The Drop, Week 14: First Year Debriefing

It's been a season now since I pared Pickin' On The Big Ten down to just five teams. I don't know how anyone else feels about it but for me, it made writing fun again. Life is simply too short to have to try to analyze and say something intelligent about eighteen teams for 14 straight weekends.

Now as we prepare for the postseason I'd like to take a look back at the things I got right and the things I got wrong along the way. Let's start by looking at my preseason picks for each team's final record and how that compares to what really happened

• Illinois: I prediced 9-3; it finished 8-4.
• Iowa: I predicted 8-4; it finished 8-4.
• Minnesota: I predicted 7-5; it finished 7-5.
• Nebraska: I predicted 9-3; it finished 7-5.
• Wisconsin: I predicted 4-8; it finished 4-8.

So that's three direct hits, one prediction of one too many wins, and one of two too many wins. No team outperformed my expectations from back in August. I'll take that.

I'm also proud of having predicted that, despite finishing 4-8, Luke Fickell would return for 2026. I think that has as much to do with what a bad hiring environment it wound up being as it does with any patience and/or love being shown to Fick.

And I offer this from Week 0, when Iowa State and Kansas State squared off in Dublin:

"The other nightmare scenario is that the winner gets massively overhyped (because, after all, these are two teams that figure to be pretty good this season) only for the loser to wind up going 6-6, making all the petals fall of this precious August flower of a publicity stunt conference game."

While I was wrong about who would win -- I picked K-State -- the Wildcats lost the game, finished the season 6-6, and neither team is ranked.

That said, while I am proud of my macro-scale predictions, some of my game calls were a little ... off. Like how I predicted the Indiana-Illinois final score would be IU 34, Illinois 31, and it wound up IU 63, Illinois 10. I followed that up one week later guessing the Hoosiers would paste the Hawkeyes 48-10. The final in that game wound up Indiana 20, Iowa 15. Indiana is enigmatic, or the Hawkeyes are the best 8-4 football team in the country.

And lastly I slipped this into my Minnesota preview about the California game: 

"Taking on the moribund California Golden Bears will let the team get its travel legs without suffering a humiliating, confidence-destroying loss on the third weekend of the season."

This was a blatant attempt to put the whammy on the Gophers so that they would lose to the Golden Bears, and it worked. The Gophers were undefeated in Huntington Bank Stadium this season, and winless everywhere else.

Photo credit: “The amazing Zoltar” by Nan Fry, CC BY 2.0