Perceptions Are Reality

Well its lull time in the sports world. Its not quit offseason for the NBA (which will start up in earnest next week with the draft. we will have some sort of coverage about that next week), NFL is weeks away from Favre coming out of retirement (never underestimate the predictability of utter stupidity. nevermind the circus show that is Favre that makes TO look tame but why would anyone rely on Favre to win down the stretch of season. look at his 2nd half of the season #s the past 5 years) and even baseball enthuasists realize the real baseball action doesn't kick in for real until America's birthday so what does that leave us with? Not much.

That said here's an interesting piece making the internet rounds about non-conference strength of schedule. As I think we all agree upon here in BSD land, the Big 10's national reputation has taken it on the chin and we'd all like for it to improve. I realize this might be an assumption but let's go with it for a moment. The difficulty in the Big 10 overcoming this current perception is two-fold 1) the current pre-season ranking (which reflects the perception the Big 10 is weak) and 2) the lack of quality non-conference games. There's the USC game for OSU but outside of that it's Purdue at Oregon, Arizona at Iowa, Cal at Minnesota. Not much (and no I don't consider Notre Dame much - feel free to discuss why a Notre Dame win improves the Big 10 perception) As such it leaves very little wiggle room for the Big 10 to move up in the top 25 rankings without these non-conference wins (otherwise its Big East mediocores beating mediocores perception). Now whether its true or not perception in the land of polls is reality. Which means for the Big 10 to really move up in the rankings (any Big 10 team) OSU really will need to hold its own versus USC as no one else has big names on the radar this year......