Hello and welcome to the mumbleth season of Pickin’ On The Big Ten, one of the internet’s longest-running college football prediction columns. While this column has appeared at various and sundry locations since the fall of 2001 (and on Go Iowa Awesome since 2016), this is its first appearance here on Rivals.com. I’m happy to share my Big Ten football picks with you every Thursday throughout the season. The picks appear in more-or-less chronological order, though since I moved to Go Iowa Awesome the Iowa pick always appears last.

A few things you should know before we get started:

I am one of you, an Iowa fan raised in Iowa, now living outside of Big Ten country (Illinois).

While I often write with a mildly snarky tone, my picks are serious and evidence-based when said evidence exists.

I don’t gamble and I don’t even look at the lines unless I’m stumped.

I have never fully acknowledged Maryland and Rutgers as members of the conference.

This will be the final season of divisional play as the conference adds USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington next season. I admit the thought of trying to pick eighteen games in a single column is daunting, and I know little about the new West Coast additions. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that, when it comes to college football, nobody actually knows anything, but everybody knows everything. What I mean is that most games go about how you would expect they will go. Upsets are rare enough to be surprising, even in this age of parity.

And most of all, literally no one knows in August if any team is actually going to be good or bad. You don’t know how badly some players are going to be missed. You don’t know if the new additions will actually work out. You don’t know if someone mysteriously forgot how to coach over the offseason. Week 1 is always a crapshoot, which is why Week 1 games are usually uninspiring. I still can’t believe the coaches and ADs allowed the conference to start scheduling conference games for this week, to be honest. Yet there are three of them this year! And with that in mind, let’s take a look at college football’s joyous return.

(Yeah, I know, there were games last weekend. I watched Navy-Notre Dame. Football starts this week.)

This is the first game for Matt Rhule at Nebraska, fresh off a very “meh” stint with the Carolina Panthers. When will NFL GMs learn that for coaches the college and pro games are different beasts and being good at one usually doesn’t translate to the other? But I digress.

Rhule has transformed Temple and Baylor, two places where it is not easy to win, and at Baylor he did it while having to follow Art “I See Nothing” Briles. It’s obviously not easy to win at Nebraska any more so it seems like a good fit. However, Rhule has never had a good first year at any of his previous stops (2-10 at Temple, 1-11 at Baylor, 5-11 at Carolina), so Husker fans will almost certainly need to hold on one at least more year before they see a team worth cheering for again.

As for Minnesota, the Gophers are still coached by P.J. Fleck, which is some sort of punishment straight out of Greek mythology. (“For thy claims to be nice when thou art merely polite yet weirdly passive-aggressive, for thy passing on the right on thine freeways, for thy merging into 65 mph traffic at 35 mph, and for firing the only good coach thou ever hadst because he let Mike Leach come back in a bowl game, thou shalt have a coach who is good enough to get you to bowl games, but not any good ones. He shall be linked to many other jobs but shall never receive one, for his suitors shall look upon thy struggles in the lesser division of the conference and they shall sayeth, ‘Nah.’ And no, Tim Brewster was not enough punishment for thee, for we gods still remember what thou didst to Jack Trice.”)

The Gophs should win this game at home, probably fairly easily.

Minnesota 27, Nebraska 13

I feel sorry for Mel Tucker, given that his biggest problem is something entirely beyond his control: the rise of Michigan from “10-2 team that always loses to Ohio State” to an actual national title contender. I feel like this game could potentially be too close for comfort for Sparty, given that Central Michigan has a decent enough coach (former Florida head coach Jim McElwain) and two quarterbacks who can also run the ball. That’s potentially fatal for a defense that is designed to beat more traditional offenses. It won’t actually be fatal here, but I think the Chips can keep it close.

Michigan State 31, Central Michigan 23

Expectations are sky-high for the Wolverines, which just calls to mind another time when a team from North Carolina came to Ann Arbor for a season opener, stole Michigan’s lunch, and got paid.

I don’t see that happening here even though Jim Harbaugh will have to start sitting out a three-game suspension for, I don’t know, high-sticking or something like that. The ECU Pirates don’t have a sneakily loaded roster like 2007 Appy State did so I do believe the Wolverines handle this easily, though it would be the most Present-Day Michigan Football thing ever if they didn’t.

Michigan 44, ECU 10

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This is the first year of the --

“Alexa, who is coaching Purdue now?”

The head coach of the Purdue Boilermakers is Ryan Walters.

