Really gets my blood boiling on a quiet Sunday in May? This whole notion that we are just supposed to accept that USC and UCLA are in the Big Ten now. I was sitting here reading that ESPN 100 days piece and they run down the big games for 2026, and sure enough they mention our trip to Notre Dame in the fall, but nobody stops to ask the real question. What happened to the Big Ten I grew up watching? I remember the 1993 season when we went to the Rose Bowl and we beat UCLA, and I mean the real UCLA, the one that belonged in the Pac-10 where they were supposed to be. Now we got them coming to Camp Randall in November like it is some kind of normal thing and I am supposed to act like that makes sense.
Back in the 1980s when I first started following this program we knew exactly who we were. We were a Big Ten team that played Michigan and Ohio State and Iowa and Minnesota and that was it. You knew the schedule before the season even started because the rivalries were set in stone. Now I look at the conference slate and it is a mess of schools from three different time zones and I cannot even keep track of who is on our schedule from one year to the next. The travel costs alone for the athletes are absurd and nobody in the commissioner's office cares because the TV money is too good.
This whole realignment disaster started when the Big Ten decided they needed to chase the television markets and now we have a conference that stretches from New Jersey to California. The tradition is gone. The history is gone. You cannot tell me that a night game in Piscataway against Rutgers ccarries the same weight as a November matchup with Michigan State under the lights at Camp Randall. It does not and it never will. I miss the old Big Ten where you played the same teams every year and built real rivalries that meant something to the communities and the families and the kids who grew up dreaming about those games.
And do not even get me started on what this did to the Rose Bowl. That game used to be the pinnacle of college football, the Granddaddy of Them All, and now it is just another playoff game. The 1994 Rose Bowl against UCLA was the greatest moment in program history and you cannot replicate that feeling when the conference tie-ins are all broken up and the game has been reduced to a corporate product. We are going to South Bend this fall and I am grateful for that because Notre Dame still feels like a real game against a real opponent from a real conference, but how long before they get swept up in this madness too?
The worst part is that the people running this sport do not care about the fans who have been here for forty years. They care about the dollar signs and the streaming deals and the new markets. I watched this program grow from a doormat into a national power under Barry Alvarez and we did it by being Wisconsin, not by trying to be something we were not. Now we are just another brand in a giant corporate machine and the soul of ...