The Big Ten, Sam Brownlee, and the Ineptitude of National Sports Media

I'm sure my fellow Hawkeye fans recall Sam Brownlee, the walk-on tailback from Emmetsburg, Iowa, who, in 2004, was thrust into a starting role when the football gods took some twisted vengeance on Iowa running backs and tore up all of their ACLs.

Needless to say, Sam Brownlee was hardly the second coming of Earl Campbell. However, he didn't fumble the ball in over 100 touches, and picked up his blocking assignments. Meanwhile, Drew Tate worked some sort of magic, the Iowa defense destroyed everything in its path, and, somehow, with the worst rushing attack in the country, Iowa secured a co-Big Ten championship and a 9-2 record.

Hawkeye fans appreciated Brownlee, but knew that he would not touch the two-deep in 2005. In fact, I have to believe that anybody that followed national football on any level knew that.

Yet, I recall reading an article in a nationally distributed 2005 preseason college football rag that assumed that Brownlee would be the starting tailback that year, and made its prediction for Iowa football based on that assumption.

Since that time I have generally boycotted most national media.

Instead I have stuck to the usually extremely well-informed, well-thought-out blogosphere and the one or two national writers that seem to do more than watch and salivate over USC and Florida games.

However, after the unfortunate ending to last Saturday's Iowa-OSU game I happened to stumble across some of the idiocy written by the national gurus.

I'll skip any of the specifics and say that the consensus was that a win for OSU was not enough. A hard fought game on both sides was not enough. A dramatic game was not enough. A chess match (albeit a conservative chess match) was not enough.

The Big Ten is boring and conservative and teams don't play to win. They should play to score at least a combined 80 points and wing the ball around like they're playing basketball.

Anything less than that is sub-standard.

I find it funny that the national press is the most vocal about a playoff system, so that an unquestioned, all-out champion can be crowned. Yet, they are also the most vocal about teams not playing simply to win?

What, these multimillion dollar programs are playing just for the fun of it?

In the end you can certainly question both OSU and Iowa's conservatism. You can say that the coaches didn't have faith in their players. I suppose there is some degree of merit to those arguments.

The problem comes about when these minimally informed writers entirely dismiss Big Ten football simply because the coaches in question aren't aggressive enough.

If the Big Ten goes 6-0 in bowl games, will those wins get dismissed simply because the games were boring (according to what standard, I have no idea)?

And the particularly ironic thing is that the most aggressive coach in the Big Ten is currently sitting at the bottom of the conference, riding a six-game losing streak against FBS opponents, will probably not be going bowling for the second year in a row, and this despite the fact that he is coaching at one of the most storied and prestigious (i.e. recruits really well) programs in the country.