“... wasn’t he a character on ‘The O.C.?’”

Yes. Yes, he was. He dated Summer Roberts in three episodes, then died in a zipline accident.

“So how is he coaching Purdue if he’s both fictional and dead?”

There’s a writer’s strike on, recycled scripts are being used.

“Okay. So what happens in this game?”

The team struggles to recover from the loss of Jason Street.

“Wasn’t that the plot of the first season of ‘Friday Night Lights’?”

Writer’s strike.

"Ohh, right."

Purdue 27, Fresno State 24

I love the long lead time of nonconference games. This one was obviously scheduled while Lance Leipold was coaching Buffalo after his many years of Division III success at Wisconsin-Whitewater. Leipold is of course at Kansas now, and unlike most Kansas coaches of late, appears not to be an abject failure. So maybe the Badgers and Jayhawks could meet in a bowl game.

This is the first game of the Luke Fickell era at Wisconsin. The former Buckeye interim is fresh from a good run at Cincinnati and says he’s going to reinvent the program’s identity.

I get why.

It was still very much Barry Alvarez’s team from the early 1990s, a rolling jumbo package that generated huge numbers for a lot of running backs who went on to have short, undistinguished NFL careers. But that’s what most of the current roster was recruited for, so color me skeptical that he’ll immediately take this team to 11-1. This game, though, should be like falling out of a boat and hitting water.

Wisconsin 56, Buffalo 7

Indiana has played Ohio State surprisingly well under Tom Allen, particularly at home, which almost (but not quite) makes up for how poorly the Hoosiers have done against everyone else. I am fairly certain that this will be Allen’s last year in Bloomington because I don’t see where the wins are going to come from and also because I’m kind of surprised IU actually brought him back.

Ohio State will probably be looking to make a statement in this game as Michigan is beginning to steal the spotlight. I think a statement will be made, and that statement will be “so long, Tom.”

Ohio State 48, Indiana 17

Life is too short to spend a lot of time learning about Towson football. It’s almost too short to learn about Maryland, to be honest.

Maryland 42, Towson 0

If Bret Bielema is truly bringing Illinois back, he has to make MACrifices out of the MACrifices. I think there was an element of smoke and mirrors to last year’s Illini, a decent enough team that managed a good record without posting anything like a signature win. The roster is loaded -- relatively speaking, this is still the Illini after all -- so it’s important to get off to a fast start here. Which, for the Illini, means winning by double digits. I think they’ll manage.

Illinois 24, Toledo 13

These two teams haven’t played as often as you might think (59 times overall, but no meetings since 1992), though it’s really the Pitt/West Virginia rivalry that gets all the attention anyway. Penn State could dark horse its way to the final East division title if Michigan and Ohio State cooperate even a little.

Or it could end with Penn State once again finishing third and being completely forgotten about.

This game is no mystery; it’s been a while since the RichRod era in Morgantown, which was the last time the Mountaineers experienced sustained success. I expect Penn State to run away with this one.

Penn State 37, WVU 20

As God is my witness, I don’t give a rat’s bonkus about either of these teams.

Rutgers 17, Northwestern 6

And of course, saving the best for last:

You are going to be so sick of the Hawkeyes by late October.

Not the team itself, which should be pretty good. But you are going to be sick to death of the media coverage, which will center almost exclusively on Brian Ferentz and that stupid 25-points-a-game benchmark.

It’ll spill over into discussion about whether interim athletic director Beth Goetz might actually pull the trigger, whether the university will remove the “interim” from her title to give her more leverage to do so, what happens if the younger Ferentz is gone, whether Phil Parker could even get media coverage if he robbed a liquor store … this is all the sort of reality TV horse hockey that the networks eat up.

I’ll lay money that by the end of September Iowa games will feature an on-screen bug showing how many more points the Hawks have to score to save Brian Ferentz’s job. (By the way, now that Van Hayden is a thing, I’m not asking for a ska band called Save Ferentz, I’m demanding one. The moment is now.) And when the Hawkeyes score their 326th point of the season, they will break into other games to report this fact.

You know it’s coming. The only way out is for the Hawks to run up the score against every bobo on the schedule so point #326 comes as soon as possible.

There’s a decent chance the Hawkeyes can start here. Utah State has had some really good seasons, and not even all that long ago, but the team seems to be in a regeneration cycle right now. If Cade McNamara is anything close to 100 percent, the Hawks should cruise. And they’ll have to, with some of the defenses that await.

Iowa 38, Utah State 13