God bless college football.

This weekend was the sport at its best, with upsets, unlikely heroes and incredible finishes.

And at the end of it all, we’re left with a Big Ten Championship Game that no one saw coming: No. 5 Michigan vs. No. 16 Iowa.

The notion that anyone was going to beat Ohio State, the 4-time defending champion with 29 straight wins against B1G teams, seemed like a pipe dream. And that the team to do it would be Michigan, a program that had beaten the Buckeyes once since 2004 and was coming off a 2-4 season, seemed improbable.

That a team with the worst offense in the Big Ten can win the West is either beautiful or an atrocity, depending on your perspective. But it’s noteworthy. And after scoring no offensive touchdowns in the first 56 minutes of a game against Nebraska, Iowa did just that. The Hawkeyes will enter the title game having scored only 1 offensive touchdown in 4 of their last 6 games. They were a 1.5-point underdog to a Nebraska team that was 3-8 and starting its backup QB.

You can’t make this stuff up!

For this matchup to happen, everything had to break right for these teams. Michigan needed Michigan State to lose twice, which it did. And then it needed to finally slay its arch nemesis, a super program with absurd levels of talent that seemed more likely to win the national title than not win the Big Ten title. Iowa needed a Minnesota team scraping the barrel for a healthy running back and a competent QB to upset the hottest team in the Big Ten, Wisconsin.

But it all happened, and we should be grateful.

It made for a weekend of non-stop drama, not to mention the glorious, B1G-esque imagery out of East Lansing, where Michigan State held off Penn State in the snow, in large part due to a ridiculous 20-yard TD pass from Payton Thorne to Jayden Reed on fourth-and-15.

At times, college football can be so predictable. Even though it’s the best sport in the world, it is annoyingly top-heavy. And the B1G is no exception. Ohio State looked like it was about to make its seventh trip to the title game in the last 9 years, and Wisconsin looked like it was going to make its seventh appearance in 11 years. Yawn!

Even as chaos was a hallmark of the early part of the season (Ohio State was upset by Oregon, and Wisconsin started 1-3), that matchup felt inevitable the last few weeks. If it would’ve happened, there would have been just 2 different title game matchups in the last 5 years (Ohio State vs. Northwestern and Ohio State vs. Wisconsin). Yawn!

That’s why Michigan vs. Iowa is a delightful matchup. Did you know that Michigan has never appeared in a Big Ten Championship Game? Granted, it didn’t start until 2011, but still. The Wolverines last won the Big Ten in 2004. And Iowa, a program that seems to win 8-10 games every year, has only made a single appearance in this game, back in 2015. And there should be plenty of drama, with Michigan a surefire College Football Playoff team with a win and Iowa a possible CFP squad with a convincing win.

Regardless, though, the Big Ten badly needed this matchup to happen, and it’s no shade at Ohio State or Wisconsin fans. This sport, as great as it is, can feel a little stale at times. We need some new blood.

This weekend was an important reminder that college football, for as predictable as it can be, sometimes surprises us all and gives us a game we never saw coming. November madness, indeed.