Coming off a loss at lowly Minnesota, Iowa looked to be lost. But really, it was just Iowa.

The Hawkeyes are consistent this year. That’s not necessarily a good thing. They’re awful on the road (0-3) and good at home (6-0). Teams playing better at home than on the road is not at all out of the ordinary. But when you lose at Minnesota then win at home against Michigan, there’s something major going on. Does the team bus have a carbon monoxide leak?

Iowa picked up a 24-16 win against the Wolverines by shutting down Denard Robinson and playing better defense than it probably has all year. The Wolverines had four plays from inside the 5-yard line as time was running out, but couldn’t punch it in (cue Michigan fans claiming Junior Hemingway did actually score on one of the plays — he pushed off, folks).

So just so we’re straight, Iowa held Michigan to less points than it did Minnesota. To be fair, I guess, Michigan State did the same thing, eking out a win against the Gophers today.

So now Iowa, which has lost to a team that is 2-7 and another that is 5-4, controls its own destiny in the Big Ten Legends Division. It has Michigan State at home next week, then plays at Purdue and at Nebraska to close out the year.

If things go as they have so far this season, that means a 1-2 finish for Iowa and a middling bowl. But with a well-balanced offense and a defense that can apparently stop people every once in a while, there’s a decent chance Iowa will be playing in Indianapolis. Yes, Iowa, the team that lost to Minnesota.

Before the month of October started, Michigan State was staring at a brutal conference gauntlet of four straight games against Ohio State, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska. Somehow, the Spartans found a way to win those first three, pushing themselves near the top 10 of the BCS rankings and taking control of the Big Ten Legends Division.

But with today’s loss to Nebraska, the Spartans and their very respectable 3-1 record during the month, need help to get to the Big Ten Championship Game in Indianapolis.

It’s a cruel fate for a team that found different ways to win against three of the Big Ten’s top six teams, and somehow was able to get emotionally ready to play all three of them. Apparently four is too much to ask for, however, as the Spartans — especially offensively — looked listless in the loss.

Kirk Cousins was terrible, the run game was non-existent and the defense was tired from spending most of the game on the field after the offense yet again failed to do anything.

So now Nebraska is in the Legends driver’s seat, holding the head-to-head tie-breaker against MSU and having the luxury of its one conference loss (at Wisconsin) coming outside of the division. The road is not easy, however, as Nebraska finishes the season at home against Northwestern, at Michigan, at Penn State and at home against Iowa. With as erratic as the Nebraska offense is, any one of those games is losable.

Michigan State’s road wasn’t a guarantee, but it was much easier than Nebraska’s, they substitute Michigan and Penn State for Indiana and Minnesota, the conference’s two worst teams.

It’s amazing how quickly the euphoria from a miracle last-second win against an unbeaten, top 10 opponent can wear off in college football. But I suppose that’s part of the reason we all love it so much.

These might have been hideous, and the game might have been, too, but Michigan State will take it.

The Spartans ended Michigan’s run at a perfect season today with a 28-14 win against “Big Brother.” That’s four straight, which pretty much makes big brother your older, fatter, kind of alcoholic brother that you can beat at sports.

Michigan’s offense was rendered impotent as the Spartans corralled Denard Robinson’s run game and forced him to pass, which, um, isn’t what Michigan wants to be doing. Robinson was 9-of-24 for 123 yards, one touchdown and one interception. The interception was returned for a touchdown by Isaiah Lewis, effectively ending the game.

Perhaps more impressive, however, was Michigan State holding Robinson to under 50 yards rushing. The Spartans also hit him well after the whistle a couple of times, you know, just because. It worked, though, as Robinson was out of the game at the end of Michigan’s final drive, causing backup Devin Gardner — who Michigan offensive coordinator Al Borges inexplicably used with relative frequency during the game — to come up with a fourth-and-22 play that is sure to reside at the top of ESPN’s Worst of the Worst for years to come. Seriously, Gardner ran for about 130 yards on the play, 125 of which were in the wrong direction or sideways.

It’s only loss No. 1 for Michigan, but it brings back memories of the Rich Rodriguez era. Michigan State out-schemed Michigan in the second half, destroying the “Brady Hoke and Greg Mattison won’t be out-coached” meme that Michigan fans were spreading. The Wolverines couldn’t tackle, which surely gave Michigan fans the shakes after watching that on repeat for the last three years.

I’m not saying Brady Hoke = Rich Rodriguez, but this should put the brakes on the Brady Hoke for Pope campaigns. Michigan is just now entering the tough part of its schedule, and should expect more of this as it goes on this season.

As for Michigan State, it’s not out of the woods yet. The Spartans have to play Wisconsin and Nebraska in the next two weeks, so the euphoria from this win could wear off quickly. But the Spartans are unbeaten in Big Ten play after games against Ohio State and Michigan, and control their own destiny when it comes to playing for the Big Ten championship.

But that’s all irrelevant right now, as “Little Brother” has officially grown up and is in control of the state of Michigan, which might be the most important thing to the residents of East Lansing.

