NCAA Football indiana Hoosiers

You can't win in college football without a few playmakers, and the Indiana Hoosiers just lost one of theirs. The team announced Wednesday that quarterback turned wide receiver Kellen Lewis is no longer part of the Hoosier football team. Lewis (right) was dismissed for the ever-classic "undisclosed violation of team rules."

This was not Kellen Lewis's first encounter with the UVOTR. He spent most of the past off-season under suspension as well, only to be reinstated just prior to fall practice. We didn't know what Lewis did back then, and we don't know what he did now, whether it was the same undisclosed violation, or a whole new one. It's clear, though, that IU's coaching staff had already lost a great deal of confidence in the one-time wunderkind.

It's barely spring here in the Midwest but spring football is well under way, and there's abundant intrigue in the Big Ten conference. Coming off what seems like the 46th consecutive disappointing bowl season, including a Rose Bowl where Penn State's Daryll Clark (right) did his best but the Nittany Lions still couldn't beat Southern Cal, nobody will be expecting much from the conference or its teams when fall rolls around. Somebody has to win it, however, and now is when the jockeying for position really begins.

Hey, it's always football season at FanHouse. Welcome to "Greetings From Flyover Country," a new weekly feature that will keep you up to date on Big Ten, Big 12, and MAC football. We'll also cover any Midwestern stories which have national repercussions, along with rounding up the week's arrests and suspensions.

We start this week with a decision bound to have people from San Ysidro to Bangor scratching their heads. Please give a moment's thought to the worst aspect of the last postseason. While the Big 12 championship was settled on the field, the Big 12 South championship wasn't. Instead, the conference gave the division title to Oklahoma, because they use the BCS rankings as a tiebreaker.

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.

Joe Tiller's farewell tour never materialized as planned this season -- after beating Central Michigan to go to 2-1, the Boilermaker lost seven of eight games, quarterback Curtis Painter found his way to the bench, and the Purdue offense sputtered mightily.

In four games during that 1-7 stretch, Purdue scored one touchdown or less. Pretty much the exact opposite of what we've come to expect from Tiller's teams (except for the occasional bomb-out against ranked teams).

Today marked Purdue's last chance to send Tiller into retirement -- which will include fishing in Wyoming, according to the broadcast -- with an offensive show befitting the long-time Purdue coach. And, boy, did Purdue ever deliver. With Painter back in the starting role, the Boilermakers' offense clicked on all cylinders. Tiller's bunch had 11 possessions against arch-rival Indiana, and scored on the first 10 en route to a 62-10 win.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten tries to describe football action in the conference everyone else calls "overrated."

RIGHT: The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, which won't be missed by very many people in the Big Ten.

And so it has come to this, the ultimate weekend of the penultimate season when Big Ten football ends before Thanksgiving. Starting in 2010, the Turkey Day tables will be a little less crowded as everyone's season extends to the last weekend of November. But that's two years from now. This weekend we say goodbye to the conference's second-longest serving coach, and bid a fond farewell to its least-loved stadium. Along the way we sort out who's going where when, and how all the teams will be positioned for next year.

Before we get on to the games, a note about the Big Ten's bowl selection process. The conference does not require bowls to select teams in order of their finish, but requires that a selected team have no more than one fewer win than the remaining team with the best record. Thus, a seven-win team can be picked before an eight-win team, but not a nine-win team. Oh, and if the league gets two teams into the BCS, some of the non-BCS bowls get to ignore all the rules.

This had to be a difficult week for Penn State - losing a heart-breaker at Iowa last week cost Joe Paterno's boys a shot at the national title, so a lull could be expected.

And right on cue, the Nittany Lions sleepwalked through the first half against 3-7 Indiana this afternoon. This is an Indiana team that lost at home to Wisconsin 55-20 last week, and came into today as a 35-point underdog, but played the Nittany Lions to a 10-7 halftime score.

You have to give Indiana some credit for going into Happy Valley and playing solid - but this is more about PSU's lack of energy than anything the Hoosiers put together. I'm sure Paterno won't be making any excuses (eh ... maybe he will), but between last week's letdown and next week's Big Ten-deciding clash with Michigan State, this was an easy one to overlook.

There's probably no reason for long-term concern, but given the visit from Michigan State upcoming, a solid second half would be nice for Nittany Lion eyes to see (and it's off to a good start, with a quick touchdown).

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten tries to explain what's going on in the nation's least explicable conference.

RIGHT: What it felt like to be a Big Ten fan this week.

You had to expect a certain amount of grave-dancing and dead-horse abuse in the wake of Penn State's loss in Iowa City last weekend. What was unexpected was the number of pundits who spun this loss as a good thing for the Big Ten. Another title game loss (which everybody assumed would've happened) would have damaged the conference's reputation even more, if that was even possible.

Still, the loss actually is good from the Big Ten's point of view. It shows some of the second-echelon teams are beginning to come back to life. It also bears out Hasty's Law of College Football: Competition creates competitors.

Yeah, I know. The Big Ten's non-conference schedule is as weak as nursing home coffee. Whose isn't in the BCS conferences? In-conference competition creates competitors too, even though I created Hasty's Law to poke fun at Bill Snyder's nearly-annual November collapse.

Penn State hadn't really been tested, at least not in the way Iowa had been. They played a close game at Purdue and another close one at Ohio State. The Hawkeyes played four close games and lost all four by a total of fourteen points. They knew they didn't want to lose a fifth one. They felt the burn, and they did what they had to do.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten breaks down action across the conference. Except for the weeks when it just breaks down, period.

Okay, sure, but what about the rest of the conference? Once again, I get it; nobody outside of State College wants Penn State to win out and make it to the title game, particularly if it comes at the expense of a one-loss champion from the Big XII or SEC. The Coke-Bottle Glass Guy must pay for the coaching sins of the Sweater Vest Guy, and the whole conference suffers until, you know, they actually win something.

So I'm guessing that whatever SEC teams wind up in the Capital One and Outback Bowls will have it penciled in as an Insta-Win; ditto the Big XII and the Alamo Bowl, the likely destination for whoever is unfortunate enough to win the North Division. I don't know what to say, other than that it's hard to argue with somebody when they're probably right. Who knows? The conference might not even win the Motor City Bowl this season, given that it's likely they'll be facing a bevy of honked-off Ball State Cardinals.

Blame, of course, is like fruitcake: Somehow it seems like there's always enough to go around. Who do I blame for the fact that the Big Ten keeps getting force-fed giant bowls of Scorn Flakes? Go back to the first paragraph.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten breaks down action across the conference.

RIGHT: A typical offensive gameplan dreamed up by Woody Hayes.

So now there's one. One team all alone in first place, controlling its destiny. But hey, they have the week off.

The question is, "Has anything really changed in the Big Ten?" and the answer is a qualified "Maybe." The road to the Big Ten championship has run from Ann Arbor to Columbus ever since Murray Warmath hung up his whistle in Minnesota. In eight of the last ten seasons, either Michigan or Ohio State has won at least a share of the conference title; the last time anybody else won an outright title was 2001.

A shakeup in the conference might lead to a change in philosophy. If you can't win the Big Ten without a vertical passing game and the ability to defend same, we've seen the last of "three yards and a cloud of dust." Good riddance. The old-school power running game is ill-suited for the kind of football played in the other BCS conferences. Ball control works great in a game where neither team scores 30 points, but if you're down by ten with five minutes to play, you don't want to (and probably can't) start throwing the ball.

So, while I know Buckeye fans are in pain right now, it's a necessary pain. College football has reinvented itself in the past decade and, as usual, the Big Ten was the last to get the memo.

Sigh. Onward.