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FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

Yes, here's another moment you just knew was coming.

Anything I can possibly say about how awful it is that Ohio State lost back-to-back BCS Title Games must, of course, be tempered by the mandatory statement about how unbelievably hard it is to make it to one such game, let alone making it to two in a row. Thus if we're going to hail on the Buckeyes for giving a new layer of meaning to the term "epic fail," we owe them ... well, we owe them 50% of the respect we give to the early-90s Buffalo Bills. Or the same amount of respect we give to Bob Stoops' Oklahoma Sooners, who have the same resume (one title, back-to-back title game losses).

So you can't say the Buckeyes are bad, not even if you're an SEC fan, and you can't say that Jim Tressel isn't a very good coach. You can, however, wonder what went wrong. The answer: Lots. In both 2007 and 2008, the Buckeyes were undone by a combination of bad execution (which was within their control) and an imploding hype machine (which wasn't).

FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in the history of Big Ten football.

Above: Rick Neuheisel (right) and Troy Aikman in Neuheisel's first coaching stint at UCLA.

Not many people remember it, but for a few years in the early 1980s, the Big Ten played a full round-robin schedule, as opposed to the current "skip the same two teams for two years in a row" format that has been in place since Penn State joined the conference. During that brief period, one team actually managed to defeat all nine of its conference opponents: Mike White's Fighting Illini, in the 1983 season. The Angry Indigenous Woodlands People dropped their first game to Missouri, then ran off ten straight wins, entering the Granddaddy of Them All 10-1 and ranked fourth in the nation.

And on the other side of the field? Terry Donahue's UCLA Bruins, a team so dazzlingly awesome they went 0-3 in their non-conference games. The doddering Bruins won the Pac-10 almost by default that season; they were 6-1-1 in conference play (ties were still allowed back then), and 6-4-1 overall. (Can you imagine the outcry today if a six-win team got a BCS berth?)

So, obviously, there was no hope for the Bruins. You'll note, however, that this game wound up on the Big Ten's "worst moments," and of course there's a reason for that.

FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in the history of Big Ten football.

Oh, like you didn't know this was coming. Come on. How could the single most disastrous game in the history of the conference not be the next item on this list?

You know the particulars already. Michigan was #5 in the country; Appalachian State was supposedly just another Division I-AA Football Championship Subdivision tomato can who was only supposed to be in it for the money. You know the game came down to a last-second blocked field goal, and you also know that Michigan was doggone lucky that they were ever in a position to win this game. The block happened, though, so the chants of "Down goes Frazier!" spread across the college football world. Appy State had pulled off the greatest upset of all time, being the first Not Ready For Prime Time Player to drink the milkshake of a top-5 team.

The day after, the Grave Dancers Union got a record number of applications for membership. "Overrated!" "End of an era!" "Fire Lloyd Carr!" Gosh, it's hard to argue with people when they're right.

My concern, though, is not with what this game meant to Michigan. My concern is with what this game meant to college football in general.

"Old School" is the College Football FanHouse's irregular look back at the rich history of college football, usually through the medium of embeddable flash video. Check out the Old School archive for more famous plays and infamous hair.



Heisman Trophy winners often falter in their team's bowl game appearance following the award ceremony. But when they do play up to their potential, we are occasionally rewarded with an amazing performance like that of Nebraska's Johnny Rodgers in the 1973 Orange Bowl.

Nebraska's head coach Bob Devaney moved Rodgers from wingback to I-back for the Orange Bowl match-up with the Fighting Irish. The move paid off as Rodgers finished his collegiate career by scoring four touchdowns and throwing for another in a 40-6 Nebraska victory.

In what remains one of the greatest bowl performances ever, Rodgers:

· Rushed 15 times for 81 yards or an average of 5.4 yards/carry.

· Scored three touchdowns on runs of eight, four and five yards.

· Caught a screen pass from quarterback Dave Humm and ran 50 yards through the Irish to score a fourth time, establishing a new Orange Bowl record for total points and touchdowns scored.

· Threw a 52-yard touchdown pass to Frosty Anderson.

Overall, Rodgers personally accounted for 30 of Nebraska's points and clinched a dramatic and impressive final victory for retiring coach Bob Devaney.

FanHouse is counting down the ten best, ten worst, and ten weirdest moments in the history of Big Ten football.

With the ten best moments accounted for, it's time to move on to the ten worst. There will be some silly moments on this list, and some moments which can best be described as "stupid," but there's only one moment which qualifies as senseless, and it's the closing moments of the 1978 Gator Bowl.

To set the stage: The Clemson Tigers were facing off against Woody Hayes' Ohio State Buckeyes. Late in the fourth quarter, OSU was trailing, 17-15. Quarterback Art Schlichter had to know the famous axiom attributed to Hayes, "There are three things that can happen when you throw the football, and two of them are bad." But the situation called for a pass, and Schlichter (a true freshman) tossed it where Clemson defender Charlie Bauman could catch it. Which he did. Bauman ran towards the near sideline, knowing that the Tigers just needed to run out the clock to lock up the victory. Unfortunately for Bauman, the near sideline was not his own.

