Adam Rittenberg: Can you wake me when Minnesota finally starts playing someone?

[MNVCGUY]

It wouldn't be difficult to play this game all day long. If you want to go the other way with some of those games, ASU was barely a .500 team when Wisky scheduled them. So they get credit now for scheduling a "quality opponent"? ISU is absolutely miserable this year, and could probably be beaten by UNLV. But they won't get creampuff consideration because they're a "BCS-caliber" opponent. As bad as Iowa is this year, they better roll ISU in this one.

Similarly, UCLA was a crappy opponent when this home-and-home was scheduled with Nebraska. I couldn't care less what the difficulty of these games were expected to be when they were scheduled. Bottom line, San Jose State will be a fairly tough out next week; maybe not as tough as we thought at the beginning of the season, but they'll be a quality opponent, and it's a game that I think will actually be a good tune-up for Iowa.

Agreed that there is no way to know how good a team is going to be on a year to year basis especially when schedules are set so far in advance. But that wasn't my point. My point was every other school in the Big Ten is playing at least one team from a BCS conference or Notre Dame. Sure we can argue the strength of each opponent on a yearly basis but you can't tell me sitting down and scheduling a program from the Pac 12 is the same as scheduling a team like San Jose State.

 

[Maximus]

It wouldn't be difficult to play this game all day long. If you want to go the other way with some of those games, ASU was barely a .500 team when Wisky scheduled them. So they get credit now for scheduling a "quality opponent"? ISU is absolutely miserable this year, and could probably be beaten by UNLV. But they won't get creampuff consideration because they're a "BCS-caliber" opponent. As bad as Iowa is this year, they better roll ISU in this one.

Arizona State was ranked 24th in the country in 2003 when the series with Wisconsin was announced.