The Big Ten Is Back

A perception-crushing week way back in early September put the Big Ten on life support without much chance of surviving.

But instead of pulling the plug and making funeral arrangements, the league hung on and gradually regained strength—if not reputation.

Now, after Ohio State bested Alabama in the Sugar Bowl to cap a trio of significant bowl wins for the conference, the Big Ten is quite alive. In fact, it just stomped all over what's left of the smoldering corpse that is the SEC's dominance.

OSU will be playing for a national championship, something it—and its conference—hasn't had a chance to do in seven years. Meanwhile, the long run of SEC dominance is officially over, rendered limbless over the course of bowl season and then decapitated on the first day of 2015.

The 42-35 outcome wasn't a fluke victory for the Buckeyes, nor was it a matter of running into a disinterested opponent that may or may not have had some issues that prevented it from playing at peak performance. Nope, this was the flagship program of a much-maligned conference standing up for the rest the league—which, by the way, combined to win three huge games on Thursday—and planting a B1G right in the heart of SEC country.

OSU now gets a chance to bring home its first championship since January 2003. But even if the Buckeyes can't beat Oregon in the first playoff-fueled title game in Arlington, Texas, on Jan. 12, that should in no way diminish what they and the entire Big Ten have accomplished this season.

In fact, because Ohio State is the one that officially ended the SEC's massively impressive streak of playing for a title in eight straight seasons, it is automatically guaranteed it and the Big Ten won't be forgotten when it comes to remembering the dawn of the playoff era.

"The Big Ten has fixed its perception problem," wrote Nicole Auerbach of USA Today. "...Thanks to that one fell swoop, the nation regained respect for the league and also its players. No longer were they too slow or too small to compete with the big boys, particularly those in the SEC."

To think, by the time the second week of the 2014 season had been completed, many were performing last rites on one of the country's most tradition-rich leagues.

Yes, Sept. 6 wasn't a good day in Big Ten country: Ohio State was shocked at home by Virginia Tech, a team that would end up going 6-6; Michigan was shut out at Notre Dame, the beginning of the end for coach Brady Hoke; and Michigan State came up short in the conference's best out-of-league audition, giving up a nine-point lead at Oregon before getting run over by the eventual national finalist.

With only four spots divvied up among five power conferences, at least one was going to get left out. It was fair to assume the Big Ten would be that one with the early struggles of its teams, but then the exact thing the Big Ten needed to happen happened: Ohio State kept winning. And winning. And winning some more, in increasingly impressive fashion.

Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

Think about it: The Buckeyes went to Michigan State, arguably the league's second-best team and won by 12. That might not seem like a big deal, though Baylor (which blew a 20-point, fourth-quarter lead to the Spartans in Thursday's Cotton Bowl) might beg to differ.

OSU then destroyed Wisconsin in the conference final, shutting down the most prolific running back we've seen in college football for years. You know, the same guy who ran for 251 yards and three touchdowns in an overtime win over Auburn in Thursday's Outback Bowl? Yeah, that Melvin Gordon.

Those results—combined with plenty of narrative about head-to-head matchups and the importance of conference title games—enabled the Buckeyes to slip into the playoffs as the No. 4 seed, which was a spot that didn't exist in the previous BCS system. That format likely would have pitted Alabama and Florida State for the title, a matchup that, based on Thursday's results, would have been to determine the third-best team in the FBS.

Given another opportunity to prove itself and define where it comes from, OSU slayed the ultimate of dragons on the way to the promised land. The Buckeyes fell behind early to Alabama, turning it over and looking shaky in the red zone, but it fought back and ran off 28 points to turn a 15-point hole into a pair of two-score edges in the second half.

The Big Ten sits 5-4 in bowl games, with one team (Iowa) left to play, compared to the SEC going 5-5 (with Florida and Tennessee yet to play). Those are pretty commensurate numbers until you break it down to the top- and bottom-tier participants.

Ohio State, Michigan State and Wisconsin, the Big Ten's three 10-win teams, all won (and beat a pair of SEC teams along the way). The SEC's 10-win teams went 2-2, with Georgia needing that bowl victory to get to double digits, and the conference lost four of its five New Year's Eve and New Year's Day games.

Follow Brian J. Pedersen on Twitter at @realBJP.