Can you believe Northwestern, a member of the Goliath-esque Big Ten was slayed –er, paper cut to death — by Bowling Green, the David league’s second-best team? How could a Big Ten team lose to a MAC team? Isn’t it an outrage?

Um, no.

NU’s performance in the Motor City Bowl wasn’t disappointing and it wasn’t an outrage. It wasn’t upsetting; in fact, it wasn’t even an upset — the Wildcats were 7-point underdogs before the game. NU fell to Bowling Green 28-24, and some people are talking about it as though the Cats lost to Jessica Simpson at Trivial Pursuit.

I thought we had already established how good the MAC was this season. It seemed everywhere you looked there was another story about how underrated the MAC was, and how it doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Three different MAC teams were ranked this season, and they all proved they could play with the big kids.

Miami (Ohio) showed everybody it deserved better than the GMAC Bowl, crushing Louisville 49-28 and finishing No. 10 in the Associated Press poll. While Northern Illinois’ whining about not receiving a bowl bid was annoying, it was well-founded. The Huskies beat Maryland, Alabama and Iowa State before lunging into their MAC schedule, and they finished 10-2.

Bowling Green ended the season at No. 23, and its quarterback, Josh Harris, is a top NFL prospect. The MAC actually boasts two top prospects at quarterback, Harris and Miami (Ohio)’s Ben Roethlisberger.

Embarrassing as it is, the phrases MAC daddy and Big MAC actually entered the American sports lexicon.

Yet when the second-best MAC team beats the Big Ten team that tied for seventh, it’s seen by elitist Big Ten fans as a bad mark on the conference.

I’m baffled that people see it that way, because I think that sounds about right: the top of the MAC should be competitive with the middle-to-bottom of the Big Ten. It’s ridiculous to say that all the Big Ten teams should be able to beat every team in a mid-major conference — to borrow a Randy Walker phrase, they have scholarship players, too.

If you’re going to judge the quality of a conference, you must look at “even” matchups between teams in the major conferences. For example, the best the Big Ten has to offer should be able to beat the best of the Pacific-10 (Michigan vs. USC) , and the second-best Big Ten team should be able to beat the second-best Southeastern conference team (Purdue vs. Georgia). Because of the BCS and the way bowl games are actually determined, these equal matchups aren’t going to happen all the time.

But a few approximately equal games were played this bowl season, and by this standard, what actually made the Big Ten look bad was Michigan being blown out by USC 28-14 in the Rose Bowl and Purdue falling 34-27 to Georgia in the Capital One Bowl.

Minnesota and Iowa, which tied for fourth place in the Big Ten, showed that the strength of the Big Ten this season lay in the upper-middle teams. The Golden Gophers beat third-place Pac-10 finisher Oregon in a 31-30 thriller, and the Hawkeyes defeated Florida, which tied for second in the SEC Eastern division, 37-13 in the Outback Bowl. Ohio State also did the conference proud. The Buckeyes, who finished second in the Big Ten, defeated Kansas State, which finished atop the North division of the Big 12.

NU’s place in all of this mess is less clear, but playing a close game against the No. 23 team in the country is far from a failure, no matter what conference the team came from.

Former sports editor Andrea Cohen is officially retired. Seriously. She can be reached at [email protected]