INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — It’s a new day in the Big Ten.
This week, members of the media as well as NCAA officials, College Football Playoff leadership and key leaders from the 18 football programs in the conference descended upon Indianapolis for Big Ten Football Media Days at Lucas Oil Stadiums.
Storylines abound.
For Ohio State, all eyes are on head coach Ryan Day, who is expected to exorcise the Buckeyes’ demons after losing to heated rivals Michigan for three years straight – along with the pressure of being viewed by most as the preseason favorites for both Big Ten and CFP supremacy.
“Our guys, they know what the expectation is,” Day said on Tuesday. “You’ve heard some of them say what their goals are. We’re not going to shy away from that. We want to win the rivalry game, be right in this stadium right here and win this Big Ten Championship, win a National Championship.”
For the Wolverines – fresh off a National Championship win themselves against Big Ten newcomer Washington – the mantle has been passed to Sherrone Moore, who succeeds the school’s previous head coach Jim Harbaugh after he left for the Chargers in his return to the NFL. Moore inherits a drastically different offense than Harbaugh had in his last season, with key players like JJ McCarthy, Blake Corum, Roman Wilson, Mike Sainristil and Junior Colson all getting drafted this spring.
Regardless, Moore believes this group is ready to pick up where last year’s squad left off.
“Team 145 has really done a really good job up to this point in taking the necessary steps to be elite, to do all the things that we set out to do – win the big games, beat our rivals, beat Ohio State, win the Big Ten, go to College Football Playoff and win it. For us, that’s something we strive to do.”
Washington comes to the Big Ten with a new coach leading the Huskies in Jedd Fisch. (Damien Dennis/The Pit Media
Meanwhile, the team Michigan beat for college football’s top prize, Washington, is entering a new era of their own.
With Kalen DeBoer’s departure to Tuscaloosa to fill the shoes left by Nick Saban, the Huskies find themselves under the guidance of Jedd Fisch, who joins the program after rebuilding Arizona – and will now look to name a successor to Michael Penix Jr., who became the most talked about first rounder during this year’s draft.
“Coach DeBoer did such a fantastic job in a short period of time with a veteran team,” Fisch says. “Those guys were old. We had 13 of those guys playing in the NFL right now. So we had to build a culture with a bunch of guys that have never really started or played in games together that were very meaningful. We had to teach them what we would expect on a daily basis. They’ve embraced it. They’ve worked extremely hard together”
As a matter of fact, the new Big Ten represents four of the six schools whose quarterbacks were selected in the first round this year. Finishing out said group are conference newbies Oregon and USC.
Despite saying goodbye to the overall No. 1 pick in Caleb Williams, the Trojans seem to be on the surest footing of the bunch. Lincoln Riley and his staff join the Big Ten with their Week 1 starter, Miller Moss, all but assured.
The same can be said of Dan Lanning and Oregon.
The Ducks will entrust redshirt senior Dillon Gabriel to pick up where Bo Nix, now with the Broncos, left off. The Hawaii native transfered to Eugene in the winter by way of the Sooners, where he’s coming off the best season of his career – boasting over 4,000 total yards and 42 touchdowns through the air and on the ground.
“Dillon is a guy that I knew before in the recruiting process and got to watch him from a distance,” says Lanning. “Being from Hawaii, I think it means a lot to him to be able to represent Oregon and our strong history there in the state.”
Oregon coach Dan Lanning is entering his third season leading the Ducks and first in the Big Ten. (Damien Dennis/The Pit Media)
And then there’s the old guard of the conference, teams like Penn State, Iowa, Michigan State and Wisconsin, all looking to regain footing on the strength of their long-standing reputations and formidable recruiting base.
For all 18 of these programs, the topics of NIL deals, a conference that is growing to monolithic proportions, and – on a much more jovial note – players that are eagar to raise their player ranking in the now-resurrected EA Sports College Football video game franchise, took center stage at Lucas Oil Stadium.
With all the disruption and new faces on display, one thing is certain: the Big Ten is primed to feature more big matchups on Saturdays than ever before.
