You sit there reading the ESPN Big Ten preview and it is the same song every single year. Ohio State and Oregon get all the hype, USC gets the flashy write up, Indiana gets the defending champion treatment, and we are buried somewhere in the middle of the paragraph like we have been invisible since the 2017 season. I remember when the Big Ten was a conference where you earned your reputation by pounding the rock and playing defense in November, not by who had the flashiest quarterback or the most five star wide receivers. We used to go into Columbus in the early 2000s and make those Buckeye defenses earn every yard. Now the whole conference is built around who can throw it 45 times a game and we are still trying to figue out if our offensive identity even exists anymore.
What really gets me about this whole preview is how little they even mention the history of what this program used to be. You look at the 1993 Rose Bowl team and we had a fullback who ran through arm tackles like they were wet newspaper and a defense that would make you earn every single first down. Nobody talked about us in the preseason that year either. We just showed up, ran the ball down peoples throats, and let the scoreboard do the talking. Now everything is about who has the best transfer portal class or who spent the most money on NIL and I just cannot get excited about a program that is trying to win by copying what everyone else is doing.
The worst part is we have a game at Notre Dame scheduled for a Wednesday afternoon in the regular season and I still cannot wrap my head around what college football has become. Camp Randall used to be a place where you came to play on Saturday afternoons in front of 80,000 people who had been tailgating since 7 in the morning. Now we are playing on random weekdays because the television networks own the sport and nobody cares about tradition anymore.