The Big 10 and Michigan. Yikes

The Big 10 is known for a lot of things. Huge schools, traditions, academics (well, sorta), and of course sports, among other things. A proud conference indeed.

Yet one might give pause to attending or sending a child to further his/her education there, especially in any branch of mathematics. After all, they don't seem to grasp the basic principle of simple counting. To wit: How could the conference have expanded to 12 schools, then 14, and still call itself the Big 10? Maybe not so proud, or shouldn't be.

But as we all know, this is football bowl season. Indeed, the Big, ahem, Ten got ten invitations to various bowl games. Out of fourteen schools, that's pretty good.

Now the bad news. Of those ten bowl games, seven of them wound up being defeats. A 3-7 record on the biggest stages is, well, not so good.

Down went Ohio State, in flames. to Clemson. Skunked.
Michigan lost. So did....
Iowa
Indiana
Maryland
Nebraska
And Penn State, conference champs.

Only Minnesota, Northwestern, and Wisconsin were able to win a bowl game, and the Badgers over a second tier (MAC) conference team, barely.

So all the hue and cry about the mighty Big 10 perhaps being the best football conference in the land is likely no more than hooey. Out of 14 teams, a 3-7 bowl record and 4 Did Not Qualifies is what it is. Not pretty.

The state of Michigan itself fared even worse. They went 0 for everything across the board. Besides Michigan going down, so did the Eastern, Central, and Western Michigans. Once mighty Michigan State was among the DNQs this year. Though MSU can rightly boast of featuring the only veterinary school in the state, their football program appeared to, excuse the pun, go to the dogs.

This, from the same state that took a few weeks, including a recount, to figure out which Presidential candidate had tallied the most votes.

Which would seem to fit right in with a conference that can't count, as mentioned above.

And we won't even talk about the condition of the roads in Michigan, because it can be summed up in one word.

Shameful.

In fact, pretty much all around.

It would seem to go hand in hand with why they call themselves the Wolverine State when there aren't any wolverines in the entire state, except in the zoo. Sigh....