It’s been just a couple weeks since the Big Ten made the decision to add Nebraska, and rather than set off catastrophic realignment, 16 team superconferences, and the dissolution of the Big XII, well, not much else really happened.  Though it’s on assuredly shaky ground, the Big XII survives (for now), and the Pac-10 added just two schools, in Colorado and Utah, who don’t stack up to the original 6 they’d hoped to grab.  The biggest winner in expansion is, undoubtedly, the Big Ten conference, having added another of the schools that are its trademark–one steeped in tradition, with a national fanbase, and more history than just about anyone.

But now, the question has shifted to Nebraska.  Aside from a big time shift in television revenues, from less than $10 million to more than double that, what is the Big Ten poised to offer the Cornhuskers?

First and foremost, a new rival.  And in the Big Ten, that means the team you play to close out your season, the team you have to get through unscathed if you want to win a conference title.  And for most of the Big Ten, that team, and that fanbase, will derive as much pleasure from knocking you off as they would their own Big Ten championship.  It might mean a  cool trophy, or just pride, but in the Big Ten, everybody’s got someone to hate. Even schools without much football tradition, like Indiana and Northwestern, put their energy into defeating their rival, Purdue or Illinois, and winning the Old Oaken Bucket, or the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk.  It’s not campy. It’s tradition.

In that sense, Nebraska’s shift to the Big Ten mirrors Penn State’s.  Both teams played a regional schedule for so long that they never really developed much of a history with any Big Ten teams despite bordering one.  Both leave behind a great rivalry to join the conference, and one wonders whether Nebraska-Oklahoma will go the way of Penn State-Pittsburgh.  And, since two decades later Penn State is still searching for one, and now, Nebraska needs one, it would only seem natural for the Big Ten to throw those teams together as league-mandated rivals.

Last Sunday, the Lincoln Journal-Star sought to examine the potential candidates for Nebraska and lo and behold, Penn State was mentioned as a possibility. (Spoiler alert…I’m in it):

Penn State plays Michigan State in its season-ending game for the “Land Grant Trophy.”

But Devon Edwards, a PSU student who writes for the Nittany White Out blog, will tell you fans don’t consider that game a serious rivalry.

As you’d expect, there’s plenty of enthusiasm about the game with Ohio State. The Nittany Lions are the lone team in the Big Ten to have defeated the Buckeyes twice in the past five years.

“But they don’t consider us their biggest rival. They have Michigan, so we’re in kind of a little brother situation now,” Edwards said. “There really are a lot of (Big Ten) rivalries and we’re kind of the lone team out. And with Nebraska leaving Oklahoma and the Big 12, I think a lot of Penn State fans are anxious to see that maybe become the big one.”

Of course, that two-sentence snippet barely grazes the surface of what makes a rival.  Throwing together Penn State and Nebraska haphazardly wouldn’t give either team the adversary they so desire.  Sure, there’s some history between the two schools–Penn State fans feel cheated out of the 1994 championship and Nebraska fans would love to have 1982 back, when a poor call in the PSU-Nebraska game allowed the Lions to knock off then-undefeated Nebraska and earn the national championship.  But those events don’t hold any import to a large percentage of either fanbase.

When Kerry Collins was leading what may well have been the best Nittany Lion squad of all time, I was 4.  I’ve read the articles, watched the videos, and heard the arguments, but I don’t spend much, if any, time worrying about how the Associated Press screwed us.  And given the tremendous success of Nebraska in the 1990s, with 3 championships in 4 years, I doubt the Cornhusker faithful is still whining about 1982.  A true rivalry has to come together authentically.

Penn State’s addition to the Big Ten almost two decades ago proved that.  Though the Lions have played Michigan State as the capper in every season since, there really isn’t any animosity between the two schools.  Why? Because Penn State has gone 13-4 against the Spartans over that time, because MSU has never won in Happy Valley, and because there isn’t any history to lean back on.  Meanwhile, Ohio State has emerged as Penn State’s greatest test, because of some spectacular games over the past decade, and because of the struggles of Michigan in that same time frame.  It’s been an organically grown rivalry, the only way these things can emerge.

