Awesome article especially the last sentence
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Official B1G Season Will Begin October 24: Unanimously Approved; Schedule will be 8+1
- Thread starter Red Reign
- Start date
Awesome article especially the last sentence
Is this an article by a Nebraska guy or is this from someone else.
It would mean a lot more coming from another source.
CONNOR O'GARA
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Tradition. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
I do not believe he is a NE guy
He spent some time working in Kearney, NE, so there is that. He graduated from Indiana though, is originally from Illinois, and now lives in Florida.
Connor O'Gara:
My name is Connor O'Gara and I'm the Senior National Columnist for the all-SEC football site SaturdayDownSouth.com and the all-Big Ten football site SaturdayTradition.com in Longwood, Fla. I also co-host The Saturday Down South Podcast. Before that, I was a sports reporter for the Kearney Hub in Kearney, NE where I covered preps, the University of Nebraska at Kearney and the USHL's Tri-City Storm. I'm a former Indiana men's basketball beat reporter for the Indiana Daily Student. I've interned with the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Indianapolis Colts and Indianapolis Indians in PR/media relations. I graduated from Indiana University in 2012 with a degree in journalism and a minor in kinesiology.
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This type of article means so much more when it comes from an outsider. Having spent a little time in Nebraska does give him a better perspective on how the people of the state feel though.
This is an excellent article. Shatel hits on a lot of key points that I have not seen being mentioned by anyone else in the media, and he does it well and succinctly. Up until the B1G decision to cancel the season, there were a lot of Nebraska fans who didn't fully comprehend how much emphasis the B1G places on academic prestige, and even fewer grasped the implications of an athletic conference where all major decisions are made be university presidents--rather than ADs, which is more the norm--and how both the university of, and the entire state of Nebraska neither thinks that way,... nor wants to think or be that way. The "Nebraska-ization" of the B1G is a real thing, and Ohio State's lonely success on the elite football stage has made that painfully real to the folks in Michigan and Wisconsin, who overly value their own academic image when they look in the mirror. The rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan goes well beyond football, and the entire league has struggled back and forth for decades as they subtly slide incrementally back and forth between chiefly focusing as a conference on either athletic excellence on the national stage or academic prestige on the world stage; only the Pac 12 has struggled as much with that particular identity continuum. Penn State and Nebraska were brought in to boost the football resume, whereas Maryland and Rutgers were much more in line with the academic side of the B1G. Is it a coincidence that while the relative new kids on the block, Nebraska fans couldn't grasp why the B1G added Rutgers and Maryland, meanwhile Wisconsin and Michigan had passive-aggressively voiced their own displeasure when they cut the academic legs out from under Nebraska's more limited academic prestige by leading a historic vote to expel them from the AAU?
The league is divided, and it has been for nearly a century. The University of Chicago was a charter member of the conference that eventually became the B1G, and they exemplified the acme of excellence in both arenas--national athletic prominence and international academic prestige-- better than anybody ever, with the possible exception of Yale in the late 1800s. Never forget that the most successful member of the original B1G--winners of multiple national championships--the University of Chicago decided to terminate its football program because it was a distraction from their emphasis on academics. They did this BEFORE the Ivy League ever considered dropping down in the level of football that they were playing as that decision was made decades later, and it was more an acknowledgement of reality than some sort of brave stand against the masses because Ivy League football hadn't mattered on the national stage for more than half of a century when the Ivies decided to cut their losses.
The B1G has always seen itself as a bigger, better version of the Ivy League. The conflict between academic prestige and athletic excellence can be seen at every level of every pivotal B1G decision. Michigan voted against adding Michigan State to the conference because Michigan State had too much engineering and practical, applied science degrees while Michigan was all about the traditional academic disciplines of law, medicine, humanities, and snobbery. Penn State was just Michigan State with a better football resume. Nebraska was a flyover bridge too far for some. When fans look at the SEC, they covet Alabama and, to a lesser degree, LSU. When the snobs look at the SEC, they cover Vanderbilt and, to a lesser degree, Florida and Georgia.
Do you REALLY want to know why the B1G's backlash against Nebraska was so strong? We haven't delivered on the promise of why we were added to the conference, which was to add to their national athletic prominence. From the B1G snobs' perspective, they went slumming with Nebraska, but we never even put out.
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I'd like to see her have a public debate with HCSF on the subject.