Michigan’s new head coach, Brady Hoke, is facing a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, he needs to bring Michigan back to playing Michigan football after the disastrous RichRod experiment. That means moving back to a pro style offense and moving from the absurd 3-3-5 defense that stopped nobody in the Big Ten back to a traditional 4-3. Michigan needs to get bigger, and Hoke has started that process with his 2011 recruiting class.

Yet with respect to the offense, Hoke also has Denard Robinson, one of the most explosive college football players we’ve seen in years. He was perfect for RichRod’s offense, even though that offense and Robinson sputtered against better defenses. It was an all-or-nothing proposition, and naturally Hoke is anxious to move on.

So how does he use Denard Robinson going forward? Hoke says “We’re smart enough to have elements he does well from what he did in the past in our offense.” But he plans on using Robinson as the quarterback in his pro style offense, which will have Robinson taking snaps under center instead of the shotgun and relying on play action.

I’m skeptical this can work. Sure, he’ll still unleash Robinson at times, and I suspect they might use the option play, but Robinson’s effectiveness will likely suffer dramatically under this system.

Robinson made big plays in the passing game last year, but that was because he found wide-open receivers when defenses tried in vain to slow down his running game. This year he won’t have that luxury. I don’t see Robinson consistently making the tough throws demanded in a pro style offense. He’s also very short and that will limit him as well.

We’ll see how this experiment plays out, but I suspect that Hoke will regret taking Robinson out of his element.

A better option might be to have a traditional quarterback run Hoke’s new offense, and keep a version of RichRod’s system around for Robinson to run as a Wildcat formation. He could also use Robinson as a Slash-type weapon in the traditional offense.

Right now their odds of winning the Big Ten are set at 15/1, so few are expecting a breakout year.

With this transition and the drama surrounding the Big Ten this year with the addition of Nebraska and the troubles at Ohio State, Michigan should be one of the more intriguing stories of 2011.

The Pac-10 has an easier time switching to Pac-12 because the conference name is more about “Pac” than it is the number of teams in the conference. The Big Ten doesn’t have that luxury because it was so uncreative in naming itself way back in 1899 (when it was the Big Nine) and 1917 (when it became the Big Ten). They should just bite the bullet and rename it the Big Midwest. It would only take a year or two for the name to catch on BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH BETTER and ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE.

If you like to sleep in on Saturdays (like, really sleep in), you’ve been in luck. The noon (eastern) slate of college football games this season has been both lacking big-time games, and any kind of surprises. It’s essentially the bad Big Ten and ACC games, and maybe lower-level SEC matchup.

I imagine it has a lot to do with television, and the networks trying to get the biggest games in the prime spots (3:30 and 8). But in year’s past, I seem to remember there being some noon games that were worth watching. And even if they weren’t worth turning on at the start, there always seemed to be at least one game that you saw the score for that made you turn on the TV.

Outside of Florida’s scare against Miami (OH) in Week 1, South Carolina’s win over Georgia in Week 2 and Miami’s win over Clemson last week, there really hasn’t been that much to watch early in the day. And really, none of those were all that exciting. This is surprising in a year where college football has had a ton of big games with a lot of hype. As a couch potato who loves to come home from my morning duties and take in some football right away, I’m very dismayed by this.

Sure, the 3:30 and 8 time slots are great, but if you plan on focusing on one game, the others might as well not even be on. Plus, some of the bigger games get pushed completely off of television in different markets. For instance, last week’s 8 p.m. ABC game in Michigan was Notre Dame vs. Boston College. If you’re not a Notre Dame fan (or I suppose a BC fan, but there’s really not many of those in this state), that doesn’t do much for you. The mirror game on ESPN2 was Washington at USC, which turned out to be a good game, but really doesn’t draw that much interest in the Midwest.

One of last week’s biggest games, Stanford at Oregon, wasn’t even on TV, and I’m not just talking about my crappy basic digital package at home. Buffalo Wild Wings, which has like 75 TVs, didn’t have the game on because it wasn’t available. You’re telling me Notre Dame at Boston College couldn’t have been moved to the noon time slot where people in the Midwest and East (the obvious major markets for that game) could have been awake and watching?

Surely there are more pressing issues in college football right now, but this dearth of noon games seems to be the easiest to fix. So get on it, NCAA, because not only is this boring me early in the day, but it’s really making it hard to find things to write about before 3:30.

The Big Ten is in the middle of a brutal stretch of games today. Of the 10 conference teams in action, eight of them play MAC schools. The other two play FCS opponents.

Well done, Big Ten.

It’s weekends like this that are embarrassing, and spit in the face of the anti-playoff “every week matters” argument. These weekends are even more embarrassing when a team loses (looking at you, Purdue). From some of the noise on Twitter this morning, it’s a money issue, and the conference needs these games to offset Title IX losses.

Really? Sounds like a pathetic excuse to schedule a bunch of cupcakes, to me.

To be fair to the conference, it’s not the only one that schedules like this, and some of its teams schedule some difficult games early in the season. This weekend is just so glaringly awful that it has to be pointed out. But as long as the BCS is around, nothing is going to change, and we can be sure to see more weekends like this throughout the country.