FanHouse is counting down the 10 best, 10 worst, and 10 weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

The phrase "three yards and a cloud of dust" was coined to describe Big Ten football, and it's still a fairly apt description of the conference's beefy, run-first mentality. That is not to say, however, that the forward pass is still a novelty in the Big Ten. Indeed, some pretty good quarterbacks have come out of the conference. A guy in New England comes to mind, for instance.

There was one particular day, though, when everything truly went berserk. That day was November 8, 1980. On that Saturday afternoon, the Big Ten's record for the most passing yards in a single game was broken not once but twice. In fact, not only was the conference's single-game passing record broken, so was the NCAA's. Even more improbably, two other national passing records were broken that day, though not by Big Ten quarterbacks.

Was there something in the air that day? Well, duh. Footballs were in the air. Everywhere.

"Old School" is the College Football FanHouse's irregular look back at the rich history of college football, usually through the medium of embeddable flash video. Check out the Old School archive for more famous plays and infamous hair.

Step back in time with me, college football fans, to an earlier era. Here we have the Seminoles of Florida State taking on the Florida Gators in 1973.



This is pre-Ben Hill Griffin stadium stuff, so that's just Florida Field. Note that the Swamp is highly recognizable. Back then the stadium was painted blue rather than orange but "This is... Gator Country!" is still scribed on those trademark vertical walls rising out of the east and west stands. The press box was a tad smaller back then, too, as you might notice.

Florida's mascot was in a woeful state in those days. "Albert E. Gator" looked like an inflatable green jalapeno with teeth and a tail.

As for the game itself? Florida routed the Seminoles 49-0. For the rivalry, it was an era which favored the Gators, who won 9 straight from 1968-1976. Today, Florida leads the overall series, 30-19-2, but FSU is 17-15-1 against the Gators under Bobby Bowden.

FanHouse is counting down the 10 best, 10 worst, and 10 weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

ABOVE: This plaque at Kinnick Stadium depicts Nile Kinnick's game-winning touchdown run against Notre Dame in 1939.

When Nile Kinnick graduated from the University of Iowa in 1940, he held three great distinctions. He was the student body president, he held a Phi Beta Kappa key, and he was the reigning Heisman Trophy winner. The last of these is the least relevant to understanding who Kinnick was.

It's not that he wasn't a tremendous football player. Hearing a description of his 1939 season is like reading one of those lists of Chuck Norris facts, except all this stuff actually happened. He played all but 18 minutes of the entire Hawkeye season. He was responsible for 16 of Iowa's 19 touchdowns, passing for 11 and running for 5 more. And those 11 touchdown passes came on only 31completions.

Kinnick wasn't just the Heisman winner in 1939; he was also named the AP's Male Athlete of the year. He beat Joe DiMaggio for that honor in a year Joltin' Joe hit .381. That's how good Nile Kinnick was.

For all he accomplished on the field, however, the real legacy of Nile Kinnick is found elsewhere. It's a story both inspiring and heartbreaking, one filled with what John Greenleaf Whitter called the saddest words of all: "It might have been."

FanHouse is counting down the 10 best, 10 worst, and 10 weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

There are a lot of firsts and onlys on this list, but this one surprised even me. Only one Big Ten team has ever won back-to-back Rose Bowls, and it didn't happen way back in the 1950s. In fact, it happened less than ten years ago. When the Wisconsin Badgers won in 1999 and 2000, they became the first and so far only Big Ten team to do so.

Now, it's important to remember that prior to the early 1970s the Big Ten had a rule forbidding any team from going to the Rose Bowl in two consecutive seasons. Once that rule was lifted, Ohio State went to Pasadena four straight years (1973 through 1976) but only won once, in 1974. Not to be outdone, Michigan then went to, and lost, three straight Rose Bowls themselves. Throughout the 1980s no Big Ten team would make consecutive West Coast swings. Michigan split their 1993 and 1994 Rose Bowls, but it looked as if no Big Ten team would ever win the thing in back-to-back years

But they didn't count on ... one man.

FanHouse is counting down the 10 best, 10 worst, and 10 weirdest moments in Big Ten football history.

ABOVE: Spartan Stadium in East Lansing hosted the 1966 Game of the Century.

Any game which matches the #1-ranked team against the #2-ranked team will almost inevitably be called a 'Game of the Century.' It seems like there's a GotC every three to five years or so. But the 1966 game between Notre Dame and Michigan State was among the very few that actually managed to live up to their billing, and it's a sign of this game's signficance that it's still controversial forty-two years later.

This was a #1 v. #2 game, but it was not so clear which team was #1 and which was #2. The Spartans and the Irish were both ranked #1 in one poll and #2 in the other. Coach Duffy Daugherty's Spartans were the defending national champions. Neither team had lost. To to it all off, it was the last game of the season for the Spartans, and they knew it. Big Ten rules of the time prevented any team from playing in back-to-back Rose Bowls, and from playing in any bowl other than The Grandaddy of Them All. Notre Dame had one game left against Southern Cal, but that would be it for them as well. The Irish didn't accept any bowl bids until 1969.

So, with the two teams so evenly matched, something had to give. Right?