Big 12 football: Missing the Cornhuskers

[Eric the Red]

http://newsok.com/big-12-football-missing-the-cornhuskers/article/3926542

 

But in terms of straight-up football, I really miss only Nebraska. The trips to Lincoln weren’t all that easy, the topography was nothing special, even the stadium, while packed and loud, isn’t anything memorable. But man, Nebraska football was fun. The games were great, the emotions high, the spectacle supreme. You knew you were in a place that cared.

 

I thought a lot about Nebraska this week after reader Blake Fite sent me an email about the Huskers. This is the email, with my responses:

[The Dude]

Loved this:

 

[ADS]

I miss the "rivalry" games we had in the Big 12. I loved playing Mizzou, K State, Oklahoma, Colorado, and even Texas.

[Street Novelist]

LMAO at the comments. People in Texas are still butt-hurt after all of these years. For a state to say we weren't that important and didn't need us, they sure do a lot of complaining about us leaving.

[Count 'Bility]

they had their chance to "miss" us 3 1/2 years ago. f#*k'em. We're better off now anyway.

[Excel]

The comment about shifting demographics was interesting and I'm not sure that Oklahomans, or Big XII fans as a whole, are really in a position to talk. Texas is booming yes but Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and WV are not. The loss we see in B1G states is largely economic as much of the Rustbelt excluding Indiana...so Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois...were hemorrhaging residents to the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida in the 90's but the 2010 census showed a decrease in the migration so the trend is slowing. Yes the South still owns a demographic edge but it's not entirely due to Midwest->South migration and the plains states shouldn't be holding that up as a win against the B1G.

 

As for the UM-UW AAU thing, I take it this guy doesn't understand that B1G Universities are run by academics. It's not as if Barry Alvarez could have said "ok guys, make NU keep its AAU status."...this is the same conference that had the faculty of one of its premier universities prevent its team from accepting a Rose Bowl invitation.

 

About Nebraska not being able to recruit Texas after moving...I crunched the numbers a few weeks back and it looks like you guys have about as many Texas kids on the team as you did in '08 so we'll see what happens.

 

Much of this article just seems like a thinly veiled attack on Nebraska with all the swipes at the B1G, like a "haha you downgraded" kind of thing which is just their Big XII insecurity showing. They lost three great schools and are outgunned as far as their product having only two elite programs compared to the B1G's four and SEC's five or six. Their neighboring conferences are far more stable and Nebraska clearly upgraded financially and academically. As far as the B1G's bowl record being "atrocious" it's done better as far as BCS games so there's that...that and how the B1G is 92-79 against the Big XII in the BCS era so meh.

[whateveritis1224]

Wasn't one of the reasons why we lost AAU status was because the research done at UNMC doesn't count towards what UNL does for research even though they are affiliated? If they had counted that, UNL is easily in the AAU.

[Excel]

Wasn't one of the reasons why we lost AAU status was because the research done at UNMC doesn't count towards what UNL does for research even though they are affiliated? If they had counted that, UNL is easily in the AAU.

 

Yea something about the medical school not being co-located with UNL. AAU isn't a huge deal, it's important to the B1G powers that be and is a factor in expansion but I wouldn't invest too much in the designation, heck KU and ISU are members and they're not stellar schools, not terrible but far from elite...and who knows, maybe NU can get back in, the CIC should help with time.

[knapplc]

Mr. Tramel's article paints a rather rosy picture of the Big XII - and it would, since he's writing to an audience trapped in the conference, at least at the moment. But he's exaggerating some harms while glossing over some others, and those are, not surprisingly, better reflective of his conference than the Big Ten.

 

He speaks of knives in the back. Nice prose, but if we're talking about actual factual knives, the AAU bugaboo was the least of Nebraska's harms in the past decade and 1/2. By far the biggest dagger was wielded by Oklahoma, Mr. Tramel's beat school, when they chose (or failed to fight against) the choice of Texas as Oklahoma's rivalry game. Both fan bases, NU's and OU's bitterly regret the end of that rivalry. Maybe not the 30-and-under crowd, but certainly anyone who wasn't still crapping their diapers during Tom and Barry's epic battles in the 80s - The Scoring Explosion years and Sooner Magic.

 

It wasn't Nebraska's choice to end that series, just like it wasn't Nebraska's choice to create the Big XII - that was another stab-in-the-back job by a trio of Liberatores, Kansas, Kansas State and Iowa State, programs weary of beatdowns by the surging Cornhuskers. In the late 80s and early 90s, when Gene Budig, Jon Wefald and Martin Jischke began plotting the minimalisation of Nebraska, the most recent victory by any of these teams was by Iowa State in the 1970s; neither Kansas nor KSU had beaten Nebraska in two decades. But while these men played the roles of Cimber and Brutus and Longinus, Oklahoma was Casca Longus, stabbing not in the back but in the face, very publicly marring the face of a former friend.

