2015 Big Ten football guides, from Indiana to Ohio State

Confused? Check out the advanced-stats glossary here.

It could be much, much worse.

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Randy Edsall inherited a program that had gone 9-4 the year before he arrived, and he proceeded to go 6-18 in his first two years. His roster suffered serious attrition, and he took some justifiable PR hits in the process.

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It was obvious how this marriage was going to end. It was only a question of when.

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The numbers get plenty of things wrong. Small sample sizes assure that. Individual games, great or terrible, carry quite a bit of weight, injuries and hot/cold streaks haven’t been put into proper context yet, etc.

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When a coach like Glen Mason raises the bar for a program but then stops raising it, or regularly clearing the bar he set, fans get impatient. And impatience can bring iffy decision-making.

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Pat Fitzgerald has come full circle in record time. He has been everything a coach can be: overachiever and disappointment, candidate for bigger jobs and coach whose seat might be getting hotter, young coach with energy and stodgy coach with old values, close-game whiz and close-game loser.

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“The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps.”

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For a moment, ignore the stories that have made the most noise during Tim Beckman’s tenure at Illinois.

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Sixteen years ago, Nick Saban left East Lansing for Baton Rouge, starting a seven-year period of frustration and the “Sparty, No!” meme. Under Bobby Williams and John L. Smith, the Spartans put a lot of individual talent on the field, dropped hints of excellent play, and went 38-45. From 2002-06, they went 4-14 in games decided by one possession. Nobody snatched disappointment from the jaws of hope as frequently as early-aughts Sparty.

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The University of San Diego was 37-33 in the six seasons before Jim Harbaugh arrived; the Toreros went 7-4 in his first year, then 22-2 in the next two seasons.

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The Wisconsin program is a massive contradiction.

At the end of each conference run-through (here’s the whole Big Ten), I take a look at how I perceive the conference’s balance of power heading into 2015. This is in no way based on schedules. They are not predictions. They’re just how I would rank the teams after writing thousands of words about each.

The Big Ten went 6-5 in bowls, losing blowouts to Tennessee, Stanford, and Louisiana Tech, but it went 3-1 on January 1, and Ohio State won the national title. This was enough to “win” bowl season.

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A program that spent so long admiring its past has been stuck looking into the future.