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The first full week of Big Ten football produced a couple of surprises and some shuffling already in our conference bowl projections.
Ohio State, Iowa and Penn State already own conference wins, with OSU and PSU earning really solid road victories. The Hawkeyes were expected to beat Indiana at home but the margin of victory was pretty impressive as Iowa ran away, 34-6.
Those 3 teams, along with Wisconsin, stay put in our projections because we had projected the Nittany Lions to the Rose Bowl as the conference’s second-best team already. The Buckeyes are still projected to the College Football Playoff.
But Maryland and Michigan State made splashes that caught our attention.
The Terrapins knocked off a fairly well-regarded West Virginia team 30-24. The Spartans, meanwhile, opened conference play with a 38-21 victory at Northwestern, last season’s B1G West Division champion.
After the CFP (assuming the league gets in the Playoff and we are projecting that it will) and the Rose Bowl, the B1G has agreements with 8 bowls. The conference could well place more teams in bowls if there are more than 10 bowl-eligible teams.
But for now, MSU and Maryland barge their way into this list at the expense of Purdue and Rutgers. We still like the Scarlet Knights to earn a possible bowl bid but 6-6 might be their ceiling so they might be waiting after all of the other B1G bowl spots have been filled. Same with Purdue.
Here are the updated B1G bowl projections:
Cotton Bowl (CFP semifinal): Ohio State vs. Georgia
Rose Bowl: Penn State vs. Oregon
Citrus Bowl: Iowa vs. Auburn
Outback Bowl: Wisconsin vs. Missouri
Las Vegas Bowl: Michigan vs. Arizona State
Music City Bowl: Indiana vs. Tennessee
Pinstripe Bowl: Minnesota vs. Wake Forest
Guaranteed Rate Bowl: Maryland vs. TCU
Redbox Bowl: Michigan State vs. Washington
Quick Lane Bowl: Northwestern vs. Western Michigan
Longtime newspaper veteran Jim Tomlin is a writer and editor for saturdaytradition.com and saturdaydownsouth.com.