Big 10 bowl action

With apologies to Clint Eastwood, Lee VanCleef, and Eli Wallach, the Big 10 bowl games this year could rightfully be described as the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good.

The Michigan Wolverettes feasted on Florida Gator meat. 41-7 is a beatdown, no matter how you look at it.

Ohio State's Buckwheats trashed the leprechauns of Notre Dame 44-28. As has been said before in this space, the REAL Notre Dame is a cathedral in Paris. Last time I looked, that was still in France. So how did it come to be the clowns in South Bend claim (fighting) Irish ancestry? And for crying out loud, stop changing the school colors every 5 minutes. Are they blue? Green? Whatever other color might come out of a box of Lucky Charms? Pick one and stick with it already.

For two teams that never even made it to the Big 10 conference championship game, UM and OSU put on dominating performances in their respective bowl games.

The bad.

The wannabe Pope collective from Stanford performed a brutal exorcism on the Iowa Pigeoneyes. 45-16 not only dispatched the demons, but pretty much cremated the mortal remains of the team from corn country.

Northwestern vs Tenn was supposed to be a good match up. It wasn't. The good ole boys from Jack Daniels land were more than happy to volunteer to stomp on those nerdy Polecat varmints from the Chicago burbs. 45-6? Really? And somewhere NW alum Michael Wilbon cringed. He knows that Schlomo Kornkeister, his partner on the daily sports yappy head show, is likely polishing up his 1,539,768th infinitely juvenile "Uranus" one-liner with Mikey's alma mater as the punchline. This, from a guy that went to college at Binghamton, never played a game, and majored in English. It's good to know he at least has a rudimentary understanding of the language.

Come to think of it --- Wasn't there a Captain Binghamton on McHale's Navy that came across as a babbling fool and was called "Leadbottom" behind his back? Could it be the original Leadbottom got a serious makeover and turned up on the 4-letter network years later? Stranger things have happened. There's the K girls, and Caitlyn, and even Detroit Lions' fans still thinking they're going to win a Super Bowl every year. Very strange indeed, but I digress.

What seems odd in the Big 10 scheme of things is that the also-rans (UM and OSU) in the conference posted huge victories in their bowl games. Michigan State defeated both these teams during the regular season. Iowa went undefeated until narrowly losing to MSU in the conference championship.

This was supposed to be the cream of the Big 10 crop. Iowa's beatdown at the hands of Stanford in the Rose Bowl was embarrassing.

But the absolute annihilation the Bamarama red rubes visited on the Michigan State Fartans in the Cotton Bowl?

38-0 doesn't begin to do such a lop-sided rout justice. It could, and likely should have been 100-0.

And that's just ugly......