Nebraska To the Big Ten: Real Casualty Is History With the Big Eight, OU

According to reports from Chip Brown and Orangebloods.com, Nebraska Athletic Director and coaching legend Tom Osborne will take his Cornhuskers to fairer pastures on Friday.

There won't be many tears shed in the Big 12. Frankly, Nebraska never got its due chance to leave a mark on the young, withering league.

That wasn't through any fault of the Cornhuskers. As it so happened, the Big 12 treated the legendary program with complete disrespect.

Nebraska was relegated to the perpetually insignificant North Division. After enduring a decade of irrelevance, what other choice did the program have?

While the Big 12 North was, to steal a joke from Robin Williams, a loft over an incredibly awesome party, Nebraska also dealt with another crushing insult.

Their biggest rival, and frankly one of the greatest rivalries in the history of football, was taken away by the division's new structure. They played Oklahoma every other year, which college football fans never quite got used to.

The Big 12 essentially treated one of the nation's top 10 all-time programs like garbage.

They also provided no financial incentive for Nebraska to stay. Sure, calls from whoever the heck the Chancellor of Kansas is are nice. But would that really impact anything?

The Big 12 put the spotlight on the South division, and on new football celebrity Texas, who began dating Nebraska's old sweet heart in the biggest of limelights.

By Nebraska's standards, college football had forever changed in that conference. And for the worse.

If the program didn't make a move soon, a lot of folks might have forgotten about all the legendary things the Cornhuskers had accomplished— they would have become Notre Dame-lite.

No one can really be mad at Osborne, or the Nebraska regents, for firing the shot that will inevitably break up the Big 12.

Obviously, it would be nice to keep the history together. But the parts of the Big 12 that actually have mattered will remain in tact as a package deal to the Pac-10.

Some will argue that Baylor or Colorado was part of that and they should have been included (whoever gets the bump). But the machine's main cogs are staying together.

Heck, on a national stage, most people couldn't name all the schools in the Big-12 North. But the entertaining dance from Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, and Texas A&M has evolved into can't miss television over the past five years.

Who can blame the Pac-10 for wanting them (and wanting them together)?

What is really being lost by Nebraska's jump, though, is the history of the Big Eight.

Seeing Nebraska and Oklahoma in different conferences is a horribly empty vision.

Fans are about to see it, though.

Obviously, there will be a year or two of the awkward "we still live together" post break-up football games.

But everything the Big Eight accomplished is over.

Try to let that sink in for a bit.

It isn't over in the sense of expansion. It is over in the sense that all the history it had built up since the 1920s will go to other conferences.

College football is losing something special.

The Big Eight wasn't a conference like the WAC or C-USA. It was consistently a National Championship winning conference. Imagine if the SEC existed today and then evaporated, with all the schools breaking up.

The loss of historical ties is that profound.

Granted, this could be like ripping off a band-aid. There is a very real opportunity here to do something to maintain the history of the Big Eight.

Nebraska and Oklahoma should schedule a yearly, out of conference match-up, similar to what USC does with Notre Dame. These two schools absolutely must keep playing each other in some capacity.

Perhaps they could even reignite the rivalry.

For college football fans in general, this is a time to be excited about the future. Nebraska has a major opportunity here to return to relevance. However, some major steps must be taken to keep the titans of the Big Eight in competition with each other.

That conference's ties cannot be permanently broken.

The death of Big Eight rivalries, over 90 years in the making, is the greatest casualty in this battle for conference dominance in these expansion wars.

Hopefully, the schools make some effort to maintain a bit of history.