#Big Ten Conference

[justinssportscorner]

Iowa's Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA D-I basketball scoring record previously held by Pete Maravich, regardless of gender. Clark did so on the 2nd free throw via a technical foul from Ohio State.

[bongaboi]

Michigan: 2022 Big Ten Football Champions

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Donovan Edwards ran for 185 yards and a score, J.J. McCarthy threw three touchdown passes and No. 2 Michigan beat Purdue 43-22 on Saturday night for its second straight Big Ten title and a likely No. 2 playoff seed.

College football’s winningest program has the first 13-win season in school history. Two more victories would give the Wolverines (13-0, No. 2 CFP) their first national championship since 1997.

And with injured star Blake Corum sidelined by a season-ending left knee injury, Edwards stole the show for the second straight week.

After shredding rival Ohio State for 216 yards and two scores last week, Edwards broke open this game with a 60-yard on the first play of the second half to set up one score. He added a 27-yard TD sprint on Michigan’s next series to make it 28-13.

Purdue (8-5) never recovered from Michigan’s quick, seven-play onslaught after it trailed 14-13 at halftime.

But quarterback Aidan O’Connell and receiver Charlie Jones helped the Boilermakers make it interesting for a while.

O’Connell was 32 of 47 with 366 yards and two interceptions after missing some practice time early this week to mourn the death of his oldest brother. Jones, who lost to Michigan in last year’s game while playing for Iowa, had 13 receptions for 162 yards.

It just wasn’t enough.

Michigan showed no signs of a hangover after last week’s rout over the Buckeyes, taking a 7-0 lead on its opening possession with a 25-yard TD pass from McCarthy to Colston Loveland.

Purdue answered with Devin Mockobee’s 1-yard scoring run to tie the score then took the lead on Mitchell Fineran’s 33-yard field goal.

Michigan answered by taking advantage of an offside call on fourth-and-6 by going for the first down, picking it up and eventually converting the drive into a 7-yard TD pass from McCarthy to Luke Schoonmaker. They never trailed again.

Edwards big run set up Kalel Mullings’ 1-yard TD plunge before Edwards celebrated his own scoring run.

All Purdue could muster was three more field goals.

McCarthy was 11 of 17 with 161 yards and one interception.

Corum posted a message on Twitter on Saturday morning to say his knee surgery went well.

THE TAKEAWAY

Purdue: The Boilermakers’ magical season ended with a solid showing in the championship game where they played better than most expected. Still, they won the Big Ten’s wild, wild West, both trophy games and should be bound for a warm-weather bowl game.

Michigan: Yes, the Wolverines may have already locked up a top-two seed thanks to losses by Southern Cal and TCU. Michigan now has back-to-back conference crowns for the first time since 2003-04 though the hard part remains — ending its national title drought.

DIALING UP TRICKERY

Purdue head coach Jeff Brohm played one season in the now defunct XFL and has acknowledged that experience helped him understand how to inject personality and creativity into play calling. It was on full display Saturday.

A surprise end around set up Purdue’s first score, a fake punt helped keep its second scoring drive alive and then Mockobee sprinted 25 yards on a fake flea-flicker in the third quarter.

[theforevermorereject]

Big Ten this tournament so far was like we’re going to show you why you should be afraid… Holy Michigan, Minnesota, Penn State and Ohio State 😳😱👍☝️

[trendynewsnow]

USC President Carol L. Folt Announces Retirement Amid Campus Unrest

USC President Carol L. Folt Announces Retirement The president of the University of Southern California (USC), Carol L. Folt, has declared her intention to retire next summer, a significant development for one of the West Coast’s most prestigious universities. This announcement comes amidst a backdrop of considerable unrest on campus surrounding the ongoing conflict in Gaza. At 73 years old, Dr.…

[dhart4214]

UCLA FOOTBALL: What The Bruins Need To Do NOW

THE ONE CHANGE THAT THE BRUINS MUST MAKE TO AVOID POSSIBLY MAKING THE WORST KIND OF HISTORY THIS SEASON Though I’ve posted mid season reports on UCLA’s football team (as well as USC’s) on this blog in the past, I wasn’t planning on doing that this year as I wanted to focus on different topics; write more opinion-editorial stuff and save the SoCal college football coverage for Crosstown Rivalry…

