A Change Gone Come
When I first heard the news all I could think about was Ohio St. and Michigan coming to Memorial Stadium and being swamped by the Sea of Red and the new rivalry that would begin. The Huskers going to the Big House and The Horseshoe and silencing the crowd with big hit after big hit and overpowering the Big 10 with all their speed. Why lie we all know the Big 10 is not known for their speed and Nebraska has made major strides to compete with the speed that the Texas’ and Oklahoma’s bring to the field every Saturday. And now they would be going to a conference where they could possibly have the fastest players on the football field. Can you say BCS bound??? But with all these positives I had to contact some of my former classmates and see what the feeling was around Lincoln.
I talked to a former Husker and several current Huskers and I was reminded of all the tradition that would be lost. The rich history of the Big 8 and the Big 12, all the battles that Texas and Nebraska went through just wiped away. And Oklahoma and Nebraska. I was only a student-athlete at Nebraska for a year but I began to hate Texas along with my classmates. I remember when we had Big 12 Indoor Track Championships back in 2008 in Lincoln and I couldn’t believe how raucous the Devancey Center was from the chanting from Texas and Nebraska. We lost the meet by one point and from then on I hated Texas and everything they stood for, well maybe not hated but I had a strong dislike for the ‘horns. All this would be washed away and probably forgotten with the next generation. But honestly our generation has kind of lost touch with what is used to be.
Nebraska and Oklahoma had some of the greatest games college football ever seen but when the division split hit they no longer played every year and more and more of the younger generation forgot they were even rivals seeing as Oklahoma has dominated the Huskers the past 10 years with the icing on the cake being a 62-28 drubbing in 1928. That was my first Oklahoma-Nebraska game I ever watched and I thought to myself “are we really rivals with the Sooners because they are beating us like a non-conference AA opponent.” The split division philosophy also causes less games between the hated Longhorns. The rivalry isn’t what it used to be between the two schools and we need to just face it and move in. It’s very tough to be someone’s rival when you don’t even play them every year like Michigan-Ohio St. do every year for the past 109 years! The Huskers will go to the Big 10 start some new rivalries and create new history.
I think the best part of this deal is recruiting. They can now steal the Big 10 schools recruits and they can even begin an OU-Nebraska rivalry game or Texas-Nebraska game to keep getting recruits in the area. I think the move is great for the Huskers and well needed. They can now be in a conference where revenues are shared and not dominated by that team down in Austin that just sucks up all the revenue.
I think the sport it’s going to benefit most is volleyball, think about this: Big 10 championship between Nebraska and Penn St. Can u say E-P-I-C.
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