\Give us some respect!""
That's the typical cry from mid-major college football programs and conferences every year. And in recent years, respect has been granted. The number of scholarships each school can give has been reduced from 120 to 85, meaning more schools can land top recruits. The perpetually evolving Bowl Championship Series has been altered yet again to allow more access to mid-major conferences. It seems every year there is a Utah or Boise State or Fresno State that rolls through a season and makes everyone realize that there is some great football being played outside of the power conferences.
But not this year.
Week one of this fall's college football season was, quite simply, a disaster for the mid-major conferences. You name the conference-the Mid-American Conference, the Mountain West, Conference USA, the Western Athletic Conference, the Sun Belt-the ineptitude ran rampant in all.
These five conferences combined to go a frightful 9-41 on the weekend. The MAC went 1-10, including seven losses to the Big Ten.
The most hyped potential upset-specials turned into nationally broadcast laughers. Georgia pummeled the only ranked mid-major team, Boise State, 48-13. The Broncos came into the game hoping to write the first chapter in their march to the BCS, but Boise State quarterback Jared Zabransky penned a one-man Greek tragedy, committing six turnovers in Athens, Ga. Bowling Green's defense rolled gutter balls all day against Wisconsin's ground assault. And it's a good thing ""Aloha"" means both hello and goodbye, because Hawaii couldn't tell what was coming or going against Southern California quarterback Matt Leinart and the Trojan offense in their 63-17 loss. Only Texas Christian managed to score a major upset on the day, knocking off then-No. 10 Oklahoma 17-10.
If this is the kind of football the mid-majors are going to be giving us this year, I have to wonder why they spent so much time in the offseason reshuffling teams in apparently pointless attempts to keep up with college football's heavyweights.
It began with the Atlantic Coast Conference swiping major programs Miami and Virginia Tech from the Big East in 2004 and Boston College this season. To replace those teams the Big East snatched three C-USA programs-successful Louisville and two middling programs, Cincinnati and South Florida. The Big East also didn't give much of a hoot for Temple, kicking out the Owls for years of underachieving. This set off a chain reaction of conference-jumping, with C-USA taking teams from the MAC and WAC, the Mountain West snaring Texas Christian from the WAC, and the WAC bringing teams up from the Sun Belt. When the dust settled, 17 teams landed in a different conference in 2005 from last season, with two of them, Sun Belt newcomers Florida Atlantic and Florida International, suddenly moving up to I-A status.
Meanwhile, the Big Ten stood pat, refusing to add another team just so it could split into two divisions and hold a championship game, an increasingly common trend. But there's something to be said for its consistency and trying to be the best conference it can be with what it already has.
So forgive me, mid-majors, for giving you the Rodney Dangerfield treatment. Maybe if you knock off a couple Big Ten teams this weekend or next you can achieve some measure of respect. But as of now, I just have to laugh a bit, because Akron is in first place in the MAC East while Purdue is in last place in the Big Ten, and the reason for both is the same-they didn't play.
Michael Worringer is a co-editor of GameDay. He can be reached at mtworringer@wisc.edu.
