Is the Big Ten Conference Dying?

Last Thursday, September 3rd, an interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal by Darren Everson. He claimed that the country's oldest and biggest football conference was suffering in recent years from population shifts out of the Rust Belt. The South and West were beating up on the boys from the upper Mid West and East because there were more of them. Of course, he didn't mention how these same teams fare on the basketball court.

Then, this morning, while thinking about the really exciting game I'd seen on TV last night between Miami and Florida State and taking my morning coffee I came across the usual excellent letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal in response to this article.

I had to agree that these two Florida teams looked very good, maybe even getting close to AAA teams for the NFL. Various letters suggested other reasons for the apparent decline of the Big Ten football programs as the coaches like to call their teams: one suggested that it was primarily the bad weather in the Mid West which led to an exodus of good players to the warm weather of the South and West, and another suggested that the higher academic standards of the Big Ten schools led to the same result. Supporting data for all these arguments were noticeably absent.

It was pretty hard to tell much from the games that were played this weekend as many of the games featured teams that didn't come close to matching each other in any department of the game, e.g. Michigan State played Montana State! Wow, I hope that MSU got paid a lot for that one. The highlight video of two! blocked kicks in a row for Iowa to beat Northern Iowa was pretty good.

The picture was taken at Camp Randall—I think they still call it by that name—a few years ago, but it always looks the same on game day. This was part of a wild weekend in Wisconsin with my brothers. Saturday in Madison and Sunday in Green Bay. Whew!