USC is a punting paradise so far this season, while Illinois is throwing a bunch of touchdown passes
It wasn't this way with 11 or 12 or 14, but now that the Big Ten has 18 football teams I find all my waking thoughts are about the conference. For instance:
1. I hope Washington's players stay hydrated on their 2,849-mile flight from Seattle to Newark for their Friday night game at Rutgers.
2. Lacking the time, resources or interest to research it, I'll insist Washington's 24-5 win over Northwestern Saturday was the first 24-5 score in the history of the sport.
3. OK, that wasn't hard to disprove. The Houston Texans beat the Chicago Bears 24-5 in 2004. But no team outside of Chicagoland has ever lost by that score in the history of the sport, not that I have the time, resources or interest to research it.
4. Speaking of history, it's been proven time after time that Big Ten football is always better when Illinois, Rutgers and Indiana are a combined 11-0.
5. Saturday night, it's Illinois-Penn State on NBC and Georgia-Alabama on ABC. Were this a battle of ratings, ABC would be a 42-point favorite.
6. Iowa had 62 passing yards at Minnesota Saturday, Michigan had 32 passing yards against USC, and the winners were Iowa and Michigan. Welcome to 1924.
7. Indiana has 28 touchdowns and two field goals. UCLA has four touchdowns and six field goals.
8. No one in the Big Ten had more than 10 carries of 20-plus yards last season. Iowa's Kaleb Johnson has 12 in four games.
9. Ohio State running backs Quinshon Judkins and TreVeyon Henderson average 9.3 and 8.6 yards per carry, respectively. Johnson is at 8.4, and has at least 46 more carries than either Buckeye.
10. Tai Felton of Maryland has assembled receiving numbers rivaling no one else in the league, with 41 catches in four games, and 151 yards per game.
11. A wild guess: Washington wide receiver Denzel Boston and Ohio State cornerback Denzel Burke got their first names because of a certain actor their mothers favor.
12. Illinois quarterback Luke Altmyer has 10 touchdown passes and no interceptions and has completed 71.4 percent of his passes, yet he is just sixth in the league in quarterback rating.
13. Eddie Czaplicki of USC is averaging 52.1 yards per punt (11 attempts), almost 6 yards more than anyone else in the conference. He is not an Australian.
14. Iowa, fond of calling itself Tight End U., doesn't have a tight end ranked among the Big Ten's top 50 players in receiving yards per game. Nine tight ends are in the top 50.
15. Three Ohio State kickoffs have gone out of bounds.
16. Indiana is averaging 199.3 yards allowed per game. Last year, it allowed 394.1.
17. It's a big ask of Stanford in the ACC, but I'd like to see the champions of all the Power Four conferences come from west of the Mississippi River. That's not entirely true. I'd prefer Vanderbilt to win the SEC, but that's just not happening.
18. Is the Chicago White Sox' record of 36-120 worse than Northwestern's 1-11 football season of 2022? No. Has there been a screwier college football program than Northwestern's in the last decade? No. Since 2017, here are the Wildcats' Big Ten records: 7-2, 8-1, 1-8, 6-1, 1-8, 1-8, 5-4, 0-1.