Via Michael Cohen
FOX Sports College Football Writer
The landslides of Iowa and Minnesota via Ohio State and Penn Staterespectively, means year Big Ten match last week College football The schedule is determined by an average of 19.3 points per game.
But the deviant fieldwork in Week 8 still makes for a treasure trove of interesting storylines that stretch beyond the Midwest and into the national spotlight:
- Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz has faced questions about nepotism following another offensive composition by his son, Brian Ferentz, who serves as the attack coordinator. team work.
- Outstanding Ohio State Jaxon Smith-Njigba Returning from a hamstring injury only departed in the first half after he appeared to correct something in his lower body.
- Rutgers recorded a 21-game losing streak at home in the Big Ten game.
- Penn State Midfielder Sean Clifford silenced his critics by throwing 295 yards and four encounters with the Golden Gophers.
In other words, there’s never a dull week in the Big Ten regardless of whether the games are horror movies or not. Here are some storylines to watch as another weekend approaches:
Tit for tat
Text definition: Last week, cell phone cameras captured a screaming match between halftime players from Michigan and Penn State in the tunnel at Michigan Stadium. The videos went viral on social media as they discussed the confrontation that would drag on for the next few days. When asked about the fight, Nittany Lions head coach James Franklin suggested enacting a policy to prevent two teams from entering the tunnel at the same time.
On Monday, Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh was asked about Franklin’s comments.
Quote: “I actually have the bigger fish to fry than Coach Franklin’s opinion about the tunnel during halftime from a previous game,” Harbaugh said at Monday’s press conference. “All they had to do was go into their dressing room. I think it was pretty clear to you that they stopped completely. They didn’t let us up the tunnel. And it looked like it was just one. sublime ploy to try to stop us in our dressing room, and he looks like he’s in charge of everything but no, I have a bigger fish to fry than worry about that kind of whining.”
Analysis: Over the years, upgrades and renovations at Michigan Stadium have added new luxury suites, updated scoreboards, and overhauled the press box as a building that opened in 1927 has shown its age. . Away from those modernizations is the tunnel used by both Werewolves and their opponents to access the battlefield.
It remains a sort of rugged, thorny, unrefined relic to the traditions of Michigan football. But it was also the only tunnel connecting the dressing room to the pitch, and the small space became cramped as both teams huddled together at halftime. According to a tweet from Michigan State’s director of football nutrition Abigail O’Connor, the bottleneck last week set off a screaming match when someone on the Penn State side threw a nut butter sandwich. peanuts and jellies into the Michigan crowd.
“The only tunnel is a problem,” Franklin said at his weekly press conference a few days after the game. “And for me, we need to put in place a policy from a conference perspective to prevent these (problems). We’re not the first team to go into a tunnel match. I want to focus on getting my team into the dressing room – not looking back I want my team to go into the locker room and their team into the locker room.
“There should really be a policy that the first team to come in, there’s a buffer. Because if not, this team starts talking, and they start to come back and what’s going to happen is something bad. bad things are going to happen in front of our eyes, put in policy, and all it takes is a two-minute or one-minute buffer between the two teams. This team gets in before that team gets close, and yet we want to. But we’re not the first team to have such problems. And for me, under the current structure, we won’t be the last.”
Days before the cleanup, Harbaugh expressed his admiration for the tunnel and said he was glad it remained unchanged over time. Michigan reserved the tunnel for former head coach Lloyd Carr on the same day of the scuffle with Penn State. It’s now called the Lloyd Carr Tunnel at Michigan Stadium.
Pull the plug
Text definition: Earlier this month, Rutgers entered their bye week by falling outside the top 120 both in fouls scored (19.7 points per game) and total fouls (311.2 yards per game) over the first six games. first. The performance was so bad that head coach Greg Schiano fired offensive coordinator Sean Gleeson, who has been in the role since 2020 and handed coach Nunzio Campanile the interim title. With two weeks of practice to adjust, Scarlet Knights defeated Indiana in their first game without Gleeson and earned their first Big Ten win of the season.
