If Saturday’s game against Missouri taught Cornhusker fans anything, it was what a difference two decades can make.
The Tigers won the non-conference tune-up 62-14 in their first trip to Memorial Stadium since the 2010 season.
Back then, Nebraska was the storied program and Missouri the perennial underachiever. The Huskers won that 2010 matchup by 28 points en route to the final Big 12 Conference championship and a berth in the Fiesta Bowl.
But 20 years later, it’s No. 5 Missouri that has raked in the wins and championships in the Big Ten Conference and Nebraska that has been relegated to mediocrity in the Mountain West Conference.
As fans headed for the parking lots with Nebraska down 38 at halftime, longtime season ticket holder Ervin Miller recalled better days.
“Now, we play San Diego State every year and feel lucky to get in the Humanitarian Bowl,” Miller said. “Twenty years ago this was unthinkable — until the Big 12 broke up, anyway.”
“I mean, we thought the Callahan Era was bad,” he added while choking back a tear. “Now I’d give anything to have those days back.”
Nebraska coach Joe Dailey said he was pleased with his team’s effort against the Tigers.
“Sometimes, you just don’t have the guns to win,” the ex-Husker quarterback and NU interim coach said. “Against a team like Missouri, all we can do is hope to go out and give it our best shot and that’s what we did. Heck, we scored two touchdowns and that’s something we can build on before we open up conference play with New Mexico.”
Running backs coach Quentin Castille said he saw growth and was excited that the Huskers weren’t held to negative rushing yards against Mizzou.
“They’re a Big Ten team, we’re in the Mountain West,” Castille said. “The fact that our backs dug in and crossed the line of scrimmage a few times tells me that we have a great chance to win multiple games this season.”
OK, it probably wouldn’t have gotten that bad. But we’re better off having never found out.
That’s why, against threats of federal intervention from Kansas lawmakers and more than a century of tradition, athletic director Tom Osborne and Chancellor Harvey Perlman made the right call by steering the Huskers into the Big Ten on Friday.
But the correct emotion for Nebraska fans now is relief, not exuberance.
Much of Husker Nation is flying high this week as if Nebraska was always a lock for the Big Ten and that this transition comes without sacrifice.
Not to dump on this party, but let’s hold on a minute.
Just a few months ago, Missouri appeared to be in the driver’s seat of conference realignment. The Tigers provided access to the Kansas City and St. Louis media markets (slightly more lucrative than Broken Bow and Grand Island) for the Big Ten Network and appeared to be on equal academic footing with Nebraska.
Had Perlman and Osborne not played their cards so well — or had Missouri been slightly less annoying in showing its desperation to leave — roles might well have reversed and Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany could have spent last Friday in Columbia, Mo., giving an eerily similar speech while Husker fans begged Texas to salvage the Big 12 while shuddering at the words “Mountain West Conference.”
We’ll never know how close this was to going the other way or exactly why Nebraska’s late inquiry about Big Ten membership did the trick while Missouri’s months of poorly disguised pleading did not.
Presumably, the football renaissance coach Bo Pelini has sparked and the new arena played integral roles while Innovation Campus and the Academic All-American record helped to a lesser extent with convincing the scholarly types at Northwestern and Michigan.
Still, though, Nebraska could have easily been left out in the cold had the Big Ten passed over the allure of Memorial Stadium in favor of TV viewers in Missouri’s big cities.
Also largely forgotten in the jubilation of not being stuck in the same conference as Wyoming are the friends (and friendly foes) we’ll leave behind.
For 115 years, including the last 103 years in a row, Nebraska has played Kansas in football. After Turner Gill’s homecoming this fall, that streak will almost certainly end.
Also destined to conclude is the rivalry with Oklahoma, Thanksgiving dates with Colorado (to be fair, the Buffs bailed first) and years of scrappy games against Kansas State, Iowa State, Oklahoma State and, yes, even Missouri.
Road games just a few hours away in familiar haunts like Manhattan, Kan., and Ames, Iowa, will be replaced with exotic far-off places like University Park, Pa., and Evanston, Ill.
“It’s all for progress,” we say now. “Heck, K-State’s football stadium looks like the place my high school team played, and I’ve always wanted to see a Penn State game.”
But there’s something to be said for tradition, for continuity, for playing against schools that you grow up watching and, over time, develop a deep-seated respect for (even if that respect is laced in a little gameday antipathy). Losing that history isn’t something you take lightly.
Now, Nebraska’s role in the conference realignment musical chairs has finished, and Perlman and Osborne deserve boundless credit for it ending the way it did and not like the beginning of this column suggests it could have.
While the Big Ten promises to bring new stability and financial opportunity, Nebraska’s decades of tradition with its old rivals is a few short months from being history.
Over time, new rivalries will pop up and Nebraska will ease into its new home. With it might come more championships and, popular opinion seems to say, increased academic prestige. But it won’t ever be the same as playing the schools just down the road that knew us when we were still called the Bugeaters.
Now it’s time for Husker Nation to collectively exhale, looking forward with both anticipation and humility.
But before you harass a Jayhawk or laugh at a Tiger, realize that we could very easily be standing in their uneasy shoes today. And, as hard as it might be to believe as we bask in our newfound Big Ten glory, someday we might just miss them.
– Mitch Smith is a junior news-editorial major at U. Nebraska.