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

ABOVE: Rich Rodriguez manually adjusts his offense's expectations.

You always think you have it figured out, then you find out you were more than a little bit wrong. I thought Mark Dantonio had rewritten the usual rules of Sparty Logic (figure out what MSU should do against a particular team, then predict them to do the complete opposite, and bask in the glow of being right). I totally forgot that Sparty Logic was going to rub up against Tedford Logic (chew up the physical defenses, get totally flustered by finesse), creating a swirling white-hot vortex of derrrr centered right on my forehead.

And that other Michigan team? I don't even want to talk about them. Apparently they can lose two home openers in a row.

All this is a long-winded way of saying I went 8-2 in the first week, which seems pretty good, except the first week's games are usually easier to pick than low-hanging fruit. I can't promise to do better this week. I can and do promise to try. It helps that there's only two real games this week.

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

ABOVE: Sadly, Ohio State vs. Ohio State might be the best conference game of the season.

Are they over?

Are you sure?

Good. Can I admit now I didn't watch the Olympics at all last week?

Why would I, with the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year so quickly upon us? Why watch actual competition, real human drama, and the 43rd time-filler about strange things they eat in China when I could be hard at work trying to find out if 'Coastal Carolina' is a real university or just something they made up for a minor plot line on Dawson's Creek?

Really, to give the games in the first week of the season any thought at all is to give them more thought than they deserve. If you scratch real hard you might find half of a good game in the Big Ten this weekend. Of course, that's what I thought last year, and you know how that turned out. But what difference does it make? College football is back. Sort of. The really good games are a couple weeks off. But with most of the Midwest now getting the Big Ten Network, at least we'll be able to see these oh-so-compelling matchups.

Attention KMart shoppers: We have a blue light special in Columbus, where right now we're offering 22% off of national championship winning coaches. So says Forbes, which is out with a list it calls The Best (And Worst) College Football Coaches For The Buck (slideshow warning). According to their algorithm, Jim Tressel's $2.6 million annual salary is under the market rate for coaches with similar achievements. The Buckeye boss should be making just under $3.2 million a year.

That sounds like a lot of money, mostly because it is. Yet Forbes says that even Pete Carroll (2007 compensation estimated at $4.4 million) is underpaid. They say Southern Cal's coach should be making about a Chevy Cobalt more than $5 million a year, based on his two national titles. (No word on how the Stanford loss affected his overall value, alas.)

So cheer up, Buckeye fans; you may have lost two straight BCS Title Games, but (a) you actually made it to two straight BCS Title Games, and (b) you didn't overpay for the privilege.

Of course, if somebody's underpaid, somebody's overpaid too. Who's the most overpaid coach in college football, according to Forbes? Hint: his name rhymes with "irk parents."

As FanHouse previews each BCS conference, the college football songbook will cast an unflattering light on each conference in the only way we know how. First up, the Big 10.



Video Link


Photo Credits:

Deadspin

Losers With Socks

flickr.com user Marion Doss

Getty Images

Curtis Painter is mediocre

Ah, mediocre football. The annual rite of late summer where fans of middling programs congregate and tell each other things like "if our offensive line is solid then I don't see why we can't go to a New Year's Day Bowl." Soon, of course, love and hopes are, well, amended.

By "amended," of course, we mean "discarded in favor of bloodthirsty savages on sports talk radio complaining about the coordinators and accusing the team of not wanting to win." It's a strange reaction to a 7- or 8-win season, of course, one that ends up in a warm climate in late December (grisly exception: Motor City Bowl, war-torn Bosnia Detroit). The fans never seem to get it: it could be so, so much worse. Look at Minnesota last season.

While Michigan, Ohio State, and (usually) Penn State represent the perennial powerhouse typification for the Big Ten, the conference usually hosts quite a few more mediocre programs. 2008 is no exception. Let's look at some of the programs that, let's be honest, don't stand a prayer of taking the Big Ten crown this season.

This was way more difficult than it appears. Overrated players are usually at glamor positions on glamor teams; with Beanie Wells definitively not overrated, Penn State's general lack of star power, and everyone predicting doom for Michigan there was little to go around. So, like, I had to go with concepts. But not for #1.

1. Curtis Painter, QB, Purdue

I've posted on this before, when Mel Kiper put Painter in his top ten senior prospects for the NFL draft and a small portion of the logic center in my brain died. Last year, Painter was the beneficiary of a silky-soft schedule (nonconference: ND, Eastern Illinois, Central Michigan, Toledo, and Central Michigan again; in conference the Boilers missed Illinois and Wisconsin) and still couldn't put up good passer efficiency numbers, finishing 46th. His YPA dropped almost a full yard from his sophomore year, and when it came time to play the big boys Purdue's offense completely disappeared. And now he's lost Dorien Bryant, Selwyn Lymon, and Dustin Keller. No matter: Purdue's got a Heisman campaign going and Kiper's lost his mind. This is madness. Painter's immobile and erratic; he's not a wizard at reading defenses; his conference TD:INT ratio was 11:7. He'll be better this year, but closer to average than excellent.

