Every Saturday, we post a play from each Big Ten team and let our Big Ten fans rank the week’s best plays. We’re building an archive throughout the season, so feel free to backtrack and rank any play from previous weeks. Here’s how it works: Watch each play, and then rank them, one being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Don’t forget to come back throughout the day Saturday, either, because we’ll post each team’s play immediately following its game. In other words, there will usually be three uploads – early games, afternoon games and night games.
(AP) Marvin McNutt caught three touchdown passes to become Iowa’s career leader and Marcus Coker ran for two more scores to lead the Hawkeyes past Indiana 45-24 on Saturday. Iowa (5-2, 2-1 Big Ten) followed up on its 41-31 victory over Northwestern a week ago with another big offensive outing, triggered by McNutt’s scoring catches of 80, 24 and 29 yards from James Vandenberg, who had a career-best four TD passes in all. That gave the senior a school-record 24 touchdown receptions for his career. Indiana (1-7, 0-4) lost for the fifth straight time and now has been outscored 161-61 in Big Ten play. Read the full AP recap, see the box score and check out our Big Ten scoreboard.
Last Saturday we posted a page with video clips of ten Big Ten football plays on it, one for each of the schools playing that day. Then we let fans rate any and all of the plays all week long right up until kickoff of the next games. In fact, if you missed the feature you can still rate the plays right here. Good news: We’re going to do this again for every football weekend left in the season, including the Dec. 3 Big Ten Championship. Right now, Iowa’s Tanner Miller has the highest-rated play. Watch it here.
Last month, everyone was talking about how the Nebraska-Wisconsin game might be the Big Ten’s biggest game of the year. Three weeks later, it’s the Wisconsin-Michigan State game getting that treatment, and rightfully so. The game at Spartan Stadium highlights the Week 8 slate, which also includes Indiana-Iowa (noon ET) and Penn State-Northwestern (7) on BTN. Use our GameFinder to find your BTN game and track all of the action on our Big Ten scoreboard. Watch former Big Ten players talk about how the Big Ten prepared them for the NFL now and check out Brent Yarina’s Week 8 Preview in this post.
One of the things I enjoy about college football is that you never really know what’s coming. Because there are so few games in a season relative to other sports and because so much needs to be sorted out in those few games, college football lends itself to having multiple “games of the year.” Nebraska-Wisconsin seemed like the Big Ten “game of the year” a few weeks ago. Now Wisconsin-Michigan State is taking on that feel. And, if the Badgers win and, say, Illinois gets back on track, then their meeting in Champaign on Nov. 19 will get that “game of the year” tag. Or, if the Spartans win, their game at Nebraska next week may suddenly earn the spotlight treatment.