I never had much of an opinion on Todd McShay, except that I was glad he was kind of challenging idiot extraordinaire Mel Kiper, Jr. for supremacy in evaluating college football talent.
But this morning McShay was co-hosting on ESPN Radio (filling into for the fat man / gay man combo) and he was asked to rank the college football conferences in terms of strongest to weakest. And despite the constant bashing of the Big Ten by ESPN and others, McShay actually referred to the Big Ten as "underrated," which made me want to hug him. McShay's rankings went as follows:
1. SEC (which would be #1 even if they weren't thanks to ESPN making sweet, sweet love to the SEC)
2. Big 12 (which I might argue with since yes they have some great teams but also a lot of lousy programs)
3. Big Ten
4. Pac Ten
5. Big East
6. ACC ("ha ha!" -- insert Simpsons sound effect here)
I think this is the most fair representation of the various conferences I've seen in a long time. Of course, I'm sure ACC supporters wouldn't agree, and I could possibly see flip-flopping them with the Big (L)East, but again, I can't argue too much.