Michigan-Iowa buried in Saturday's undercard

The Big Ten Conference has five of the top 20 teams in the latest BCS standings. Pretty good league, right?

Sort of. The highest of those five is No. 10 Nebraska. For the Cornhuskers to reach the top two in time for the BCS title game, a string of several unlikely events would have to be stitched together in the next month, things that would shake the belief system of all college football fans.

Meanwhile, in a place called Tuscaloosa, the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the nation meet Saturday night. They are Southeastern Conference mainstays, Louisiana State and Alabama. The winner will almost surely roll to the national-championship game. If their encounter is especially close, the loser might, too.

How galling would that be to the high-and-mighty Big Ten to beg for a second team of its league to get into the Fiesta or Sugar bowls while the SEC occupies both slots of the BCS' grand-finale?

So what if, say, LSU plays ‘Bama tough and loses, then wins the rest of its games and somehow finishes No. 2 in the BCS standings? It would be a farce, that's what. Unless there are no unbeatens left standing among Stanford, Oklahoma State or Boise State.

The lords of college football proudly says their sport doesn't need a postseason tournament because every week is a playoff. If that's true, tonight's showdown should be an elimination game.

It doesn't matter if tonight's loser falls in a five-overtime epic. The SEC is part of the cartel that wants no part of a playoff, so it isn't entitled to two of its teams in a so-called championship game.

Nonetheless, the SEC is King Football. The BCS title has been won the last five years by SEC teams representing four different schools. Four of those five games were decided by 10 or more points, with Ohio State the victim twice.

Alabama and LSU have what no Big Ten team can claim, and that's a truly great defense. Four Big Ten teams are in the nation's top nine in scoring defense, but three (Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin) have been dissected when they played someone good on the road, and the other (Penn State) got taken apart by Alabama at home and has yet to play a road game against someone of note.

When the ball is in the air at 11:01 a.m. for the start of Saturday's Michigan-Iowa game, it will signify something. Namely, it's only eight hours until the kickoff of LSU-Alabama.

There's a bit of a coincidence Michigan is at Iowa Saturday, because the only time Iowa has ever been in a No. 1-vs.-No. 2 game was 26 years ago when the top-ranked Hawkeyes beat the Wolverines at Kinnick Stadium, 12-10.

Saturday's is just the 10th regular-season 1-vs.-2 game since that 1985 day, counting the 2009 SEC title contest. You look at those matchups since Michigan-Iowa of ‘85, and there isn't a name that doesn't fit into college football lore of the last quarter-century and longer.

Alabama, Florida, Florida State, LSU, Michigan, Miami, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, USC.

That Iowa was ever in such a game puts it in exclusive company and is something to cling to for another 26 years, and another 26 after that.

Michigan-Iowa is the best of the five Big Ten matchups Saturday. Which means nationally, the conference is an afterthought this week.

The same will be the case in New Orleans on Jan. 9 when the SEC probably gets its sixth-straight national championship.