Big Ten

College football is in the middle of the best stretch of its modern era, and I think it might be quietly building toward something genuinely ugly. The playoff expanded. The ratings are enormous. The talent on college fields is as good as it has ever been. But there is a difference between a sport that...

The NCAA is about to add eight more teams to March Madness and the only people who asked for it were the people who already have the most. That is the whole story. Everything else is marketing. The basketball tournament goes from 68 to 76 teams, likely starting next season, and the CFP is somewhere...

Stop pretending the college football four-team playoff was about justice. It was a country club. Same cast, same endings, same excuses when outsiders knocked on the door. If your school did not have the logo or the history, you needed to be perfect and then some. One loss and your season was erased because the...

Watching Penn State get steamrolled by UCLA today and then remembering last week’s collapse to Oregon, you can’t help but think this program is addicted to a very specific kind of denial. When you ask a Penn State fan an actual question about what’s going wrong, half the time the reply is some glazed, tribal...