Big Ten Media Poll has a devil of a time with the details

Already this morning the players at Stanford University have formed a player's union (although they don't yet call it that) and the University of North Carolina has put their general manager on administrative leave.

College football comes at you fast.

In Ohio @Clevelanddotcom released the Big Ten Preseason Media Poll and it leans heavily into all the usual suspects.

The graphic does its usual nasty work of concealing No. 9 and 18, which are Illinois and Purdue under new coach Barry Odom. The Boilermakers are 0-18 in conference play over the last two seasons, and haven't been to a bowl since 2022 when Jeff Brohm was head coach.

Good coaching, bad coaching and big plays produce inevitable surprises

Coaching makes a bigger difference in college football than any other sport. Brohm built a culture. Joe Tiller had a scheme. In the '60s, Fred Mollenkopf coached the Black and Gold into a Rose Bowl and four straight seasons in the Top 20. Every program has their cycles, and in the NIL/Transfer Portal era the combination of leadership and talent evaluation can produce rapid and dramatic changes.

Things rarely come out as expected. In 2025 this same poll confidently predicted Penn State to win the conference. They had an experienced starting quarterback, an Alll-American to anchor the offensive line and a veteran defense led by Zane Durant, who fell to the fifth round.

The Nittany Lions stumbled so badly that their coach got fired midway through a 7-6 season.

In 2025 the media thought Indiana would fall back a little after their magical run to the College Football Playoff the year before. Kurtiss Rourke had graduated, and Curt Cignetti brought in former Cal quarterback Fernando Mendoza to replace him, 16 touchdowns and six interceptions with the Bears the year before.

Cignetti saw something in Mendoza that the rest of college football missed completely. The Hoosiers turned out to be undefeated national champions, the first 16-0 champion since Yale in 1898. Some people think IU ought to be No. 1 until proven otherwise, but it seems like a new year with new players-- that approach is too simple.

And how good a program Ohio State is, to have four players taken in the first 11 of the 2026 NFL Draft, and still be picked to win the conference?

Here is last year's preseason AP Top 25, which proved to be half wrong, egregiously inaccurate even in the playoff field. PSU, Clemson and LSU were all trendy picks to win the national championship, but all three finished 7-6, eliminated from playoff consideration by mid-October.

Last season the Big Ten writers forecast the conference as follows:

18 Purdue
17 Northwestern
16 Maryland
15 UCLA
T-13 Rutgers/Michigan State
12 Wisconsin
11 Minnesota
10 Washington
9 Southern Cal
8 Nebraska
7 Iowa
6 Indiana
5 Michigan
4 Illinois
3 Oregon
2 Ohio State
1 Penn State

They missed badly on Indiana and Illinois, and USC did better than unexpected. Minnesota climbed to 8-5 and won another bowl.

But when the predicted conference champion falls to 3-6 in league play, it may be time to mute the media poll.

Things rarely turn out the way fans or reporters think they will. Last year at this time Duck fans expected Dakorien Moore to be the leading receiver, and instead it became Malik Benson, who shook off a couple of drops in the spring game to catch 43 passes for 719 yards and 6 touchdowns.

The Ducks had a good season at 13-2, but it hung in the balance on a single play. They trailed 16-15 at Iowa with 23 seconds to go, first and ten on their own 49. Dante Moore threw a laser to Benson to set up a winning field goal.

Good coach/bad coach often comes down to a field goal in the driving rain or a single moment of brilliance. Now the Ducks own the longest road winning streak in college football at twelve consecutive games, though they've been a big disappointment in neutral site games. They've lost four of those in disastrous and memorable ways, a pattern Coach Lanning has to shake off to reach the first tier of college coaches.

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