College Football Insider – Michigan and the Big Ten

We’ve been hearing how the Big Ten Conference has been down in football for at least the past five years, and much of that talk can be tied to the league’s top teams folding on the big stage.

Repeated blowout losses to USC in the Rose Bowl and a couple of bad losses by Ohio State in BCS Title games have been the main culprits in the Big Ten’s loss of national respect, and with each game, more and more reasons for the slide began to reveal themselves.

But now, with Rich Rodriguez’s system beginning to take shape at Michigan, the Wolverines could be the team that ushers in the final transition between the Woody and Bo “three yards and cloud of dust” era to modern college football.

Sure, the Wolverines only beat Notre Dame, but the Irish finally look like a legitimate BCS-caliber team, at least on offense, and it’s more the way Michigan won than how much they won by. All of a sudden, some of the pre-season NCAA futures odds on the Wolverines look as though they were way too conservative on UM’s chances to win the Big Ten or to get the predicted 7-8 wins.

The Wolverines boast more freshman and sophomores than any other team in the conference and yet they are now a major threat to the league’s top teams, Ohio State and Penn State.

For so long in the Big Ten, the teams with the best talent (Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State) were handcuffed by primitive schemes, especially on offense, while the teams that ran progressive systems (Northwestern, Purdue, Illinois recently with their turnaround from two wins to a Rose Bowl berth) didn’t have national title-level talent. The latter group all managed to have a few assorted big-time seasons despite not possessing anywhere near the skill of the former top teams.

Now that Michigan has made it through their transition year with Rodriguez and paid their dues, the Wolverines might be the team other programs will have to chase in the future and the team that sets a new standard in the Big Ten.

Ohio State and Penn State have added elements of the spread offense to their systems, but each team’s system is not nearly as complex and complete as Rodriguez’s spread, which has undergone years of tweaking.

They’re not true spreads, and truth be told, each team often prefers to go back to the I formation and just run the ball when the going gets tough.

OSU coach Jim Tressel and Penn State’s Joe Paterno have added elements of more established spread attacks to their systems but it’s just not the same as a team that is as committed to running it and to training for it by recruiting and developing leaner, faster, more explosive athletes like Michigan does.

OSU and PSU are still caught in the middle of being old-school power Big Ten teams and new-age spread teams and that holds them back when they come up against the Texas’ and USC’s of the college football world.

Michigan also is a step ahead on defense with its attacking and speed-base style, as is fellow Midwest (potential) power Notre Dame, who stole John Tenuta and his hyper-aggressive scheme from Georgia Tech.

Ohio State and Penn State still run more simplistic defensive schemes and rely a little too much on passive zones.

While power football and conservative defenses still have their place in college football and the Wolverines might get run over a few times by power teams like Wisconsin and OSU as they try to build depth and familiarity with their system, it’s pretty safe to say that the Michigan experiment is the Big Ten’s best hope for catching up with the top teams like Texas, Oklahoma, and USC.

And while Paterno and Tressel are set in their ways and their recent track records have been very good to excellent, sooner or later, the time will come when they’ll have no choice but to adapt even more.

Michigan’s not there yet, but anyone who’s watched their offense operate the past two weeks can tell that their style is the farthest thing from Bo and Woody’s, and in today’s vastly different era of college football, that can only be a good thing.