Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/861263
2 0 1 7 K I C K O F F S P E C I A L heading into the 2017 season and five of the past eight. The last SEC East team to win the conference title was Florida in 2008. Dramatic reversals of fortune are less common, but they, too, occur. In 2014, for example, Oregon was the most powerful program in the Pac-12. Two years later, it went 4-8 and fired Mark Helfrich, who had guided the Ducks to the brink of the national title in the first College Football Playoff. And while Oregon was trending down, Washington was on the rise. It had gone 8-6 in 2014, its first season under former Boise State coach Chris Petersen. But it went 12-2 last year and was the Pac-12's representative in the 2016 play- off. So the pecking order in the Power Five conferences is always in some degree of flux. But college football also has a hand- ful of too-big-to-fail programs that have been able to use their deep pockets and long winning traditions to maintain their place atop the sport's hierarchy. Even though the College Football Playoff is only three years old, three teams have al- ready made multiple appearances: Ala- bama, which has been a participant all three years, and Ohio State and Clemson, which have made two appearances apiece. All three rank among the 20 win- ningest programs in Division I FBS his- tory. In the Big Ten, league officials may have hoped to achieve a rough balance of power when they scrapped the Leaders and Leg- ends divisions in 2013 in favor of an East- West split. But they did put three of the 10 winningest programs in college football history in the East, so even with Penn State and Michigan strug- gling at the time the new alignment took effect, the odds fa- vored a return to business as usual. And yet, it's hard to fault those officials for crafting divisions that don't balance out, because they faced a major challenge: Michigan and Ohio State can't be sepa- rated, even as protected rivals. Doing so would create the potential for a rematch in the league championship game just one week after the teams' traditional season- ending clash, so the Buckeyes and Wolverines are a package deal, even though their combined presence in- evitably skews the balance of power. Michigan has won 42 Big Ten champi- PANEL DISCUSSION Dave Revsine of the Big Ten Network inter- views Penn State's Jason Cabinda (left), Marcus Allen (center) and Mike Gesicki. Photo by Nate Bauer