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"Not all the Big 10 teams had those schemes, some were fast and passed like mad and those that were built like Pac-10 teams lost when the weather turned cold..."

That's complete baloney. Those lower level Big Ten teams were losers early in the year and late, it had nothing to do with weather. And the early attempts at passing offense in the Big Ten were as rudimentary as the power running attacks they hung onto for about three decades too long. The high schools in California ran more sophisticated schemes. In some cases, they still do.

Over all these years, why didn't Notre Dame suddenly start losing when the weather got cold? They generally play upper level Big Ten schools and they have something like a .680 career winning percentage against the Big Ten. Why have Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State, BYU, Boston College and a host of other poor weather teams continued to embrace passing offenses and continue sending quarterbacks to the NFL? How did Brett Favre in Green Bay, John Elway in Denver, Jim Kelley in Buffalo, Tom Brady in New England, Terry Bradshaw in Pittsburgh, Fran Tarkenton in Minnesota (I could go on and on and on) put up huge passing numbers and go to Super Bowls coming from such lousy weather cities?

Bottom line is, you embarrass the Big Ten with your excuse-making. Basically you are saying that your league is so soft that they can only compete with good conferences under their terms, in their comfort zone. "They function best at 50-55 degrees"!! Oh God, gimme a break. Ohio State and Michigan just put up about 1,000 yards in offense against each other. I don't remember the weather getting in the way of that WAC-type contest.

And finally, before you try to say USC only played the lousy Big Ten teams, be very clear. 9 of the last 11 times they played either Ohio State or Michigan in the Rose Bowl, USC won. 9 of 11 against the best you had to offer.

Well, until you figure out that A) USC's stadium is about 15 miles from the Rose Bowl (used by UCLA since they left off sharing USCs); B) that the Rose Bowl is played in January - at which point the midwest has only seen maybe a weeks worth of days that it's been as high as 65 in two-and-a-half months, and now averages in the upper 20s (between 40 and 0); C) Realize that there are Big10 teams that put up huge passing numbers in that time frame; and D) that playoff games in the NFL aren't all played in the South and coastal West, E) that Big-10/Pac-10 games played in September and October during the time in question are pretty evenly split; then there's not much point in this conversation which has already gone further than I really care.

“Pasadena, California got its start in the Midwest during a cold 1873 winter. An Indiana resident Dr. Thomas Balch Elliott assembled together a group of more than 100 families that had grown tired of the hard Indiana winters and desired more moderate weather throughout the year. They called themselves the California Colony of Indiana.”