Ohio State's shutout win against Wisconsin highlights parity within Big Ten

College Football’s top-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes cruised to yet another win in their flawless 6-0 start to their national title defense, but with Indiana and Oregon hot on their heels, the Big Ten feels more top-heavy than ever.

Ohio State Fans Take Over Camp Randall To Watch Their Buckeyes Easily Down The Badgers, 34-0. | Samantha Madar/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Seeing the Buckeyes atop the AP Top 25 Poll for the fifth week in a row should come as no shock to the casual college football fan, but two other high-caliber Big Ten teams also being inside the top ten should be seen as a welcome addition.

The red hot, undefeated Indiana Hoosiers have reached their highest AP ranking in program history, vaulting up to the second spot after winning two top ten clashes over the past four weeks.

The Oregon Ducks, one of the newest additions to the Big Ten, were tabbed as the number six team in the most recent national poll, with the only blemish on their record coming against that same stout Curt Cignetti Hoosier squad that won 30-20 at Autzen Stadium two weeks ago.

The Big Ten itself will always be thrilled to see its powerhouses among the highest ranked teams in the country – after all, it’s very good business these days to have high-quality, established programs within your conference, which in turn bring marketing dollars and television revenue figures that could hardly be imagined only just a decade ago.

Despite these three upper echelon programs carrying the weight of the Big Ten, it cannot be ignored just how much the “middle class” of this storied conference has truly bottomed out.

Three schools are clustered near the bottom of the most recent rankings, with Illinois, Michigan and Southern California all standing at 5-2, but more realistically are considered to be afterthoughts in a College Football Playoff format that draws its definitive line at 12 teams allowed for postseason action.

Much further down this list of Big Ten programs are the once-proud programs of the 2010s like Penn State, Wisconsin, Michigan State and Iowa, all of whom fell from grace after being perennial contenders to win the conference title game.

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The distant memories of Wisconsin’s back-to-back Big Ten titles in 2011 and 2012 as well as Michigan State’s triumphs in 2013 and 2015, reveal more about the change in play-style that the conference has experienced than anything else.

Unlike the high-flying and highly skilled, precision-based college football of today, the Big Ten seemed to have left behind the era of physical, grinding running game that made teams like Wisconsin and Michigan State so difficult to encounter in those years.

The question remains that with a greater disparity in distances traveled, recruiting advantages and endless supplies of money, will the upper class of the Big Ten like Ohio State, Indiana and Oregon seize control of the Big Ten for years to come?