Yahoo Sports’ Jason Fitz, Caroline Fenton, and Adam Breneman discuss if the Big Ten is the deepest conference in college football after big wins from Penn State, Iowa, Nebraska, Maryland, and others. Hear the full conversation on the “College Football Power Hour” podcast – and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
The big 10 is the deepest conference in college football Caroline.
And there’s a lot of talk right about the SEC about, I, I heard Joel Klatt say the big 12 is the deepest conference in college football this week.
Uh But I think what we saw from not, not the top tier teams in the big 10.
We know Oregon, Michigan are all going to win a lot of game games this season.
But from these middle tier teams in the big 10 looked really good and really strong.
Penn State looked like a playoff caliber team against West Virginia.
Uh Iowa won 40 to nothing.
Nebraska looked really good 140 to 7.
Dylan Riolo, their five star quarterback was Electric.
Maryland won 50 to 7 against uconn.
Uh The, there’s no question that this is the deepest conference in college football.
You have two of the teams with the best rosters in the country with Ohio State and Oregon and then just deep play week after week and some of those middle, middle of the pack teams that I just mentioned show that they’re, you know, the, the top tier of college football rosters and talent.
Uh from how, how the, how they perform today.
Yeah, one of those teams you mentioned this is a tease later on.
I’m gonna tell you why selling, I don’t, I don’t buy into it at all, but I gotta give you credit Brennaman because you were in on this Nebraska thing.
And I was curious to see what Rayola looked like and frankly that it was a thing of beauty watching that like that Matt rule with a quarterback is a much different beast when you try and figure out how to defend him.
I was watching Nebraska hoping that I could come in and poke the belly of the beast with your brother.
But, uh I can’t, they, that was a, that was a solid performance by them.
Iii I started getting some, some in some tweets and it was like the first quarter and the game was pretty close to that Nebraska game.
People were starting to bring that, bring that, take my, my Nebraska playoff take up to me.
But, uh, but yeah, and I think too Matt Matt rule in year two, he, he does such a good job of developing those programs.
Uh, and you know what he did at Temple and Baylor, you look at the year two jump.
His teams always make a massive improvement in that year two.
Caroline big 10 deepest conference.
What do you think?
I saw that?
Uh I saw Oregon get a little bit of a scare against Idaho.
Some Michigan, keep things a little bit too close for comfort against Fresno State and, uh, perennial big 10 contender UCL.
A making things a little bit interesting against Hawaii.
And I look, I understand week one weird things are going to happen when teams are figuring out what they want to do with new quarterbacks, new coordinators, so on and so forth.
I don’t entirely disagree with you though because Ohio State looked as advertised, one of the best teams in the conference.
Penn State was one team that I had a lot of question marks about, of exactly who are you going to be?
And you’re one of the new big 10.
Are you going to ascend to being one of the contenders or you kind of got to fall back into mediocrity and kind of the middle of the conference.
We don’t know the answer to that quite yet, but I liked what I saw and I remember hearing all last season that Penn State fans were just hungry for big plays.
Open up the playbook, take the deep shots, let Drew Aller kind of take some of those more calculated risks.
We didn’t see that last year, which made me think that I didn’t think Penn State was going to be all that interesting to watch if they were just going to continue, kind of a conservative offense.
I loved seeing Dr Aller open it up a little bit, so I don’t know if I’m necessarily buying deepest conference in the country, but a very strong point.
