Will Lincoln Riley change the way Big Ten football is played?

Will Lincoln Riley revolutionize how the Big Ten Conference plays football? It will be fascinating to see.

The Big Ten is a smashmouth league. If you have watched one Minnesota-Iowa or Michigan State-Wisconsin game, you’ve seen them all. This is not track-meet football or run-and-gun, video-game fare.

Ohio State does make football seem like a track meet, as shown last season against Michigan State and then in the Rose Bowl against Utah. Jaxon Smith-Njigba collected 347 receiving yards in the Granddaddy. One could therefore say that the Buckeyes have already changed the game in the conference.

Yet, Lincoln Riley is still a young coach (under 40 years old) who is beginning to make a mark in the college football world. He could be ready to unleash something special in the Big Ten. He could be a person who forces the rest of the competition to change how it goes about its business.

There once was a coach who changed the way the SEC played football in the early 1990s. The league loved its smashmouth identity under old-time coaches such as Pat Dye of Auburn, Vince Dooley of Georgia, and Gene Stallings at Alabama, the spiritual successor to Bear Bryant.

Steve Spurrier crashed through the old-boy network and taught SEC fans to love the forward pass.

Is Lincoln Riley going to make that kind of imprint on the Big Ten? We’ll have to wait a few years to find out, but we talked about the subject with Mark Rogers at The Voice of College Football:

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Story originally appeared on Trojans Wire