All it took was one game for the dominoes to start falling.
When Urban Meyer led Ohio State to a monumental upset of SEC titan and college football behemoth Alabama on Jan. 1, 2015—in the conference's backyard of New Orleans, no less—it put an exclamation point on a tectonic shift in the sport's landscape.
Hours earlier, Michigan State rallied late and beat Baylor in the Cotton Bowl. Earlier on that New Year's Day, Wisconsin edged Auburn in the Outback Bowl.
“There's no doubt that when we saw Wisconsin beat Auburn, that was a major, major moment for us to win this game,” Meyer said in the wee hours of the second day of 2015, minutes after he and his staff exerted everything it possibly could into tumbling the Tide.
Meyer has said since that his team also found out the Spartans beat Baylor mere minutes before going out onto the Superdome's turf to warm up. The eyes of his players lit up with that thought of, It is our turn now. We have to keep pace.
The Buckeyes faced the stiffest that night. But behind a monster in running back Ezekiel Elliott and a guy whose performance was anything but representative of a third-string quarterback, Cardale Jones, Meyer's group took the largest step at flipping the script of an entire sport.
Yes, Michigan State and Wisconsin's victories came earlier in the day, but somebody had to beat Alabama for the movement to feel real.
Michigan sat at home that night, not far removed from a 5-7 season that ended in Columbus with a 42-28 loss to the Buckeyes that cost Brady Hoke his job. The Wolverines knew there was only one man they could hire to replace him to get the program back to respectability not only in terms of the Big Ten but primarily against Ohio State. That man was Jim Harbaugh.
Michigan hired Harbaugh on Dec. 30, 2014, two days before the Buckeyes beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl and shocked the college football world. The Wolverines didn't know the Buckeyes were going to be able to pull the upset in that game. But they knew full well the bar Meyer set with a 59-0 whipping of Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship Game that got Ohio State into the first-ever College Football Playoff.
And Meyer felt Harbaugh's presence once he returned to college coaching and has ever since. Though it is unorthodox and sits in the sometimes blinded minds of Ohio State fans as silly, what Harbaugh does on the recruiting trail with his Summer Swarm satellite camp tour (which cost $211,948 the first year, then $334,711 this summer) puts the pressure on everyone else in the conference to sack up and be better.
“He upped the recruiting up a notch, challenged everybody a little bit,” Ohio State vice president and athletic director Gene Smith told CBS Sports. “Look at what James Franklin does. He's been known as a great recruiter. I think he affected that at Penn State Nittany Lions. Pat Fitzgerald has 10-win seasons and is highly competitive. We all know what Harbaugh can do.”
Smith became a player in a war of words just last year when asked about Harbaugh's push to get his face everywhere to boost recruiting and help revitalize Michigan football.
“If we were jump-starting our program, I'd probably try and do that, too,” Smith said, being honest and not trying to take a shot at the Michigan head coach.
Harbaugh took it so and fired off this viral tweet:
Good to see Director Smith being relevant again after the tattoo fiasco. Welcome back!
— Coach Harbaugh (@CoachJim4UM) March 23, 2016
The angst to be the best is there and is because of Michigan and Ohio State. And it is spreading.
Franklin beat Ohio State this season and with a win against Michigan State—who until this season had been on the rise under Mark Dantonio, making the Playoff last year—on Saturday, will earn a trip to the Big Ten title game. If the Nittany Lions win that against likely West Division winner Wisconsin, they should be in the Playoff. The Badgers, under second-year coach Paul Chryst, navigated a brutal conference schedule and are ranked No. 5 in the AP Poll on rivalry weekend.
The Big Ten went out and hired better coaches, spent the money to keep them and the play in the conference is significantly better near the top than when the SEC went on a nearly decade-long national championship bender. Chryst is at Wisconsin leading his alma mater, Harbaugh leads all college coaches in salary at more than $9 million a year, Meyer is third at $6.1 million and Franklin is tied for 10th and makes $3.6 million.
Another big name in longtime NFL coach Lovie Smith, who led the Chicago Bears to the Super Bowl, resides in Illinois. Mike Riley is at Nebraska, another man with NFL coaching experience.