From Nebraska’s perspective, I doubt the fanbase would be particularly enthused about the Penn State game, especially if they’ll be continuing their 98-year rivalry with Oklahoma that’s one of the nation’s fiercest.  And even if that series would, unfortunately, go by the wayside, it’s not hard to imagine the Iowa game gaining significant prominence in Lincoln or Iowa City–the Hawkeyes would be the closest competition, geographically speaking, for Nebraska, and Iowa.  And while Iowa finishes up their season every year against Minnesota, that rivalry may well be overshadowed by Minnesota’s own rivalry with Wisconsin, the oldest in college football, and almost assuredly the one with the coolest trophy–Paul Bunyan’s Axe–and before that the “Slab of Bacon.”

With that in mind, Iowa fans are jumping at the chance to play Nebraska every year.  The Iowa-Nebraska rivalry is almost like the Penn State-Pitt series at this point, dormant on the field, but played out thousands of times a day by the ardent supporters of each team.  As Black Heart, Gold Pants writer Ross Binder explained to me, a Nebraska game would have instant implications, at least from the Hawkeye side of things.

An annual game with Nebraska would mean a lot to Iowa fans.  We ran a poll on the site asking our readers who they wanted as an end-of-season opponent in the annual rivalry game slot… and Nebraska ran away with the votes.  They had almost twice as many votes as the second-place team in the poll (Minnesota).  So, yeah, there is definitely a lot of pent-up interest in a Nebraska series.  Part of it is the border factor, but mainly it’s probably because so many Iowa fans know and interact with (or have known and interacted with) Nebraska fans and love to argue about which school is better or who would win if they played.  The fact that that argument can now be settled on the field and not just over a few pints is incredibly satisfying.

Iowa also plays Wisconsin every year, a series made all the more significant by Bret Bielema’s Hawkeye ties, having both played and coached for Iowa before moving on, eventually, to Wisconsin.  And out of that triangle of hate, Wisconsin emerges as the lone Big Ten without a fixed season-ending game, leaving many to, naturally, suggest Nebraska.  Given the fact that Barry Alvarez, the former head coach and current Athletic Director, played for the Cornhuskers, there’s plenty of ammunition to that effect.

I spoke with Adam Hoge, who writes the phenomenal Wisconsin blog Bucky’s 5th Quarter, to try and gain some insight about what the potential rivalry with Nebraska would mean for the Badger fanbase:

I’m not saying it would make the most sense for Wisconsin and Nebraska to have a season-ending rivalry but I honestly believe the Badgers are the most likely candidate because of the Alvarez connection. Would it be a significant rivalry for the Wisconsin fan base? Well, I believe the best rivalries are driven by great games that are played late in the season and if Nebraska and Wisconsin are consistently fighting for a spot in the Big Ten Championship game at the end of every season then it’s a rivalry that would easily surpass the ones UW currently has with Minnesota and Iowa.

That’s really what it boils down to, though. Competitiveness.  Just as Wisconsin fans are starting to grow tired of the Minnesota series, having won six straight contests, so too has Penn State never truly embraced the Michigan State game.  The only way for a rivalry to emerge is with hard-fought battles on the gridiron, in games that mean something for both teams.  They can’t be born overnight, or over a period of a year or two.  Until there’s a reason for animosity, the Nebraska game will be “just another game” for every Big Ten team.

Would I love to see Penn State end the year against Nebraska? Of course. I know it’s certainly better than the league-sponsored rivalry we’ve got now, and, unlike that series, it has the potential to blossom into something great.  Yes, Nebraska is a tremendous program, with many parallels to our own.  But that doesn’t mean a series between our schools will take off.  For the first few years, maybe the first decade of that rivalry, it will feel like a non-conference game, affixed carelessly to the end of the schedule.