Quote: “Listen, I think we’ve been very well prepared for two weeks,” Schiano said at Monday’s press conference. “Definitely you can’t turn things upside down in two weeks’ time. So I think what we’re going to do is keep growing. Midfielder, you know, it’s not like we’ve developed. Something came up. Finally, we had all of our midfielders. to play on the same day.”
Analysis: No team in the Big Ten has been more unsettled in midfield this season than the Rutgers. The battle in the hot training camp between the sophomores Evan Simongraduted student Noah Vedral and second year Gavin Wimsatt in the normal season. Each player has started at least once, and no one has started more than three games. The trio came together for six touchdowns and eight interceptions, although six of those INTs went to Simon.
Rutgers’ Noah Vedral Connects With Sean Ryan
Scarlet Knights QB Noah Vedral beat Sean Ryan in an incredible 15-yard TD against the Indiana Hoosiers on Saturday.
Schiano and his coaching staff have relied on Vedral for the past three weeks to say goodbye and run the offense following a change in coordinator. 24-year-old QB started her college career at Central Florida in 2017. He spent two years in Nebraska (2018-19) before finally landing at Rutgers in 2020 and keeping the starting job for most of the previous two seasons.
Vedral was neither spectacular nor overly efficient in Saturday’s 24-17 win over Indiana, completing 12 of 24 passes for just 113 yards and a touchdown. But he navigated four quarters without overturning the ball and helped Rutgers switch seven times in the third and fourth combined.
“We don’t know exactly how it will play out,” Schiano said. “I mean, for that game, Noah was the starter, Gavin was the sub and Evan was next. Every match will be different depending on our preparation, our opponents. , our game, and until we figure out exactly how we want to go – and you can say, ‘Well, you’re in game eight.’ That’s right, as I told you at the beginning of the year, if (the midfield situation) works on its own, that’s great, and if it doesn’t, we have to keep tweaking until we figure it out. I’m working on it.”
Statistical Abnormalities
Text definition: Minnesota went to Penn State last weekend believing it had one of the best defenses in college football. The Gophers are sixth in the country with just 263.7 yards per game and fourth in scoring defense (11.7 points per game), fifth in passing defense (159.2). yards per game) and 20th for defensive urgency (104.5 yards per game). The Nittany Lions then cut them to 479 yards and 45 points in a primetime national televised defeat, in which Clifford was never fired and was rarely disturbed.
Quote: “It’s not very good,” Minnesota head coach PJ Fleck said Monday when asked about his team’s passing situation. “I can get into it a little bit more. We just don’t go home with four (hurried). We have people who can advance and do better (with) technique, fundamentals. When we did (those things) we had some pressure on (Clifford) he could step up in the pocket and make a big throw here or there. there was even some internal pressure, which is good. But we had to be better in that department. We know it. Whether it’s personnel, whether it’s bringing in more people, whether that’s our fundamentals – it all has to improve.”
Analysis: Despite how well defensive coordinator Joe Rossi’s unit ranks in several key categories ahead of the Penn State game, there are glaring weaknesses in the stats on hasty passes. of the team that still hadn’t burned the Gophers.
Across seven games, Minnesota finished last in the Big Ten and ranked 118th nationally among bags, with nine – a far cry from the 24 bags the Michigan league leaders amassed. The only Gopher with double-digit midfield pressure this season is a winger Jah Joyner, who has a modest total of 11, is outside the top 200 players in the country and is 40th in the conference, according to Pro Football Focus. Six of his 11 pressures come in non-conference games against Western Illinois (three) and Colorado (three).
The Gophers’ small pressure numbers are compounded by Minnesota’s inability to end the game with sacks on the rare occasions when they harass opposing quarterbacks. Edge pusher Danny Strigow is the only player with the most bags this season (three), but only one of them has played against rival Big Ten. As a team, the Gophers have failed to tally a sack in their last two games.
The defensive numbers will continue to slide until Rossi produces a more aggressive pass.
Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with a focus on the Big Ten. Follow him on Twitter at @Michael_Cohen13.
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