Cover-ups have covered the Big Ten with mud

Imagine a little over two years ago if you had been told:

1. The Big Ten would add the University of Nebraska.

2. Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel would resign under pressure after withholding information from the university's compliance office and the NCAA about some of his players selling or trading uniforms and other memorabilia to a man under federal investigation, and OSU would get hit with a one-year bowl ban and other penalties by the NCAA.

3. Penn State would have the worst college sports scandal of all-time, involving a former PSU assistant football coach who was convicted of being a child-rapist. That would not only get football coach Joe Paterno fired, but get the PSU football program slammed with a multitude of serious violations Monday including a 4-year bowl ban and a significant loss of scholarships.

Three unrelated occurrences in recent Big Ten history. Three things that would have been deemed extraordinarily unlikely in, say, April 2010. Three things that have a common denominator.

That, of course, is the seemingly unquenchable thirst to add or protect football power.

The Big Ten can say whatever it wants, but it annexed Nebraska for one reason: Football.

The U. of Nebraska is a perfectly reputable school, but the Big Ten didn't need Nebraska to be stronger as an academic consortium.

While Nebraska has a good all-around athletic program, NU baseball or volleyball or women's basketball weren't going to do anything to add cable companies to the Big Ten Network.

It was adding another marquee football name. It was an answer to the moving and shifting in other conferences. It was getting the Big Ten a 12th member and making it eligible to stage a conference-championship game, which it immediately and happily did in Nebraska's first season in the conference.

If you wanted a school that had a larger population and media markets, and more academic prestige, you'd have snapped up Missouri instead of Nebraska.

As for Nos. 2 and 3, we know what those were. Tressel didn't want damage done to his kingdom. Nor did Paterno, or his athletic director, or his university president.

Dirty little secrets were kept. In their minds, too much power could be lost. It was, of course, but because of their cover-ups.

It makes you wonder how often dirty little secrets are kept by other kings. Before Ohio State's scandal and Penn State's atrocities, Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez got Wolverines football slapped with three years of NCAA probation for failing to provide an atmosphere of compliance.

Welcome to the Big Ten, Nebraska.

Monday's beatdown of Penn State by the NCAA and the Big Ten was pretty brutal, but still wasn't as harsh as a death penalty. Nittany Lion football will be lousy for a long time. But football there will be. It's too big to fail.

This wasn't SMU, and this is a generation in which college football television contracts are for a great deal more money than in the generation before.

No way was the NCAA going to remove a football program from the Big Ten, with all the lost revenue that would mean in various forms for the other 11 league members and the conference itself.

What, the Big Ten Network would suddenly make itself to Pennsylvania and the Eastern Seaboard? The league would abandon its football title-game because it no longer had 12 teams?

No. Monday's announcements satisfied everyone who wanted Penn State severely punished, and it left the Big Ten intact even though the league's high-and-mighty image has been coated over with mud.

But there was good news for the Big Ten on Monday, too. One of its bowl partners changed its name from the Insight Bowl to the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl.

That name is a lot more fun.