[news4usonline]

Penn State, USC headed in opposite directions

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – For the first half of its Big Ten Conference football game against the USC Trojans, Penn State did not play like they are the fourth-best team in the country.  The No. 4 Nittany Lions huffed and puffed their way throughout the first half and saw themselves going into halftime with a 13-point deficit.  Penn State looked slow and mechanical while the Trojans made an…

[baddawgsports]

Big Ten Conference and Chicago Cubs Partner for The Frozen Confines: Big Ten Hockey Series

College hockey continues to push boundaries and create exciting matchups in large outdoor venues. The latest announcement comes from the Big Ten Conference who will host 3 men and 1 women’s hockey matches at Wrigley Field. The Big Ten Conference and the Chicago Cubs announced today plans to host a pair of college hockey doubleheaders at Wrigley Field in January 2025. The event will be known…

[jcamilov06]

Emeka Egbuka's touchdown vs. ❌ichigan Wolverines | November 25th, 2023

[anygivengameday]

#14 Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs at #6 Minnesota Golden Gophers

Friday, November 3, 2023

3M Arena at Mariucci, Minneapolis, MN

[sportfeed9]

Minnesota gives Fleck a 1-year extension, plus a raise

Minnesota gives Fleck a 1-year extension, plus a raise

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Minnesota coach PJ Fleck had his contract extended Wednesday by an additional year with a $1 million raise in annual salary, after the latest round of big spending by Big Ten rivals. The new seven-year deal will run through the 2029 season, the university announced without releasing terms. Fleck will now make $6 million per year, a person with knowledge of the contract…

[expelliarmus]

[justinssportscorner]

Alex Kirshner at Slate:

The Pac-12 Conference, which started in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference and donned a bunch of names over a successful century of Western teams playing games with each other, is dead. After USC and UCLA exited for the Big Ten last summer, and after Colorado headed for the Big 12 last month, the conference took on additional water on Friday: Oregon and Washington, the Pac-12’s biggest remaining fish, joined their Los Angeles counterparts in the Big Ten. The Big 12 Conference is now also adding Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah, news that broke just minutes after the Pacific Northwest schools decided to join the Midwest. The future is deeply murky for the biggest schools left in the Pac-12 now, Stanford and Cal in the Bay Area. And it looks only grim for two of the quirkiest and most fun programs in college football: Oregon State and Washington State, who are losing their blood rivals (Oregon and Washington) to another league but aren’t getting the call to decamp themselves. The specifics will fall into place in the days ahead. The big picture is already a bleak one. The degradation of the Pac-12, and now its imminent outright death as anything like what it has always been, is a college sports tragedy. In some part, this moment is a natural destination for a train that left its station decades ago and will run over more of college sports’ nice old things in the years to come. But what has happened to the Pac-12 wasn’t inevitable and certainly didn’t need to unfold as quickly as it did. What college sports fans know as the Conference of Champions is at death’s door because of cold, hard capitalism, yes, but also because the people in charge of stewarding the Pac-12 were the wrong mix of arrogant and incompetent.

College sports has been transmogrifying into a made-for-TV product since the mid-1980s, when the Supreme Court stripped the NCAA of its top-down control of football television rights and left teams and conferences to make their own agreements. As one cycle of gigantic TV deals has given way to the next, the Pac-12 has slid into a more pronounced disadvantage against its peers in the South and Midwest. College football is a religion in the Southeastern Conference’s footprint and in much of the Big Ten’s, though the latter now covers both the parts of the country obsessed with football and the parts that are not. The Big Ten and SEC have lucrative TV networks of their own that they run in partnership with ESPN and Fox, and the leagues sell the rights to broadcast their games—their inventory, in industry parlance—for hundreds of millions of dollars. The financial edge of the big two leagues cost the Pac-12 both UCLA and USC in a realignment move to the Big Ten last summer, and the same edge has now cost them Oregon and Washington to render the Pac-12 unrecognizable. When those schools left, three others fled in response to the Big 12, and suddenly, it was all over. The Northwestern Big Ten entrants might only get half the money of a normal Big Ten member, but that will be more than they were likely to get if they had stayed in the outgunned Pac-12. Someone might look at the TV cash disparity and conclude the Pac-12 never had a chance to survive. But the Pac-12’s predicament is worse than simply not being able to compete financially with the Big Ten and SEC. The world was big enough for the league to survive in a reasonably strong form anyway, as a secondary but still powerful conference with a distinct Western identity. The reason the Pac-12 is instead finished is that its leaders messed up repeatedly and gruesomely until they couldn’t blow it anymore.

