After 0-5 day, it's time for Big Ten to be outrageous

LeBron James recently suggested that the NBA consider retracting so more good players could congregate per remaining team.

What James should have said is the Big Ten should expand, but with fewer schools playing football.

If that sounds like a contradiction, stay tuned.

Big Ten football can't compete on a national level right now, judging by Saturday's 0-5 bowl record.

The conference is 2-5 overall this bowl season with only Ohio State left to play Arkansas in Tuesday night's Sugar Bowl.

Seattle Times college reporter Bud Withers recently wrote a column with the headline, “Big Ten is strong, because … it says so?”

The piece was in response to Ohio State president Gordon Gee remarking that schools from conferences like the Big Ten are superior in football to schools from so-called smaller conferences.

To his credit, Gee retreated from the notion even before “small” TCU defeated “huge” Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl.

Anyway, the truth is that the Big Ten is strong because TV executives and bowl organizers are duped into saying it is.

The surprise isn't that the conference was beaten by an average of 20 points Saturday. It's that eight of its teams were invited to bowls when perhaps two or three were worthy?

Maybe the Big Ten is God's way of saying there are too many bowl games.

The conference sure isn't ashamed to take the bowl money and run right into stone walls from last outposts like Lubbock and Starkville.

As usual, as an alumnus of a Big Ten school I'm here to concoct cockamamie measures for cockamamie times.

(Did I mention that my Illini, Illini, mighty-mighty Illini recorded 1 of the Big Ten's 2 bowl victories?)

The conference already has expanded by adding Nebraska for the next school year.

However, the league needs four more new members.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. The Big Ten should expand to 16 schools … but contract to 10 football teams!

Do the math by rounding off each school at 100 football players, counting several walk-ons and the odd scholar.

That's 1,600 players, which seems like a lot. But spread over 16 schools, it wouldn't be enough for the Big Ten to be competitive any more than 120 over 12 will be.

If only 10 of the 16 schools played football that would be 160 players apiece — NCAA rules be darned — perhaps enough to play with the Mississippi States and Texas Techs.

Even Indiana, Purdue and Minnesota, the Big Ten schools that didn't make it to a bowl, must have a couple of players who could help Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan State.

So the Hoosiers, Gophers and Boilermakers … gone from football! Then Illinois for finishing the regular season at .500 … gone! Then underachievers like Penn State and Michigan … gone!

There, we're down to 10 teams with a 16-team talent pool of slow-footed Midwesterners to fill out rosters.

If that alone doesn't work, the Big Ten can petition to have more than 11 players on the field at all times.

Or maybe the Ivy League can be persuaded to send teams to bowl games so the Big Ten might have a chance to beat someone on New Year's Day.

Yes, these proposals are as absurd as, say, Big Ten schools being paid big bucks to lose five straight bowl games.

But all a graduate of the Big Ten can do is be outrageous to keep from being outraged.