The Case Against the Nebraska Cornhuskers Joining the Big Ten

Hello! I’ll be chiming in occasionally on the issues and games of the day.  Like a Rob Schneider movie, I hope to add value by making you think and/or laugh five percent of the time.* With some practice and the discovery of procedures like, ahem, posting pictures or linking to supporting facts, I hope to get that number up to a solid ten percent.

The current hot topic obviously is the expansion of the Big 10. I understand Dr. Tom’s apparent position, one Farmer Ted has ably laid out on this blog–Nebraska doesn’t want to be left holding the bag if Mizzou , Colorado, and some of the Big 12 South schools leave. A shrunken Big 8 remnant/WAC North with the Kansas schools, Oklahoma State, Iowa State, and maybe some MVC schools may not even be a BCS-level football conference, and we’d be better off joining another BCS conference rather than being left out in the cold.  (I proposed NU setting out as an independent in a comment, but that probably doesn’t make sense for the simple fact that we would rarely appear on TV and the dollars wouldn’t be there. It only makes economic sense for Notre Dame, and I’m not convinced it is even sustainable for them.)

My problem, however, is that I don’t think Nebraska is really all that much better off in the Big 10. Here’s why:

I. Recruiting
This may be a little controversial, but I’d argue that the steady diminution of our recruiting empire in the late 1990s and 2000s, thanks to the rise of KSU and Mizzou, was as responsible for our decline as any falloff in coaching acumen after Dr. Tom left. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Nebraska generally was the first choice for talented players in not just Nebraska but western Iowa, the Dakotas, Kansas, much of Missouri, and parts of Colorado.  Wistrom (MO), Rucker (MO), Vanden Bosch (IA), Evans (KS), and many other high-level performers were critical to achieving ten-win seasons.

Any one of the areas I just cited are small in population, true, but when taken together Nebraska was able to get most of the good players from an area of about 10-12 million people. That’s not a laughable number, equivalent to maybe 60-70% of Texas’s “empire”, and we could supplement that OL/DL/LB-heavy recruiting area with skill-position talent from California, Florida, and Texas.  When OU was scuffling under Blake in the mid-1990s, we even started to get a higher number of recruits out of Oklahoma and north Texas. 

From 1997 to 2005, though, the rise of Kansas State under Snyder and to a lesser extent Missouri under Smith/Pinkel, Iowa under Ferentz, and OU under Stoops stripped away a lot of our recruiting empire.  Sadly, we just can’t land most of the big recruits from those areas anymore.  Bill Callahan almost certainly was the opposite of “excellent in all areas”, but the NU kingdom from 2000 on was limited to Nebraska, South Dakota, and not much else, which made his job a lot tougher. I’m really happy with Pelini’s work, and he’s re-established some ties to Texas and our old recruiting grounds, but our attempts to rebuild our recruiting dominance in Kansas, Missouri, western Iowa et al. are still very much a work in progress.

This is a long way of getting me to my main point here—I just don’t think joining the Big 10 will help us expand our recruiting empire and get the talent level we need to win. Leaving the Big 12 means that we’ll no longer appear on TV in the Great Plains/Texas, and we'll be be just another Rust Belt Clydesdale competing for the occasional OL or WR recruit in those areas.  Our recruiting will fall off in the old Big 12 geographic area, and I fail to see how we’re going to persuade many Illinois or Minnesota prep stars (much less those from California) to select us over other long-established regional names like Michigan or Ohio State. The gains just are not going to outweigh the losses, and I am concerned that our top-end recruiting expectation would be to become another Wisconsin. 

II. Fungibility

This gets me to my other, related point—if we do this, I believe we may become completely interchangeable in the national/regional mind with Wisconsin or Iowa. Our tradition is excellent, sure, but in the last ten years these two have had as much football success as we have, focus on ball-control offenses, have solid, blue-collar defenses, passionate fan bases with 80K in the stadium on game day, etc.

For better or for worse, we don’t run a unique offense anymore (a topic for another column), so I fear that there is nothing that would really distinguish us over and above these two schools. Moreover, the population of these states is greater than our new recruiting area would be, so I just don’t think that in the long-term we’d consistently be able to best them. Yes, I know the money from the Big 10 network would be great, and there’d be new rivalries to enjoy, but Nebraska already brings in a Top 20 amount of revenue according to the numbers I’ve seen and would be able to at least stay relevant money-wise in any conference.

So I think I’ve actually talked myself into reversing course on this issue—even if the Big 12 sky does fall, maybe it is better to stay in what’s left of the Big 8. We could easily fill the role as the Boise State of the Heartland, appearing in BCS-level bowls with high frequency. I know that’s not exactly a stellar goal for a program with Nebraska’s tradition, but a move east may well consign the Huskers to a permanent equilibrium around 7-5  in the Big 10 Western Subdivision.  So we need to fight hard in the next few weeks (which means what, talking Missouri out of the move?) to make this unwieldy conference work before the hammer falls.  The Big 12 is deeply flawed, but it is still our best option.  Any thoughts?

* As Thucydides did, I think it makes sense to give you a list of my biases—I grew up as a fan of NU in the 1980s, and accordingly my tastes accordingly lean to I-formation football, Dr. Tom, Charlie McBride, and massive doses of androstenedione. I will duel at dawn anyone who dares to besmirch the greatness of the mid-90s juggernauts. That said, I understand the changing nature of the game, and I am always open to being further convinced that I am an idiot.

This article originally appeared on: Better Off Red

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