Remember when the ACC added Virginia Tech, Boston College and Miami and was supposed to become a Super League?
The Super League went 7-4 on week one, and exactly one of the wins was against a BCS foe, and that was Baylor. The rest came against Jacksonville State, Charleston Southern, Delaware (barely, by Maryland), James Madison, Kent State and McNeese State (barely, by North Carolina).
The losses includes Virginia Tech to East Carolina and Clemson, considered a national title contender, 34-10 at home to Alabama, maybe the 5th best club in the SEC. Clemson coach Tommy Bowden admitted Bama just played harder than his troops did.
The real No. 1 in the country, by the way, is USC, which killed Virginia 52-7 five days after QB Mark Sanchez was cleared to fully practice after recovering from a knee injury. Rushing yards in that one: 218-32. And it was at Virginia.
Compared to that mess, the Big Ten did OK in week one, 7-3 with two of the losses (Cal-Michigan State and MIzzouri-Illinois) close ones on the road against quality opposition. The other loss, of course, was by Michigan at home to Utah. The Utes are probably pretty good, but Michigan, at least for now, is a mess.
Casual perusal of the chat rooms reveals surprising patience and reason among Michigan hardcores. Nothing like this sugar-coat from Big Ten’s web site:
The Wolverines gave one of the nation’s better non-BCS conference teams a run for their money in a game that had all the makings of one that could have turned out a lot worse.
In addition to being deliberately untethered to reality, that’s got to be one of the ugliest sentences in public-relations history.
