefeated #7 Rutgers squad). Dantonio has the same challenge as his predecessors in East Lansing… how to woo talented players away from Ann Arbor. If he can be successful in that effort, there’s no question that MSU would transform back into an elite program.

Past Tradition
Finally, what would an article about Big 10 coaching be without mentioning men from the past such as (and in no particular order): Fielding Yost, Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, Barry Alverez, Fritz Crisler, Lovie Smith, Biggie Munn, Hayden Fry, Cam Cameron, Lou Holtz, Wes Fesler, Earl Bruce, etc., etc. There is no other conference with as deep a coaching tradition as the Big 10. All elements, motifs, and styles of modern football began as experiments and adjustments by the head coaches there. College football’s past is rooted in the Big 10, and the conference’s current group of coaches are continuing that tradition by being the most influential leaders and shapers of the sport.

So, over the next few weeks, as you hear over and over again how “OSU doesn’t have a chance to win the title,” or “Illinois doesn’t deserve to be in the Rose,” or “UM is going to lose by 900 to the Gators,” consider at least one area where the Big 10 has an advantage over everyone else, and don’t immediately discount any team that has such excellent leadership.

The ever-cogent SMQ fires a pre-emptive strike into the “SEC Speed” nonsensical argument that will no doubt reach insane proportions over the next month.

I realize it’s generally considered bad form (or just plain lazy) to past large blocks of text from someone else’s work into one’s own, but there’s simply too much wisdom here to trim down into small bites. SMQ makes no bones about his opinion of the “MNC” or the Buckeyes, so his credibility on the matter is to be respected.

The worst result of last year’s mythical championship game was the growth and perpetuation of this absurd notion of superior “SEC speed,” based not on the collective 40 times and shuttle drills of hundreds of players on a couple dozen teams that make up the SEC and Big Ten, but on a handful of plays in a single game that was decidedly outside the season-long patterns of both participants, and not demonstrably decided by “speed…” Based on everything we know from the dozen “samples” on both sides leading up to last January, that Florida team couldn’t beat that Ohio State team by 27 points again in a whole season of trying. There’s a reason the Gators were underdogs, and it’s not because they kept the fast guys under wraps when squeaking out wins against South Carolina and Vanderbilt.

Truth. He goes on with some advice for our overconfident southern brethren:

One would think the false sense of inevitability that followed Ohio State prior to last year’s championship (or USC the year before that, or that very, very fast Miami team in 2002, or, I don’t know, LSU, Ohio State, West Virginia, USC, Oregon, Michigan, Oklahoma, California, Florida or LSU again prior to stunning upsets over the last three months) would demonstrate the virtues of humility to fans everywhere.

…and offers a very realistic picture of what the title game will look like:

Based on everything we know from both teams’ performances this season, Ohio State and LSU should be a close, hard-hitting game between two of the few teams that still operate largely from traditional two-back sets on offense and do not hesitate to run old-fashioned isos, counters and traps into the line… It will be decided by the side that executes and catches the right breaks under the specific set of circumstances that unfold on Jan. 7… The athletes, the speed, all of that is a given. LSU and Ohio State have both turned in top ten recruiting classes each of the last four seasons. They’ve all got the athletes. They’ve all got the speed. The differences in raw talent on this level are nil. This championship, like all championships, will be about combining management, strategy and execution in the moment, and probably a bounce or timely flag or two. Not as catchy as “SEC Speed,” but anything more precise than wrongheaded, bumper sticker hubris rarely is.

Bravo. We’ve been complaining about the “SEC speed” myth for a long time now, but thanks to SMQ we now have a moniker for those who spout it: Bumper Sticker Hubris.

Link

After last night’s games, ESPN was quick to stir up angst towards the BCS system.

The SportsCenter and GameDay hosts kept asking “How terrible of a system do we have when, on the very last night of the CFB season, we don’t know who will be playing for the title?”

Listen up, my allergic-to-critical-thinking-ESPN-boneheads: It has nothing to do with the system. It has everything to do with nos. 1 and 2 going down in back-to-back weeks. Again:

If college football had a playoff, and the top two seeds went down, would you hear people complaining that the playoff system “needed to be fixed?” Of course not. So why is it the BCS’s fault when LSU, Kansas, Missouri, and West Virginia all lose within a span of eight days?

The truth? ESPN is pushing animosity towards the BCS because they can’t make more money off of it. Fox has the game, and the best ESPN can do is the Tostitos Pontiac Tampax BCS Selection Show sponsored in part by Joe Bob’s Tire and Lube (Sunday, 6 p.m. ET).

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: ESPN has become the MTV of the sports world. Programming, talking points, agenda items, etc. are all driven by (1) what makes the most money, and (2) the perception of what’s popular. The network’s once thoughtful commentary and analysis have turned into oft-repeated talking points and punditry.

Here’s an SAT analogy to make my point:

______ is to ESPN as Britney Spears is to MTV.

A. SEC Speed
B. Jeff Gordon
C. Tom Brady
D. Nelson Mandela
E. Three of the above
F. None of the above

Get it?

Take another example: Earlier this week, when Les Miles said that his team was ‘technically undefeated, because LSU’s losses were in overtime,’ all halfway-intelligent people on the planet collectively rolled their eyes and said, “oh, BROTHER.” Right? We all agreed that such a statement required a, oh, shall we say, a certain disconnection from reality.

Yet ESPN thought that argument sounded just witty enough that most mouth breathing brain dead fans might admire it, and decided to parrot it for a nationwide audience on SportsCenter. They actually showed and discussed a screen graphic that had LSU’s season itemized in the following manner:

LSU Tigers
Wins: 11
Losses: 0
Losses in OT: 2

Are you kidding me? They’ll insinuate that the Tigers had zero losses, just to get the SEC back in the title game? Pathetic.

But back to the BCS. Almost exactly one year ago, we published our “Wait to hate on the BCS” post:

“To me, all the BCS hatred seems a bit premature. I think fans should let the games play themselves out. Consider the following: What if Florida beats OSU? What if USC wins the Rose? What if UM wins the Rose, but needs a miracle (or just looks sloppy)? Any of the three outcomes would retroactively validate the BCS selections.”

In short, even though ESPN never admitted it, the BCS worked perfectly in 2006. It worked in 2005, too, when Vince Young beat the “best in hi$tory zomg !eleventy!11” USC Trojans.

In fact, in the decade of BCS selections, there has only been one season where the system clearly broke down: in 2004, when the system kept a deserving Auburn team out of the game.

But since then, the pollsters have taken it upon themselves to make sure that never happens again. They did it last year, by recognizing that Florida deserved a title shot & leapfrogging them over everyone else to #2. They’ll do the same thing this year, and once again choose a deserving team to match up against the Buckeyes.