Why is there animosity between Penn State and Michigan, and Iowa, and even Minnesota? Because we’ve played those schools in bitter, hard fought contests, because they took away our greatest dreams, of a league title, an unbeaten season, a chance to play for the national championship.  We despise Henne and Manningham, and the refs who threw an extra two seconds onto the clock in 2005.  We curse Daniel Murray’s name, after his last-second field goal gave Iowa a stirring victory in 2008.  We wonder about what could’ve been in 1999, when a then-unranked Minnesota team stormed into Beaver Stadium and shocked the #2 team in the country, sending the Lions into a tailspin that landed them in the Alamo Bowl instead of the Rose Bowl they seemed destined for.

It’s those factors which create a rivalry.  Not a stupid trophy, or a quirk of scheduling.  Not a bad call in a game 28 years ago, and a decision made by sportswriters 16 years ago.  And worse still would be Nebraska not only finding their place at the end of Penn State’s season, at the expense of replacing Ohio State in the process.  The Penn State-Ohio State rivalry may pale in comparison to “The Game,” but it’s a breath of fresh blood in a conference so dominated by centuries-old rivalries.  But more importantly, that would mean replacing Penn State’s only regional opponent with one as far away as two conference-mates could be.

It’s a telling statement when Jim Delany openly wonders what thought he should give to such a consideration.  When discussing the alignment of the Big Ten’s divisions, Delany cited three factors:

“First priority’s competitive fairness to me,” Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said last week. “Second priority is maintenance of rivalries, some of them are very important. They’re part of who we are and they’re not treated lightly. And then I think the third is what factor, if any, does geography play?”

School	Town	Distance (miles)	Driving time
Ohio State	Columbus, OH	322.6	5 hr 4 min
Michigan	Ann Arbor, MI	391.1	5 hr 53 min
Michigan State	East Lansing, MI	454.6	6 hr 46 min
Indiana	Bloomington, IN	547.8	8 hr 28 min
Purdue	West Lafayette, IN	560.3	8 hr 34 min
Northwestern	Evanston, IL	585.6	8 hr 51 min
Illinois	Champaign, IL	617.5	9 hr 22 min
Wisconsin	Madison, WI	712.3	10 hr 35 min
Iowa	Iowa City, IA	772.9	11 hr 19 min
Minnesota	Minneapolis, MN	974.2	14 hr 17 min
Nebraska	Lincoln, NE	1073.5	15 hr 32 min

To me, assigning divisions is simple.  Do it like the Big XII did and like the SEC does, on a strictly geographic level, where Penn State would join the first five listed in the chart below.  It preserves every single significant rivalry in the Big Ten, and ensures that one fosters between Iowa and Nebraska and Nebraska and Wisconsin.  Trying to get too cute, as many have suggested, turns the Big Ten into the ACC, in which nobody’s quite sure which team is in the Atlantic and who’s in the Coastal.  Sure, it might not create the most balanced divisions, especially if Michigan returns to form at some point in the foreseeable future, which they should.  But it’s too early to assume that Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State will simply remain the class of the Big Ten for time eternal.

A return to form for Nebraska, to the halcyon days of the late 1990s makes them, not Ohio State, the most dominant team in the conference.  And who knows–Rich Rodriguez could continue to run Michigan into the ground and rack up NCAA violations to the point where it takes UM a decade to rebound.  Following Joe Paterno’s eventual retirement–he’s got to go sometime, right–Penn State could find themselves slipping in stature.

Penn State, and it’s fans, have long felt like the black sheep in the conference.  Now, with every school in the Big Ten rushing to praise the addition of Nebraska, it creates a remarkably stark contrast with the attitudes surrounding the conference’s annexation of Penn State twenty years ago.  To continue to let two schools run the conference, and with the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry potentially proving more important than the wants and needs of the other 10 schools, now is the time for Jim Delany to finally throw Penn State and its fans a bone, by aligning them with schools they can actually visit, amongst teams which whom they’ve fostered some history.

How much do you want to bet he doesn’t?