Ten B1G Things

1. Someone sneaked into Bert’s office and changed his calendar from “Purdue Game” to “Rose Bowl”
2. I don’t think anyone would’ve put money on Purdue being the first team to hold Chase Brown under 100 yards this year
3. Coach Pat of Evanston did his best to surpass Edmund and claim the title of “Worst Early November Performance in Minnesota by a Big Fitz”
4. You need a cyclotron to make something with a half-life shorter than an OSU running back in 2022
5. On the plus side, this Dallan Hayden kid seems alright for someone who can’t ride
6. CJ Stroud is now the first QB to throw 30 or more TD passes in consecutive seasons
7. Bazelak’s best work seems to be done on the bench
8. The silos in Lincoln are empty, with Nebraska down to a freshman named Chubba as QB1
9. He’s apparently not much worse than J.J. McCarthy, based on this week’s numbers
10. If you listened closely, you could hear a million turtle shells cracking at once when Nick Singleton turned on off-tackle run on 4th & 1 into a 45-yard TD
11. James Franklin doing sideline pushups for the TV camera is one of the most cringe moments in a long history of cringe
12. Do we have to let Maryland go to a bowl?
13. Michigan broke Michigan State—can’t convince me otherwise after limping away with two 4th-quarter FGs to secure a win over Rutgers
14. Iowa surging just enough to get to a mid-December bowl game that will—thanks to the fine print—result in Kirk, his sons, his wife, his wife’s hairdresser, his dog, and the guy who gave him a 15% discount on basement waterproofing in 1998 each getting a bonus payout is poetic

The Rundown

Indiana at Ohio State | B1G Noon, Little to cheer about, 56-14

GF3: Don’t get me wrong. I don’t long for the Urban Meyer days. I’m glad OSU isn’t in an heart-wrenching knife-fight with Michael Penix or any other Indiana go-getter these days. But Indiana is bad. Tom Allen is cruising for the Alabama Offensive Analyst seat. OSU won easily but lost yet another running back. That makes three now if you count TC Caffey. At least OSU remembered how to run the ball. That was nice. But without one of the top two backs in the lineup, Michigan looks like an impossible matchup.

MaximumSam: The Buckeyes put in a workmanlike effort rolling through Indiana. I look forward to reading the various pieces on Why They Actually Suck this week. Bring on Maryland.

BuffKomodo: Indiana basketball is 2-0 and plays against Xavier on Friday. Oh. This is a football blog? I should talk about the football team? If I must. So I didn’t watch much of this game, but apparently Dexter Williams is capable of evading blitzing linebackers kind of so that may be the best option at QB. However had Bazelak, Tuttle, and Sorsby not been bad/hurt we still would not have seen him play. None of it changes the fact this team stinks too. Oh well. I called it. Almost have ourselves another 9 game slide.

Purdue at Illinois | Purdue bursts Bert’s boiler 31-24 and our Illinois writers are doing fine, thanks

BoilerUp89: Fire the Cannon! Purdue gets the victory and keeps the West divisional hopes alive - but they need the help of Nebraska or Minnesota as well as taking care of business the next two weeks for that to happen. So... now our watch begins.

thumpasaurus: We’re losing out and I’m a gigantic idiot. Off Tackle Empire was an anchor around which I based part of my vendetta against a cruel god that exists to extract suffering from the few souls brave enough to stan illini football. Because if I didn’t defend the value of Illinois as an institution despite their repeated fuckups, who would?

The better question is this: why does it matter? The illini were absolutely jobbed by an officiating crew that followed us from Bloomington and who I actually thought about rushing the field to fight despite the obvious lifetime ban that would come.

However, the bigger factor was the offense being a complete and utter shitshow the week Barry Lunney Jr signed a big extension. The officiating conditions meant we had to be at least 14 points better than Purdue to win, but I thought we could manage that and was extremely disappointed when in fact we could not. Lunney doesn’t bear all the blame though. The vaunted illini pass rush evaporated against a Purdue offensive line that could have been mistaken for projected holograms in October. Not a single sack.

Illinois played well enough to win this game and got jobbed by the officials, but I’m sad instead of mad because I thought that with good officiating we should have been 17 or so points better and we absolutely did no such thing.

It’s been a pleasure blogging and commenting with all of y’all on the way to the death of Web2.0, but it’s feeling more and more like I need to live in real life and not in fictional places like “the internet” and “anywhere people are excited about Illinois football because they think we don’t suck”

He was a high school QB: Fuck you! Fuck It all! I’ve watched this same game over and over and over for three decades and I still thought Lucy wouldn’t pull the ball back this time. Why do I keep investing emotions into this shit?

thumpasaurus: NO YOU GIANT ASSHOLE WE WERE PERFECTLY HAPPY NOT BEING GOOD AT BEING ILLINOIS FOOTBALL

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Nebraska at Michigan | Corn inferior to Maize by large margin, 34-3

RMB: A boring, mildly frustrating 31pt win. My God what a luxury. Michigan’s run game is very good. I mean VERY good. But it’s all there is on offense. On defense, it just doesn’t make sense. Nothing this team does looks like it’s better than an average college football defense, but here they are giving up 3 second half points in 5 games.

I have a theory on this. Stay with me now, this is complicated. My theory is... we’re playing against really bad football teams. Nebraska was a terrible team under Frost. Since they fired him they were on their way to becoming ok, but they are far from ok without Casey Thompson. Stopping Nebraska’s offense without Thompson is like stepping on baby chicks. It’s not really that hard to do and only a psychopath derives pleasure from it.

Michigan is probably going to be fine next week. Turns out Illinois isn’t great, and the game’s at Michigan Stadium. But there’s no way in hell this team is going to hang with Ohio State in the shoe.

