Big Ten Football Morning Coffee: Leadership Defined at Michigan

Rise and shine, friends. Here's what's going down in the Big Ten today.

—One aspect of Brady Hoke's evidently successful approach to coaching is his reliance on senior leadership in the locker room. And yes, lots of coaches say "I want senior leadership," but that last part can be awfully nebulous; you can't just point at a senior and say, "lead, dammit!"

Per AnnArbor.com, Brady Hoke figured out exactly that fact when, after his Ball State team elected a captain who then immediately told Hoke he had no idea what leadership was. So now, Hoke sends his seniors to voluntary leadership seminars, nine in total, during the winter semester preceding their senior year. Hey, it gets results.

—So the BCS won't be called the BCS anymore, per Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com. Whatever. Get a proper playoff structure in place, then worry about labels. Otherwise it's like BP making its new logo a green-sun-looking thing, then turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into an oily death zone. But hey, pretty logo.

—Indiana is the sole Big Ten representative on Bruce Feldman's Top 10 list of the easiest non-conference schedules on CBSSports.com, playing Indiana State, UMass, Ball State and Navy. For whatever it's worth, Bill Snyder loved scheduling non-conference cupcakes when he was turning Kansas State around, and it worked; why not get wins wherever you can get them if you're the Hoosiers?

And moreover, why not get wins wherever you can get them if you're anyone in the Big Ten? Let's say you schedule a hard non-conference slate to "prepare" your team for the Big Ten. Then you go 2-2. Unless that preparation leads to at least two more wins out of eight conference games than you would have gotten with an Indiana-type schedule, that was the wrong move. Wins are what matter to polls and bowls, period.

—The Omaha World-Herald has a 30-year-deep, interactive database of the commitments/signees of the Nebraska football program from 1984 to present day. You can also look at players by their home state. The historical bios are still going up, but they go back a few years at least, and the ones the site does have are informative and often incorporate multimedia.

Note to newspapers: This is what you should be doing with your websites. You have decades of information in your archives; figure out how to organize and package it, and make your website a tool to do things you can't do on paper. Kudos to the World-Herald for figuring that out.