Meanwhile, the SEC boasts names like Butch Jones at Tennessee (29-20 in Knoxville), Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss (buried in NCAA sanctions), Will Muschamp at South Carolina (struggling to gain ground as a head coach), Kirby Smart at Georgia (former Alabama DC who likely won't ever beat his mentor), Bret Bielema in Arkansas (25-24 in Fayetteville) among others. Not to say it could happen in the future, but none of those coaches (aside from Freeze, who did it twice) has shown they can beat Nick Saban with any sort of consistency.
Check that list in a few years and see how many of those guys are gone because they were always second fiddle to Saban and their higher-ups moved on to somebody else because the clock never stops ticking in the SEC. It will likely be more than one.
It feels like the Big Ten is deeper in the coaching aspect for the simple fact two of the country's best reside in the Midwest.
“It starts with players, recruiting and then obviously very good coaching staffs,” Meyer said on Tuesday. “All of the above is very important.”
Recruiting is a massive difference. The Big Ten's talent pool is growing and trending nationally. Meyer's latest class has the least number of Ohio kids in it (10) ever. Harbaugh's presence and antics speak for themselves everywhere from the east coast, to Florida when he held spring practice at IMG Academy in February and especially in Ohio.
"Whether you'd implement his techniques, which are outstanding, or you just say that's not my style, it doesn't matter," Smith said. "You've got to up your game. I just think highly competitive people are driven harder by highly competitive people."
It is showing in the rankings, in recruiting and in the fact the SEC is and has been a one-horse league the last few years. Alabama's dynasty is on its own level, as evident by the fact the Crimson Tide were crowned national champions in three of the last five years and four of the last eight.
Meyer won a pair of titles in three years at Florida. He has his team in position to contend for another this year and did as well in 2015 before a loss to Michigan State on Senior Day.
Harbaugh leads a largely dormant program that hasn't had a share of a national title since 1997 or even a Big Ten crown since 2004. His 2016 recruiting class ranked sixth in the country and included the nation's top overall player, defensive tackle Rashan Gary.
As of Tuesday, Michigan's 2017 recruiting haul ranked eighth in the country. Ohio State's is second, only recently yielding to Alabama but still having a solid chance to finish on top come February. Harbaugh and Meyer are rolling, and the other coaches in the Big Ten are furiously trying to keep pace.
There was a different vibe at Big Ten Media Days this summer than year's past. DJ Durkin and Chris Ash were terrific assistants under—you guessed it—Meyer and Harbaugh before taking over at Maryland and Rutgers. Durkin's 2017 recruiting class is in the top-20. Ash's at Rutgers is ranked 31st.
Nebraska, Penn State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Northwestern—they're all in the same neighborhood of the recruiting rankings among the top 35 in the country. The Big Ten knew it needed to step up because of the Meyer train in Columbus and Harbaugh's imminent rise at Michigan.
“I think the leadership the coaches have provided is probably the biggest difference. I don't think you can be really good without great leaders in those roles,” Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany told CBSSports. “But no matter how great the leadership is, you need players. It's a combination of things. For sure, we're on a nice trajectory.”
It goes back to winning big games on the national stage. The conference is earning respect, as evident by having three teams in the AP Poll at this point in the season for the first time in 58 years. Penn State gives the conference four of the top eight teams in the country.
Not bad for a league that fell into a massive hole in early 2014, when the Buckeyes lost to Virginia Tech, Notre Dame waxed Michigan and Michigan State lost by 19 at Oregon all on the same day.
“I remember in 2012 when I was first hired here, I was shocked about the disrespect about the Big Ten on a national level. I didn't understand it because I never felt that way,” Meyer said. “What's happened is people are winning bowl games, people are recruiting very fine players, the atmosphere in these stadiums are second to none. I'm very proud of our conference.”
Meyer and Harbaugh started the shift. They meet on Saturday for a chance to advance and play on an even grander scale either in Indianapolis or the College Football Playoff. Penn State is also in the conversation. As is Wisconsin.
For the SEC, it is Alabama and only Alabama. That is what Saban has built.
Harbaugh and Meyer flipped the switch in the Big Ten and coaches like Franklin and Mark Dantonio showed they can compete with them the last two seasons. Durkin and Ash have light years to go but are establishing the recruiting base necessary to at least become a thorn in the sides of Ohio State and Michigan. Franklin notched a huge win over Ohio State this season.
College football is cyclical but its latest round is coming up Big Ten. Look no further than Meyer and Harbaugh as to why.
