Faux Pelini: Nebraska-Big Ten marriage is one of convenience that needs mending
by Faux Pelini
As this makeshift college football season finds its legs, let's address the surly red elephant in the room: the University of Nebraska's frayed relationship with the Big Ten conference. All is not quiet on the Big Ten's western front.
In recent weeks the Big Ten and its members have hurled insults and accusations and even lawsuits at each other, and Nebraska has carved out a role as the conference's black sheep. The ugly infighting is a mostly new development but the seeds of discord between Nebraska and its conference were planted in the very beginning. Nebraska and the Big Ten have been overdue for some drama.
A handful of years into the new century, Nebraska grew weary of its Big 12 Conference situation, convinced that it had become subservient to the maniacal whims of the University of Texas and its backroom influence on conference decisions. By 2009, Nebraska was open to finding a new conference to call home.
A place like the Big Ten represented stability, financial upside, and a fresh start. So when Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany called Nebraska as part of his campaign to expand the Big Ten's footprint, Nebraska listened.
A deal was quickly struck: Nebraska would leave the Big 12 and join the Big Ten in July 2010. The press releases trumpeted the usual corporate merger-speak, touting synergies and storied institutions and exciting opportunities. It was a match that was perfect on paper, a real Win-Win.
But a marriage of convenience only works if you don't pretend it's something else.
After joining its new conference, Nebraska embarked on its Big Ten onboarding process, doing its best to become immersed in the Big Ten's culture and history. It was carefully planned, it was formal, it was......forced. Tradition and loyalty cannot be manufactured.
Everyone had assumed Nebraska would become a bona fide Big Ten school more or less automatically, acting and thinking like the other members and generally blending in, because, well, why wouldn't they? The deal made sense, after all.
But the uncomfortable reality was that Nebraska was running from the Big 12 more than it was running to the Big Ten. As a result, the most important parts of the loyalty equation -- Nebraska's full investment in the Big Ten, and the Big Ten's complete embrace of Nebraska -- simply never happened. This was a business arrangement, nothing more and nothing less.
The Big Ten's charter members have a deep connection that will never be fully available to Nebraska. The odd reality is that, even a decade into its Big Ten membership, Nebraska still shares more history and commonalities with Cockeye State and Kansas than it does with Michigan or Ohio State. In the Big Ten, Nebraska will always be the New Guy. The kid who moved into your dorm halfway through the first semester and will never be an original member of your crew no matter how many kegs he sneaks up the back stairwell.
Despite all this, things between Nebraska and the Big Ten had mostly worked out fine. Nebraska would have liked to have won more games in the first decade of its Big Ten membership, bu tthere hadn't been any major disruptions. Until now.
In most marriages you only learn how strong your bond is after something bad happens. Like, say, a global pandemic.
In early August the Big Ten was doing its best to navigate through These Unprecedented Times, and commissioner Kevin Warren began to send signals that the conference might cancel the 2020 football season. Nebraska coach Scott Frost famously took that opportunity to announce that although Nebraska preferred to play a Big Ten schedule, it was "prepared to look for other options."
This was not at all helpful.
Nebraska had made a fundamental mistake: It said the quiet part out loud. The Big Ten and its members interpreted Frost's statement as evidence of Nebraska's disloyalty, a sign that Nebraska was only in it for itself. Nebraska found itself accused of the same transgression that it believed Texas was guilty of a decade before: self-serving, scheming opportunism.
Now, if Nebraska had really cared about the Big Ten, it might have understood the impact that the Other Options speech would have on the other conference members. The Big Ten was working on a group solution to a difficult, high stakes problem -- how to responsibly deal with a virus that was killing a lot of people -- and Frost made it seem that Nebraska was only concerned about its football schedule.
And if the Big Ten had truly cared about Nebraska, it might have tried to understand where Nebraska was coming from. Instead, the Big Ten and its schools mostly took the easy way out and characterized Nebraska as a disloyal problem child.
What the Big Ten wasn't willing to see is that when speaking of Other Options, Nebraska wasn't making threats. Nebraska was worried.
To understand Nebraska's collective mental state during a conference crisis, you need to revisit Nebraska's Big 12 drama.
By 2009 Texas had emerged as a threat to Nebraska's way of life, seemingly using the Big 12 commissioner as its puppet, making plans to launch the Longhorn Network and generally making diabolical plans to wreck the competitive balance of the league. Those fears have proven to be overblown, but at the time Nebraska felt highly vulnerable. The college football landscape had been shifting under Nebraska's feet, and Nebraska didn't have the protections of a dense population with the desired number of "TV sets" (remember those?). Nebraska simply wanted to compete for titles again, and the Big 12 had become an unstable platform. There was panic in Lincoln.
And to understand that, you have to go back another 15 years, to the mid-1990s, when the Huskers created impossible, enduring expectations by winning three national titles during an unthinkable 60-3 run. Those teams unleashed an intense cocktail of emotions for Nebraskans, equal parts pride, fulfillment and relief.
And to understand that, you would have to go back another decade and experience the stunned and confused tears of the red-clad faithful in bars and basements after Tom Osborne valiantly discarded a national title by going for two in the 1984 Orange Bowl, thereby failing to reclaim the championship euphoria that had once been injected directly into Nebraskans' veins.
And to understand that (last time, I promise), you have to go back another 12 years, to when Nebraska football fully arrived and provided the state of Nebraska visibility and credibility -- popularity, even -- on the national sports scene, winning its second consecutive national title on millions of Zenith TV sets. In those two seasons Nebraska forged a permanent football identity that would influence perceptions and decisions in 1983 and 1995 and 2010 and 2020 and beyond.
Nebraska people don't just love Husker football. They identify with it and deeply depend on it -- athletically, socially, emotionally, economically. For Nebraska, keeping alive Other Options was a necessity.
It's almost October and the chaos has subsided. The Big Ten seems to have found an elusive unanimous solution, at least for now. We have an actual Big Ten schedule on the books, and the focus has finally returned to football.
But things are different now.
Nebraska and the Big Ten have always had a marriage of convenience. Compromise and understanding have never been priorities to them, and so the Big Ten did not care to understand why Nebraska's history would compel it to speak of Other Options, just as Nebraska didn't care about jeopardizing its standing with the rest of the group.
When a marriage of convenience becomes inconvenient, the foundation is no longer in place. The partners must either start over or move on.
As often happens in college athletics, the leaders from the Big Ten and the University of Nebraska who made the decisions a decade ago are long gone, leaving the current leaders to make sense of things. What will happen next between Nebraska and the Big Ten will depend on two things: what the Big Ten and Nebraska really want from each other, and their other options.
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