Big Ten Scheduling

I'm not the world's biggest college football fan, but as the season draws to a close, I have been paying attention to the goings-on in the NCAA FBS. It's pretty exciting. Naturally, I can't help but develop opinions about what I see unfolding before me. For the purposes of this series I'll call College Football Thoughts, we will assume that the BCS system actually has merit and will be here to stay indefinitely.

The Big Ten does its members a major disservice by ending its season the weekend before Thanksgiving. All of the other conferences remain in action the next weekend with various rivalry games and other league contests. The weekend afterward, the Big XII, ACC, and SEC have conference championships while the Pac-10 features the USC-UCLA game and the Big East showcases the Backyard Brawl between West Virginia and Pitt.

Last year, Ohio State looked thoroughly outmatched in the BCS championship game. After all, they hadn't played competitive football for the seven weeks prior to that game. Meanwhile, Michigan, which was idle for the final two weeks in the season could do nothing to make their case to the poll voters while Florida made its run to the SEC championship.

I'm sure that the Big Ten has valid reasons for ending its season so early (e.g. letting the student-athletes actually concentrate on school), but in this era of big money college sports, they need to rework their scheduling so that they don't drop out of the public consciousness. I understand that the Big Ten doesn't want to expand to include a twelfth team in order to gain the right to contest a lucrative conference championship game, which is fine, but they need to do something else to remain viable. Therefore, the conference needs to break with tradition, either by postponing the Michigan-Ohio State game by a week or two, or by scheduling games for another week or two after The Rivalry. With the advent of the twelve-game season, Big Ten teams now must play twelve games in a row without a break, then sit idle and lose their momentum while awaiting bowl season. There are more than twelve weeks in the season, so it would behoove the Big Ten to use all of them.