One day after David Barrent, the top prospect in all of Iowa, decommitted from Iowa to sign on with Michigan State, Kirk Ferentz's beleaguered staff added a Hawkeye legacy. Running back Jordan Cotton, son of former Iowa fullback Marshall Cotton, announced today he'll become a Hawkeye.

Barrent apparently had cold feet from the get-go about his commitment to Iowa, and the team's off-the-field drama had something to do with his decision:

"The fact that it was in the press so much brought up thoughts of other schools even more," Barrent said. "I kept thinking about what I can have elsewhere."

Cotton, on the other hand, isn't so concerned:

"I'm not looking at Iowa like it's a bad place," Jordan said. "What happened is that some of their players put themselves in bad situations. I'm not going to do that."

You can't fault either player for their decision, really. As much as Iowa fans love Cotton's determined attitude and see him as the sort of player who can turn things around on and off the field, Barrent isn't wrong in wanting to distance himself from the zero-ring circus Iowa football is right now.

Still, at least part of Cotton's play-it-straight attitude has to come from his father, who now works at an Iowa correctional facility. No, it's not on the university campus.

Kirk Ferentz was on the podium at Big Ten Media Days today, and not surprisingly, football was not the main topic of conversation. Ferentz directly addressed the recent activity in Cedric Everson/Abe Satterfield case, in light of the letter from the alleged victim's mother which came to light earlier this week. The Des Moines Register reports what Ferentz said:

"The suggestion of a coverup - I can tell you this, I take great exception to that," Ferentz said. "If a logical person looked at this .... basically, you have to be morally bankrupt."

I'm not sure what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I guess he's saying that a person would have to have prejudged Ferentz and the rest of the UI administration to assume that they were trying to cover up the incident. As much as I don't like how the university appears to have handled the investigation, he's right. If he wanted to cover up the incident and keep it quiet, he wouldn't have suspended Everson and Satterfield immediately.

Ferentz also asked reporters not to hold the 2007 team against the 2008, but to judge them based "on its own merits." However, football doesn't exist in a vacuum, and until there's some sort of resolution to the investigation of the investigation, the specter of last season will cloud the season. Every Hawkeye miscue, on the field and off, will raise the question of whether the team is too distracted to function properly.

But so what? There are things far more important than making sure that a football team isn't too distracted. The courts are now handling Everson and Satterfield; that's out of the university's hands. What is in their control is how the investigation of the investigation proceeds. If they're smart, UI administrators will make sure that this time the Iowa Board of Regents has full access to everything the university knows about the case. That wasn't the case last time, apparently, and it led some of us misguided souls to think there might have been a cover-up.

FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

If people know anything at all about Iowa football, they know two things. First, they know the punchline to the joke "If there's three Hawkeyes in a car, who's driving?" (They know that mostly because that joke is older than Joe Paterno.) Second, they know that the visitors' locker room at Kinnick Stadium is painted pink.

It has not always been thus, of course. Hayden Fry, once he'd earned a little political capital in Iowa City, ordered the visiting locker room swathed in pink. Fry claimed he remembered that pink had a calming effect on people, and that (wink wink, nudge nudge) was his sole motivation behind the curious color choice. Oh, sure, occasionally some opposing coach would get a little worked up about it, but really, that was just part of the psychological gamesmanship Fry was noted for.

See? Just for fun. But any joke fails once it's taken too far, and in 2005, that's what happened. Hayden may have spent his political capital to get the opponent's locker room redone, but then there was some actual capital involved, and, well, suddenly it wasn't so funny.

Recall, if you will, that the University of Iowa's latest football-related legal scandal (aside from last night's public intox arrest of incoming freshman Riley Reiff, anyway) came about six weeks ago when freshman defensive backs Cedric Everson and Abe Satterfield were arrested in connection with an alleged sexual assault. What made the assault case peculiar is that it allegedly happened in late October, and investigations by public safety didn't even take place until about a month later. Everson and Satterfield transferred after the fall semester.

Why the long delay, you may be asking? The victim's mother wondered the same thing.

In a letter to the University dated November 19, 2007 and released today by the Iowa City Press-Citizen, the mother detailed a long list of frustrations in relation to the school's handling of the case. The concerns ranged from the university's preference to keep punishment for the alleged sexual assault "in house" to the general welfare and safety of the alleged victim.

The University offered a response that included the following passage:

The safety and well-being of the student has always been at the forefront of our concern. Each step of the way everyone involved with the University worked in accordance with University policy and procedures and attempted to convey those policies and procedures to the student and her family.

The mother's letter, however, paints a starkly different picture.