Happy New Year!

If you are a Big Ten Football Fan, Day One of the Big Ten Media Day is your New Years Day. A lot of optimism; and everyone has a clean slate. And this year promises some news about the future of the conference from the Big Ten Conference.

 

Of course, the big headlines are the coaches’ press conferences. Each Big Ten Coach gets 10-15 minutes to meet the media. After reviewing the coaches’ interviews, the thing that struck me the most is that, as opposed to the SEC, none of the coaches were answering questions about agents or other wrongdoing. And that says a lot about the programs the Big Ten is running and the athletes that come to play here.

 

And yes, Nick Saban, some of the agents are like “pimps.” But they are also like drug-dealers, prostitutes, gang leaders, and other assorted handler/enabler/bad influence sorts. There are bad people out there and you are dealing with a population of young impressionable people. It is your job and the job of the school to teach them right from wrong and protect them from these people. Agreed, you cannot be everywhere. But you cannot shed all of the blame.

 

But back to the Big Ten. Jim Delaney made some long-awaited announcements about the future of the conference.

• Division breakdown will be announced in 30-45 days. The conference will consider the teams’ performance since 1993. This is an interesting statement. The national perception is that an eastern division that includes Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan will be too powerful. But performance since 1993 includes the recent successes of Wisconsin and Northwestern – as well as the later part of Nebraska’s dominance of the 80’s and 90’s. Perhaps the strict east-west split is the favorite.

• While not committing to a location, there will be a conference championship game in 2011. Indy seems like the obvious choice if there will be a permanent location.

• Delaney said that he wants to move to a nine-game conference schedule, probably beginning in year three of the new alignment. This would allow teams to play four teams from the other division each year. This raises the question of whether there will be “protected” inter-divisional games; while still rotating through the entire conference every two years. This received mixed responses from the coaches. Jim Tressel was particularly critical of a nine-game conference slate.

• Big Ten will keep its name; new logo will be unveiled.

Fitz was as impressive as he has ever been. He still spews his share of typical clichés. But he was stoic and candid in his assessment of the team. Bill King from XM Rivals Radio was raving about Fitz on the radio this morning, calling him a “General” that any big program would hire on the spot. Let’s hope it never comes to that. Some highlights: (transcript courtesy of laketheposts.com and ASAP Sports).

• On NU’s recent success: “And what is that next step? First and foremost it's going to be to go to a bowl game for three straight years, something that never happened in our program before. It all happens because we believe we've got great players.”

• On the opportunity to play at Wrigley Field: “And especially for our student-athletes. It's going to be pretty neat to run out where Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus and George Halas were on that field. That's going to be really special.”

• On his success against Iowa: “Northwestern and Iowa that have a lot of respect for each other, and I think they've just been really hard-fought games and a lot of fun to be on both sides of the sidelines. We just have been fortunate to be on the winning edge.”

• On Dan Persa: “Dan's played a lot of football for us. He started last year against Iowa and Iowa City, came in second half against Penn State, but he had also played the year before in the kicking game. It helps you sleep a little bit better at night.”

• On the running game: “If you want to win the championship in this league, you have got to be able to run the football efficiently. We define that by four or more on first down, half or more on second down, pick it up on third and fourth, and score on the goal line. It's not a complicated equation, but we definitely need to be better there. And we put a strong focus in that in the spring, and we'll go right back there to start a camp.”

• On how to solve the attendance issue: “We need to keep winning, number one. The direction that Morton Schapiro, our president, and our board of trustees and Jim Phillips have gone now with adding Mike Polisky as our associate AD in charge of external affairs, giving him a budget to be able to market here in Chicago, and to continue to do the things we can control on the field. That's obviously the 12 Saturdays of winning football games.”

• More on Persa: “Pound for pound, he's our best conditioned athlete. He was named our Iron Cat, which is our top point getter in the off-season from strength, speed, and conditioning standpoint. I'm pretty confident he'll win that again. He kind of won that going away last year. He's a tremendous leader off the field. He first and foremost starts by leading by example. He's the first to show and last to go. That's the way you want your quarterback described. But he has an uncanny ability to have others around him want to be associated with him. So everybody raises up to his level.”

The biggest news from Fitz was a major personnel move. Brandon Williams will punt this year; leaving Stefan Demos to concentrate on kickoffs and place kicks. Demos has struggled with the punting game in the past. Hopefully, moving in this new direction will be a positive for the team and allow Stefan to focus on an All Big Ten season as a kicker.

 

As the Big Ten meetings continue, on I will collect quotes from our three attending players, Dan Persa, Corbin Bryant, and Quentin Davie – as well as any other news that breaks from the meetings.

 

Starting next week, I will begin covering practice, which begins on Monday. I’ll also begin my week-by-week preview of NU’s schedule.