Three years of this and I still cannot get used to seeing us scheduled for a Tuesday night game at Notre Dame in the regular season. You remember when bowl games meant something? I am sitting here in June thinking about the 1994 Rose Bowl when we took down UCLA and the whole state of Wisconsin shut down for that New Years Day. We earned that trip by winnig the Big Ten, not by having a decent record and hoping the selection committee throws us a bone. Now we are gonna South Bend on a random Tuesday night in what used to be a marquee intersectional rivalry game and it just feels like another regular season game dressed up in fancy uniforms.
The old bowl system had character. You knew if you won the Big Ten you were gonna Pasadena and that was that. No arguing about strength of schedule or eye test or whatever nonsense the committee uses now. I remember the 1999 season when we went back to the Rose Bowl and beat Stanford and Ron Dayne ran for over 200 yards and we all knew exactly what that trophy meant. It was earned on the field in November, not decided by a bunch of suits in a hotel conference room. Now we have the College Football Playoff and a dozen bowl games nobody cares about and kids are opting out to prepare for the draft.
You want to talk about tradition? The old Big Ten had a pact with the Pac-10 that meant something. Those January 1st games in the sun, the crowd split 50-50, the marching bands, the whole pageantry of it. Now we are playing Notre Dame on a Tuesday night in October because television networks say so and the conference realignment destroyed every rivalry that mattered. I miss the days when you could circle a date on the calendar and know that game was gonna decide everything. Now it is just another game in a 12-game schedule leading to a bracket that changes every year.
The kids today will never understand what it felt like to watch the bowl pairings announced on New Years Eve and see your team going somewhere that meant something. Not this playoff expansion nonsense where half the teams get in and the regular season barely matters anymore. We had something special and we traded it for television ratings and corporate sponsorships.