GF3: RMB and I will continue to undersell and reverse-jinx our squads for the next two weeks, but when Michigan wins it’ll be “I knew we’d get OSU we were just built for it...”

deadread: Unless and until Casey Thompson returns, Nebraska will be unable to compete offensively. The Frost era really hollowed out the program. GBR, nonetheless.

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Rutgers at MSU | Sparty avoids hilarious collapse, 27-21

Able Kidhandlerski: Watching chunks of this game in between toting my newborn daughter around like a running back who’d lost a couple fumbles the week before, I had the Galaxy-brain observation of, “weird game flow, man,” and the box score ended up backing me up on that.

In a clash between two inconsistent-at-best offenses, both teams rolled up well over 400 yards of offense, but at a sluggish enough pace that a few dorfed scoring opportunities held the total points down. If you’d told me the game would be decided by one team blocking field goal and sharply executing a couple of their own in the second half, I would’ve assumed we would be talking about a debilitating Spartan loss given how incompetent their kicking unit has been this year. Instead, they scratched out a badly-needed win on the back of a balanced offense and a defense that made just enough plays to cover its general still-badness (there’s probably a word I’m looking for but I’m mentally processing at about MS DOS speed right now).

Get one more next week against a thoroughly downtrodden Indiana, and we’re not too far off of preseason expectations notwithstanding one of the worse months of football I’ve ever seen.

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Maryland at PSU | PSU triumphs over much-hated team who is totally not a rival so please stop saying that even though PSU really hates them, 30-0

misdreavus79: Fuck Maryland.

87townie: Six sacks last week. Seven sacks this week. They shut down the Maryland offense completely. The terps had 27 net yards at half. This defense is so much fun to watch. I’m actually worried that we are going to lose Manny Diaz to a HC job sooner rather than later.

Abdul Carter is only a freshman. Next time you watch PSU, look for #11 on defense. He’s entertaining as hell. And he’s a true freshman. So are the two running backs that played the bulk of the game. This is a young Penn State team.

On paper this game looked relatively even. And with Joey Porter Jr. among a list of PSU starters sidelined, I was concerned. I didn’t need to be.

Larry31: Maryland's offense is broken. Not counting garbage-time, they have scored 3 points in the last two games. 10 points if you count the garbage-time TD against Wisconsin last week.

The vaunted passing attack has crashed and burned. This offense is more inept than Northwestern, Indiana or rutger.

Is this really the same team that played UM as close as anyone has all year?

Well, time to move onto the only sport that matters. Is it lacrosse season yet? Looking to forward to OSU-like dominance in both men's and women's lacrosse.

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Wisconsin at Iowa | Hawkeyes win the Lutheran Binder Bowl*, 24-10

*Brought to you by Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup

stewmonkey13: Iowa won an American collegiate football game, relatively easily, with 146 yards of total offense. While almost all of Iowa’s offensive scores came off of short fields, it’s not like the offense was clicking as they still averaged fewer than 3 yards per play.

And won.

Pretty easily.

lolFuck wisconsin!

MC ClapYoHandz: Pretty simple affair, Iowa was able to generate 21 points through their D/ST, which was the best unit on the field, and that’s too much to ask most offenses to overcome against Iowa. Wisconsin actually got an unlikely deep touchdown pass to give them a boost, but you can’t give up the critical plays and win this one.This concludes Wisconsin’s participation in this ridiculous divisional race and it’s on to basketball a little early this year. As for Iowa, their reward is likely a Death Star encounter on neutral ground. RIP Iowa.

Kind of...(Chris): Can UW win after giving Iowa 7 points on a short drive after a punt block? Maybe, but probably not.

Either way, it’s irrelevant, because Graham Mertz just threw an all-time horrible pick-six and there’s now way, UW is rallying from 14-3 down. If nothing else, Jim Leonhard is getting a more and more justifiable argument for not retaining Bobby Engram next year. Though, with Mertz retaining eligibility, there’s no reason to expect any change to matter too much. Or, maybe Wisconsin will head to Lincoln next week lose to the popcorn vendor the Huskers will likely be forced to play at QB, and put Leonhard’s path to the permanent head coaching position in jeopardy.

Oh, the intrigue!!!

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NU at Minnesota | Gophers serve up worst Fitz disaster in MN since ‘75, 31-3

MNW: The late cut to the BTN studio, only to have Gerry Dinardo openly laughing at Northwestern, said enough.

The ‘Cats got dealt a rough hand when Brendan Sullivan got knocked out in the first half, but that doesn’t explain a defense that appears never to have been taught how to tackle — the Gophers finally stopped asking Giannis Antetokounmpo to throwing the ball and just ran it down the throat of a defense that was woefully overmatched by a mid-tier Big Ten West c. 2022 team.

That’s the kindest that can be said about Minnesota. This is a Glen Mason team with a more forgiving conference schedule.

Fitz can clean house this winter or he can go. I’d prefer it be the former, but his hubris is killing the program he built.

Lincolnparkwildcat: I’m glad I missed half the game driving to a Friendsgiving celebration in Chicago. I second everything MNW said. Just put the coordinators in a catapult, get them bus fare, leave them in Minneapolis ( I don’t care ): just let Ayeni and McGarigle call the plays.

WSR: The Gopher defense is really good against bad offenses. We’ve seen it time and again, and once again today we feasted on trash so effectively that I wouldn’t be opposed to changing our name to the Raccoons. Meanwhile the offense continued to do nothing but the impression of a road grater and it worked well enough. At some point we’ll need to throw a passing touchdown again, right? But all that matters was that it was a beautiful fall day and the kids made it to the end with the help of some hot chocolate and cheese curds and snowflakes that they caught on their tongues. It was a perfect day, even if the football wasn’t.