[...] All of this adds up to something a little less severe than the death of Western college football, because the teams involved will keep playing games. Fans will keep tailgating, their lives mostly unaffected by how much TV money their alma maters are raking in. But the reduction or demise of the Pac-12 will have serious costs. It could end either the Washington–Washington State rivalry known as the Apple Cup or the Oregon–Oregon State game that they used to call the Civil War. (The departing schools say they’ll prioritize maintaining those games, and we can only hope that stays true forever.) It will weaken the geographic distinction in a sport that used to see provincialism as a feature, not a bug. And it will pit schools against teams they share no history or animus with, in an 18-team Big Ten (at least) where some teams will go years without playing each other. They’ll all be richer. There is no guarantee that they, or anyone, will be happier.

The demise of the Pac-12 was entirely avoidable. USC and UCLA's defections to the Big Ten (B1G) were the warning shot of P12's demise; however, the conference still could have been in a manageable shape.

But when Colorado hightailed it back to the Big 12, the dominoes began to really unravel for the Pac-12's survival. Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah joined Colorado to the Big 12, and Washington and Oregon went to the B1G, leaving behind Washington State, Oregon State, Cal, and Stanford in a rudderless P12.

In truth, the Pac-12's disaster began with the Pac 12 Networks, and will end with messes.

[bongaboi]

Illinois: 2023-24 Big Ten Men's Basketball Champions

The Illinois Fighting Illini apparently have their recipe for success in the playoffs.

It's quite simple: Fall behind by double-digits in the second half, turn up the defensive pressure and ride the hot hand of guard Terrence Shannon.

That was the case for a third straight game in the Big Ten tournament at Target Center in Minneapolis. This time, they rallied from 10 to defeat the Wisconsin Badgers 93-87 to capture their second conference title since 2021. Guard Terrence Shannon led the way with 34 points, completing one of the best performances in tournament history.

He averaged 34 points in three games, including a career-high 40 in the semifinals against Nebraska.

The Illini trailed 61-51 with 14:38 left before they began another big charge. A 7-0 run highlighted a Dain Dainja dunk, Shannon layup and 3-pointer by Marcus Domask put them ahead 70-65. Shannon then capped it with a deep 3-pointer with 1 minute, 26 seconds remaining. They shot 60 percent in the second half.

It wasn't just Shannon. Domask finished with 26 points on 8 of 11 shooting. He was also 9 of 10 from the free throw line.

It was the eighth win in nine games for the Illini. The only loss was to No. 2 Purdue, a game they had every chance to win. Now, the Illini roll into the NCAA Tournament oozing with momentum.

They should enter no lower than a No. 3 seed.

[offsidenewsco]

Have you ever wondered about NCAA Hockey? What's the Frozen Four? How do the rankings work? What players have played through the system?

We've got you covered in our primer here

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The U.C.L.A. Bruins' Extensive Travel in the New Big Ten Era

The Long Journey of the U.C.L.A. Bruins Football Team This season, playing football for the U.C.L.A. Bruins means embarking on an extensive travel schedule, one that feels more like that of a seasoned traveler than a college athlete. The journey commenced in August with a victorious outing at the University of Hawaii. Following this initial triumph, the Bruins embarked on a series of challenging…

[dhart4214]

An Open Letter To My Fellow Members of UCLA's Bruin Nation

I’ll try to make this as concise and brief as I can, because I don’t want to take too long venting my feelings here. Dear Fellow Bruins, Yes, I was at the Rose Bowl this past Saturday, watching our football team play what in my opinion was one of their worst football games in their history if not the worst. It was like they were a combination of college football’s version of the Bad News…