Nebraska in the Big Ten: What It Means to Me

Did you expect an even longer hiatus from me?  I am usually good for at least four posts on this blog a year and occasionally more when I am prodded for more information!

So what is on my mind this early am hour?  Well, I promised a post about what it means to me, as a Nebraska fan that the Huskers are now in the Big 10.  It means more than just new games being played every year and new rivalries being formed.  It even means more than my sanity being lost if Nebraska loses to Ohio State this upcoming season.  What does it mean to me? It means that, as a fan, I finally get to see basically every game that Nebraska plays for the first time in my life as a fan of this team.

My love of Nebraska started on January 2nd, 1996; it was on this day where I watched Nebraska steamroll the Florida Gators 62-24 in route to their second consecutive national championship.  At the time I was seven years old and was just in the infancy of my sports fandom and couldn’t fathom football being on a day other than Sunday.   I was glued to the television screen watching the scarlet and cream of the Cornhuskers running up and down the field and constantly hearing the name of “Frazier” being uttered by Jim Nantz.  I was hooked from that point on and even though I had no clue about why the game was significant I knew that Nebraska was the team for me. 

(Sidebar for a moment: It is VERY likely that had Florida been doing the same thing to Nebraska that I would currently be a Florida fan.  I was very young and easily impressed at the time and this could have easily happened.  While I am here…to say I had no clue about college football would also be an exaggeration because I had heard of Miami and Notre Dame, but no other team besides those two.)

Since I really started paying attention to college football in 1997 (ironically after spending a year away, during which Nebraska did not win the national title…) I have been as diehard a Nebraska Cornhusker fan as you can possibly get without actually having some sort of affiliation to the school via relatives being alumni or actually living in the state.   Unlike Kevin and, to a lesser extent, Ross I do not live in the state which my favorite college football team plays or even in one close to it so that means I get to see everything.  There is going to be no more mystery, there no more me telling people, “Yeah I can’t hang out today I have to listen to the Nebraska game over the internet since I can’t watch it on TV.” For the first time in my Nebraska fandom I finally get to visually live the season with all the other of the Big Red Nation and it is going to be something special*.

*Or it will lead to me being checked into an institution by Mid-October, either way. Memorable.

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