6 increasingly ridiculous things the Big Ten can do to improve at football

Remember how last week, we were talking about the “disaster” the Big Ten had just experienced? Well oh ho ho, did the Big Ten ever recalibrate that whole horror scale after Week 3, one of the most rancid weeks from a power conference that we’ve seen in years.

Here are the ugly numbers from the B1G:

This can’t continue if the Big Ten wants to keep any semblance of respectability and market share. Otherwise it’s going the way of the dodo or the Big East, and that seems less than ideal. So here are some suggestions, in increasing order of desperation and implausibility.

In the short term, the Big Ten can salvage some semblance of respectability by taking two 11-1 teams* to its championship game, and if there can be another couple 10-win teams coming up just shy in the conference races as well, so much the better. Hey, people like the double-digit wins. It gets more teams into the Top 25, and that kind of visibility helps the cause.

From there, in the longer term, the Big Ten can try a renewed emphasis on recruiting, especially by trying to make inroads in hotbeds like California, Texas, Florida and the rest of that Southeast corner of the country. No offense to the states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, but those areas just can’t stock an entire conference with high-level players anymore. And if there’s something the Big Ten members can do to improve the talent production in its footprint in the coming decades, so much the better. Camps, something, whatever.

* With all due respect, it’s probably too much to ask a team like Nebraska or Penn State to run the table this year. Remember, we’re still in the plausible section of this article.

Now, okay. I know some of you don’t like the guy, and that’s fine. We’re not here for a political flamewar. I need everyone to focus more on the “President” part and less on the “Obama” part. If your favorite guy or lady were in the White House, I’d name that person instead, but it’s Obama right now.

Anyway, the White House website has a special page for making a petition, and if the petition receives 100,000 signatures within 30 days, the administration is compelled to respond. Well, great! Heck, a hundred thousand doesn’t even fill the Big House — I mean, Michigan didn’t fill the place last week either, but the point stands — and that’s just one stadium out of three over a hundred grand and one program out of 14. Surely, SURELY, more than 100,000 fans would like to see the president of the United States restore order to the college football landscape.

As for the petition itself, we’re not going to file it yet — there’s a 30-day window and it’s not quite time to give up on the Big Ten — but a good petition would include a mandatory place for the Big Ten champion in the College Football Playoff, a strong admonishment toward the SEC for anti-competitively hoarding all the good players, federal moneys toward building football facilities in the Midwest**, and a condemnation of Purdue football just for existing as it does.

**and/or buying out Kirk Ferentz’s albatross of a contract.

Mark Wilson, Getty

Brainwashing is hardly a novel concept. Jacobim Mugatu used it, I think there was something about it in “A Clockwork Orange,” and Barney the Dinosaur’s pleasant mantras have the distinct overtone of mind control.

Are there moral issues that arise when we’re talking about abducting adults from their domiciles or places of employment student-athleticism for the purposes of making them work studently athleticize for your program instead? Yes. We need to make clear that this is different from the callous theft of our best and brightest young athletes. Quick note: I’m not sure what that difference might be.

When a program is said to have “a lot of weapons,” it means a good deal of talent at the offensive skill positions. So let’s be clear: I mean literal weapons. Projectiles of varying sizes, shapes, and velocity for with to forcibly remove an opponent from your path.

Now, this does not include guns, mind you. The line has to be drawn short of “The Last Boy Scout”-ing people out there. Dismemberment’s way out of the question, too.

But look, these football players are all wearing some pretty heavy body armor to begin with. If I hit a football player with a baseball bat across his chest, it’s not going to cave in his torso or anything. The shoulder pads take care of that whole situation, that whole area. He’ll go down, but he’ll get back up eventually. That’s the goal.

Or like, okay, is there a way that you can shoot a rocket or a cannonball or something that when it explodes, it doesn’t mangle or burn the target in any way, it just makes him fly back about 50 feet? That would be pretty useful. Yes, in the SEC those are just called “linemen,” but the Big Ten is trying that, and it’s clearly not working, so it’s time to explore light ballistics, and I don’t see how anybody could disagree.

All right. If the weaponry and trafficking are no-gos, Obama won’t step in, and getting better at sports is out of the question, it might just be time to give up the whole charade and stop trying at football. Retire before the MAC just plain passes the Big Ten in quality (and being that the MAC has more wins against power non-conference foes already this year, um ...).

Conference commissioner Jim Delany already floated the notion of descholarshipizing (new word) the Big Ten’s football programs, and although he meant it as a threat against reform, he might want to just go down that road anyway and save those of us in the Great Plains and Great Lakes and the New York City Media Market the embarrassment of further football. This is a nuclear option. But it’s an option.

(NOTE: Dinosaurs may turn on humans at any moment, and then society crumbles under the claw of the Laser Terror Lizard. Absolute last resort. No refunds.)

Anyway, yeah. That’s the Big Ten right now.