2014 Big Ten football preview countdown, from Indiana to Ohio State

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Update, August 19: Starting quarterback Braxton Miller’s season-ending injury has lowered Ohio State’s title odds.

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For the most part, Gary Andersen’s first year in charge of the Wisconsin football program went fine.

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Mark Dantonio has pretty much ruined it for all other coaches taking on rebuilding jobs. Rebuilding is a very difficult thing, often frought with fits and starts, surges and stumbles. But while there have been a couple of setbacks in Dantonio’s seven years in East Lansing, they have been minimal and rather easy to explain. Dantonio’s tenure at State has been as smooth and forward-moving as you’ll ever see.

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Sometimes you have to step back and admire something, even if you’re not sure whether it’s good or bad.

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Because I’m a rather sick person, by the end of each season I have a mental list of teams I cannot wait to preview for the next season. Maybe they dramatically over- or underachieved, and I want to figure out why. Maybe the stats had them ranked much higher or lower than I would have expected. Maybe they have a new head coach or coordinator, and I want to see what difference they can make. Maybe they have a player or a coach I just love to talk about.

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-- Dan Wetzel, July 2012

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I wasn’t exactly brimming with excitement about the prospects of Iowa football last summer, and with good reason. Ferentz was overseeing a program that had regressed in rather linear fashion for three straight seasons. The Hawkeyes’ offense had gone from mediocre to terrible in 2012, and Ferentz tasked second-year coordinator Greg Davis, engineer of Texas’ offensive collapse not too long ago, to rebuild it with a new quarterback, no standout receivers, and an offensive line that was missing a couple of key pieces.

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It’s been a strange year or so in Evanston.

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Rutgers has pulled off something remarkable in recent years: the Scarlet Knights have managed to regress in six of the last seven seasons.

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Each year in this preview series, the order for a given conference is set using each team’s five-year F/+ ratings. This measure gives us an easy look at each program’s overall stability, and as a result, we’re in theory counting down from least to most healthy in each conference.

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

Last year’s Maryland preview was suitably focused on injuries. Any time you finish the season with a true freshman linebacker at quarterback, chances are good that health will be the overriding theme. That Maryland managed to improve even slightly in 2012 was a positive sign for the future, especially considering that, in theory, injuries luck would probably be more on the Terps’ side the following season.

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There are fates worse than Glen Mason Territory.

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The idea of a Year 0 season comes up relatively frequently in these previews. See April’s USF preview, for instance. The idea is simple: sometimes a coach needs, basically, a redshirt season in a new job to get all the pieces sorted out, install his system(s), attract the type of talent he’s looking for, etc.