Iowa-Michigan has a point spread you just don’t see for conference-title games

Focusing on point spreads isn’t necessarily the best use of a person’s time, so I apologize. However, the line on Saturday’s Iowa-Michigan game is so unusual …

Has there ever been a major-college league-championship game in which the spread was 23 points or more before this one? I’ll answer that later. The Wolverines opened as 23-point picks over the Hawkeyes.

It isn’t as if the Big Ten is used to coin-flip matchups in Indianapolis, mind you. The five previous championship games had the East champ as favorites by 11 or more points.

The lowest of the five was Michigan -11 against Iowa two years ago. The Wolverines won, 42-3.

You might think it’s been forever and a day since the Hawkeyes were such big underdogs. I did. But I have a short memory.

Iowa was a 29-point dog at Ohio State just last year. The Buckeyes won, 54-10.

However, the Hawkeyes won the two previous times they were an underdog by 18 or more points. They clocked 18-point favorite Ohio State in 2017, 55-24. The year before, they surprised 21-point favorite Michigan, 14-13.

Both games, not coincidentally, were in Iowa City.

This is the sixth-straight Big Ten championship game in which the East champion was favored by 11 points or more. The 11-point spread was the 2021 Michigan-Iowa game, which the Wolverines won, 42-3.

Barring a change in the line before kickoff, this would be the 3,722nd college football game with a point spread of 21 or more points. (You can find the darnedest statistics if you know where to look. Thanks, teamrankings.com.) It would be just the 27th of those 3,722 with an over/under of 40.5 points or less. The O/U for this one opened at 35 points.

Things do change, by the way. In 2000, the Hawkeyes were 41.5-point dogs at Nebraska. They covered, losing just 42-13.

Iowa has won its last six games at Lincoln.

Now, has there ever been a conference-title game with a spread as large as 23 points? The answer is I don’t know. Texas was a 20-point dog against Nebraska in the first Big 12 title game, in 1996. The Longhorns won, 37-27.

Is that an omen for Saturday in Indianapolis? Of course not.