10/19: Why the Big Ten is having such a great year with Adam Rittenberg of ESPN
The Audible with Stew, Bruce & Ralph: A show about college football
The Athletic
4.4 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2016
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bruce and Stew are joined by Adam Rittenberg of ESPN and discuss why the Big Ten conference is thriving this year; Does Texas A&M have a chance to beat Alabama? (6:00); Where will Les Miles be coaching next year? (11:00); Would an undefeated Boise State have a shot at the playoff? (20:00); Does the pro style offense lead to better NFL players? (27:00); and more College Football Playoff discussion.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Audible. I'm Stuart Mandel. Join by Bruce Feldman. We are pleased to be joined by our friend |
| 0:15.7 | Adam Rittenberg from ESPN.com. Adam covers the whole country in college football, but for many years there, |
| 0:22.2 | it was known as the Big Ten guy. And so I wanted to start there. Successful season so far for the |
| 0:28.2 | conference, I feel like they haven't gotten this much adulation in a while. Ohio State, |
| 0:32.5 | Michigan, I feel like it's not a surprise that they're highly ranked at this point in this |
| 0:37.1 | season. How much is Wisconsin surprised you? Yeah, yeah, dude, it's not a surprise that they're highly ranked at this point in this season. |
| 0:39.4 | How much has Wisconsin surprised you? |
| 0:41.1 | Yeah, yeah, Stu, it's significant. |
| 0:44.7 | I was there for their first game against LSU at Lambeau Field, |
| 0:48.5 | and the way they came out, the way they prepared, the energy they played with, |
| 0:51.5 | and then the improvement that they showed at certain positions, like the secondary, |
| 0:53.8 | really surprised me. And this looked like a season that |
| 0:56.3 | they'd be fortunate to get to seven seven wins and i know that's not the norm for wisconsin but |
| 1:00.8 | they hadn't played a schedule this difficult not non-conference wise and conference wise with |
| 1:06.6 | some of the crossovers having both ohio and Michigan on the schedule, Iowa, which is coming |
| 1:12.0 | off of a Rose Bowl appearance in Nebraska. So, you know, we talked a lot about the difficulty |
| 1:16.6 | of the schedule, but now it's sort of become, well, you know, instead of Wisconsin has to go play |
| 1:22.5 | this team, it's this team has to go play Wisconsin. I mean, you saw how difficult it was for Ohio |
| 1:26.5 | State to get out of Madison with the win, and the same thing will hold true for Iowa this week, for Nebraska in a couple of weeks. And I think Paul Chris has done one of the better coaching jobs in the country. I think he made a really good hire with Justin Wilcox, a defensive coordinator. And then you're seeing some improvement in areas like the offensive line, which I thought had taken a step back under his predecessor, Gary Anderson, |
| 1:48.0 | a little bit, and now you're starting to see them run the ball like Wisconsin is accustomed to. |
| 1:52.8 | You saw that against Ohio State. So, yeah, definitely surprised by them. |
| 1:56.3 | I feel like because Wisconsin has played so many big games so far, we basically know that team at this |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Athletic, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Athletic and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.