Football season is upon us, and tonight Ohio State begins its quest for another national championship with a task they’ll take on several times this year: Playing an unranked team.
As SEC envy has reached an all-time high, with coaches, mediots and fans from other conferences making outlandish, often unfounded boasts about the validity of their conferences against the SEC, here’s what the Big Ten had to offer:
Unranked Michigan lost @unranked Utah (17-24)
No. 20 Wisconsin was battered by No. 3 Bama (17-35)
Unranked Nebraska lost at home to unranked BYU (28-33)
Unranked Minnesota lost at home to No. 2 TCU (17-23)
Unranked Purdue lost @ unranked Marshall (31-41)
Unranked Penn State was humiliated at unranked Temple (10-27)
No. 5 Michigan State beat football juggernaut Western Michigan (37-24)
Unranked Northwestern defeated No. 21 Stanford at home (6-16)
Unranked Rutgers flexed its muscles against freaking lower division Norfolk State (63-13)
Unranked Indiana survived at home against the Salukis of lower division Southern Illinois (48-47)
Unranked Illinois beat unranked Kent State at a home scrimmage (52-3)
And unranked Maryland put up half a century at home against the pesky Spiders of lower division Richmond (50-21).
So if you’re scoring at home, before the Buckeyes take the stage tonight, that’s 6-6 for the Big Ten in its first weekend of football, with just one of those wins coming against ranked opponents. And three others against lower tier schools who won’t be in bowl games because they don’t even have bowl games in their division of football.
And folks, that’s the gauntlet Ohio State must run through to make it to college football’s 2nd edition of the playoff. Looking forward, at this stage, the fighting Urban Meyers play exactly one ranked team this season…the second to the last game of the season. Tonight they play @unranked Virginia Tech.
Meanwhile, Bama slaughtered its first of seven ranked opponents in Prime Time on Saturday night, making detractors about the Tide this season look as laughable as the Buckeye schedule. Since we live in a world where common sense is as extinct as the T-Rex, don’t expect analysts to acknowledge these facts over the airwaves or online. But for the love, shouldn’t they?
(Follow ITK on Twitter for Bama news, commentary and smack.)