 

The AAU? An embarrassment, to be sure. But by the the time Nebraska was evicted it had devolved from an elite group of academic institutions into a Boys Club of rank, a badge of "prestige" important to those in academia and few others. The actual, tangible benefits of AAU membership are debatable. They lobby for research funds and being "in" is typically considered better than being "out," but the fact of the matter is that AAU members account for about 58% of research grants and funds, which is a tidy sum until you consider that's split (and not split evenly) between the AAU's 60 member institutions.

 

Nebraska's continued membership in the Big XII would have done nothing to keep it from becoming the only institution ever ousted from the AAU - and before anyone goes on a Harvey Perlman rant, just save it - the research Nebraska focuses on (Ag-based) would never, and will never, be valued by the AAU. UNL's ouster was a foregone conclusion when the AAU became more and more obsessed with quantifying its membership in the mid-2000s. Agriculture research is not, and never will be, viewed equably on the academic scale, Harvey Perlman as Chancellor or no Harvey Perlman.

 

Mr. Tramel chooses to ignore, no doubt because it sounds better for the purposes of his article and his audience, the CIC, a far more exclusive "club" of Big Ten academic institutions (and Chicago U). Nebraska has access to more research, more research funds and is in a better overall academic place as a member of the CIC than it was as a member of the AAU - and it could never have joined the CIC without leaving the Big XII.

 

Mr. Tramel also chooses to ignore, or omit from his story for reasons unknown, the fact that neither the University of Oklahoma nor Oklahoma State University are AAU members.

 

So much for that "loss."

 

Mr. Tramel also chooses to ignore, for his own reasons I'm sure, the fact that Oklahoma and Oklahoma State were already planning on leaving the Big XII by the time Nebraska solidified its membership in the Big Ten.

 

Nebraska officially accepted its invitation to the Big Ten on Friday, June 11th, 2010.

 

Pac-10 officials were in the air not 24 hours later with offers in hand, visiting both Texas and Oklahoma. Let's not forget that both Texas and Texas Tech had special Board of Regents meetings scheduled on Tuesday, June 15th - four days after Nebraska's move became official - to announce their departure from the Big XII.

 

It was Texas' perfidy that ultimately sabotaged those moves, but not before poisoning the well - so much so that both Missouri and Texas A&M both SECeded from the conference.

 

 

 

 

 

Bah. I could go on and on. Barry Tramel waxing nostalgic over Nebraska's departure may be genuine. He's a reporter, not a university official. But the fact that Oklahoma no longer visits Lincoln, nor Nebraska visits Norman, isn't anything other than a damned shame, and he doesn't have to look north for reasons and responsibility.

 

He can look just down I-35 at Norman. And he can keep wondering what might have been.

[shyndy]

why does he say Osborne wants to go back to the big 6?

[I am I]

Ran into a kstate fant the other night. He ribbed me a bit for "bailing on B12". But after I pointed out that KSU ISU and KU had nothing to offer in the way of defiance to Texass and the move of the offices, CCG, and whatnot to Texass, he demurred and agreed that either keeping the old B8 or a different B12 woulda been better than what ultimately ended up happening.

 

We agreed that we do indeed miss playing those games, but Nebraska was the clear "winner" by leaving. It's like--the stupid crappy teams CU ISU KU KSTATE just aren't the same with the big bad big Red keeping the peace on the block.

 

I'm feeling personally, in another 2-4 yrs, I'll be fully invested in our new conference.

[Foppa]

Obviously a lot of OU supporters could care less about a yearly game with NU. Otherwise they wouldn't have sold their soul to Texas.

[HuskerfaninOkieland]

Barry is a regular (or used to be...I don't listen to local radio anymore) on a sports talk show, The Sports Animal. I wanted to punch my radio every time he talked. He's an annoying little f#*k

[Count 'Bility]

Think about the AAU, is that had we not been joining the Big 10 at the time, which is all AAU I believe, no one would really know anything about it. But it was used by folks outside of Nebraska as kind of "ammo" against Nebraska for leaving the Big12. Being removed from the AAU has been quite overblown in my opinion.

[NoLongerN]

Adding to Knapp's good read. Lets not forget that Mizzou was also working very hard to gain membership into the B1G leaving vulnerable to having no seat left at the dance. I put the MU issue as a bigger factor then others do.