You sit there and read ESPN's Future Power Rankings and they slot us somewhere in the middle of this new look Big Ten and I just think about the 1993 season when we went into the Rose Bowl and proved everybody wrong. We did it with homegrown kids from Wisconsin and Illinois who wanted to be Badgers. Now we are in this Frankenstein conference with USC and UCLA and Oregon and Washington and none of it makes any sense. I remember when the Big Ten was about cold weather football and running the ball down your throat at Camp Randall in November. Now we are flying out to the west coast to play teams that never even thought about joining a midwestern league until the money got too big to ignore.
The worst part is watching these ESPN projections lump us in with programs that have no business being in the same conference. We built this program on Barry Alvarez's vision and a culture that took decades to establish. Now we are just another team in a 18 school mega conference where the history and rivalries mean nothing. The Minnesota game used to be the whole season. Now it is just another Saturday between trips to Pasadena and Seattle. I miss when conference realignment meant adding Penn State and that was a big deal. Not this mess we have now where the Big Ten is basically the old PAC-12 with some midwestern teams sprinkled in.