Still crazy after all these years

 … three national titles in 50 years? College football fans have been consistently told over the years about how tough Big Ten football is. However, history does not support this premise. First, one determinant of how good a program is can be traced to how many national championships it has won. So, how many have the teams in the Big Ten won in the past 50 years? Three. Yes, just three over that period. Ohio State has two (2014 and 2002) and Michigan one (1997), and that one was a split verdict, with the Wolverines winning the AP poll and Nebraska, then a member of the Big 8, winning the coach’s poll. Penn State has won as many national titles as Ohio State in the past half-century — two (1982 and 1986)— but did so as an independent. The Nittany Lions have not won a national title since becoming a member of the Big Ten 26 years ago. Yes, those are the numbers. Ohio State is such a power, its fans say, but the Buckeyes have won just two national titles in the past 50 years. To place

Chuck Noll as a college player at University of Dayton Photo courtesy of Dayton Flyers … not exactly Myles Garrett, but close  In Chuck Noll’s biography entitled “Chuck Noll: His Life’s Work,” writer Michael McCambridge wrote about a play that occurred during the 1954 season when the NFL Hall of Fame coach was playing for the Cleveland Browns. Noll was then in his third season with the Browns, playing both offensive guard and inside linebacker. He was a tenacious competitor, but was not a cheap-shot artist like the current Cleveland Brown defensive player Myles Garrett. McCambridge wrote, Chuck’s tenacious style earned him the appreciation of his teammates but not always his opponents. One player he persistently tangled with was Chuck Bednarik, the Eagles’ cantankerous two-way lineman. Early in his career, Chuck laid a good shot on Bednarik at the line of scrimmage on a punt. After the game, still peeved. Bednarik took a swing at Chuck with his helmet, striking him and kn

George Atkinson hitting Lynn Swann [This was not the infamous 1976 hit.] Photo courtesy of Pinterest … showed how dirty Oakland — and others — in the league were It was a spectacle so bizarre, so beyond the realm of common sense and ordinary imagination that it might have been the creation of some mad comic producer—a cross, say, between Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade. But there it was: in the clean well-lighted environs of a U.S. district courtroom in San Francisco the National Football League, that most august and shining symbol of American morality, excellence and all-round exemplary life style, was on display with a full line of dirty laundry. The subject was mayhem, and judge and jury listened with fascination as all manner of lurid language was applied to the grand old game—"wanton violence," "gang warfare," "criminal acts," "happiness at pain," "love of blood." William Oscar Johnson, Sports Illustrated, 197

… I do feel your pain, but I was upset previously At present, Penn State Nittany Lion football fans are very upset that Coach James Franklin’s undefeated team that they believed had an opportunity of winning a national championship lost to what they consider to be an inferior Minnesota team last week — albeit an undefeated team. They have reason to be upset. They complain that the Nittany Lions will never win a national title as long as Franklin is coach. They Lions played very poorly, and after beating tougher teams like Michigan and Iowa, this was particularly galling. I even read one comment that said, “This would never have happened under Joe Paterno.” History The truth is that Paterno did not win a national championship until 1982, 17 years into his coaching career at Penn State. He won another one five years later, but did not win another one in the final 25 years of his career. So, placing Franklin in that category may not be fair. I know that I have criticized Franklin in t

Adam Vinatieri dejected after missing FG against Steelers Photo courtesy of ESPN … Kevin Colbert MVP? Well, he created this mess At the start of the season, I had listed my predictions of the fate of the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2019, and I was wildly optimistic. Really, 11-5? That now sounds ridiculous even if their starting QB had stayed healthy. I then seriously reconsidered the rest of the season after two or three consecutive losses, and realized that a nine-win season might be enough to eek out a spot in the playoffs. However, even in this reconsidered piece, I had them losing one of two games, either to the Indianapolis Colts or the Los Angeles Rams, who played in the Super Bowl last season, in the middle of the season. Now, they have won both of those games, but only because Lady Luck was shining on them in the Indianapolis game. The Colts had what for future Hall of Fame kicker Adam Vinatieri was a chip shot, a 43-yarder, that would have given the Colts a 27-26 victo

 … ACC lied about how great the conference would be When the Atlantic Coast Conference set out to destroy the Big East Conference in the early 20-teens, they lured away schools like Syracuse and Pitt by saying that the ACC football program would be superb when they joined and left the Big Easta. They cited programs like Florida State, Miami, and Virginia Tech that had won national titles in the past as being the bedrock of that new fabulous conference that would compete with the Southeastern Conference [SEC]. The truth is that the ACC just wanted to eliminate the Big East for basketball because it was the dominant conference in men’s basketball in the early 2000s. Since 2003, the ACC and Big East — which was decimated by defections in 2011 — have won an equal number of national basketball titles. Football is the Big One In football, the ACC is currently a joke — except for a fabulous Clemson program that has won two national titles in the past three seasons. In fact, Clemson has no

… Is the CFP actually worse than the BCS, with just two more teams? Coaches often tell their players to avoid making derogatory comments about their opponents prior to the football game. Those statements make their way into the media, whether it is television or on the internet the old antiquated newspaper clippings that can be clipped and placed on the bulletin board in the locker room. However, sometimes outside forces can do that work for them, and that occurred on Tuesday for Coach James Franklin of Penn State read that his Nittany Lions had leapfrogged undefeated reigning national champion Clemson into fourth place in the first College Football Playoff rankings. It occurred for LSU Coach Ed Orgeron twice in the past two weeks when it leapfrogged Alabama in the Top 25 AP rankings and then were placed one spot ahead of the Crimson Tide at number two in the unbelievably biased CFP rankings. And, ironically, it occurred for first-year Ohio State Coach Ryan Day when somehow the CFP