This season it appears there is no clear favorite to win the Big Ten title. We can talk about what we hope will happen... but this year, nothing "makes sense" enough to say with any certainty who is going to win the conference. For example: Minnesota gets drubbed by Penn State who in turn barely lost to Michigan who Minnesota barely beat on the Wolverine's field. Minnesota then barely loses a home game to Wisconsin after the Badgers barely lost to Northwestern who was barely beaten by Penn State who barely beat us.
Iowa is gaining confidence, Purdue can't keep losing, Michigan may have awakened, Michigan State is [censored]ed, Wisconsin is playing for the coach, Northwestern can score on anybody, Penn State is playing possessed, Minnesota is one dimensional but scary and we have the nation's best "D" (IMO) but a turnover-prone, inconsistent offense. The only confirmed doormats are Indiana and Illinois but inevitably they're going to take somebody out on their own field. It is unlikely to happen this weekend with us visiting Indiana and PSU at Illinois, but this year I wouldn't be shocked if something crazy happened.
The one thing you might be able to do is look at every team's schedule except Indiana and Illinois and assume they'll either win their home games or be very close at the end. You can then look at what kind of team they've struggled with this year to reasonably predict the outcome. I can't imagine a one-dimensional running team like Minnesota, or a pocket-passing Michigan to put up enough points to beat
OSU. I'm much more concerned about Northwestern if we're going to continue this trend of turning the ball over.
My hope is that mathematically and through tie-breakers we have the title wrapped up before the Michigan game. Having said that my gut still tells me that we're going to have a bunch of two and three loss teams at the end of the season with
OSU and PSU with one loss going into away games against Michigan and Michigan State respectively. With this crazy year in the Big Ten what happens then is anybodies guess.