(09-24-2018 10:24 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  In contrast, almost a quarter-century later, games involving Penn State and traditional B1G teams still do not feel like B1G games to me. This weekend's Ohio State - Penn State game will probably be a great game, but it will still have the feel of a cross-sectional game, not a B1G game.

Yeah ... I like the Penn State games, but as someone who started watching the Buckeyes when my mom was a ("non-traditional", as they say) OSU Senior who could get family tickets, with Archie Griffin breaking through the line for 5-10 yard runs and Dwight Hudson dazzling the crowd at halftime, it feels like, "hey, as a result of realignment, we get this permanent OOC series with Penn State!"

Quote: And games involving Rutgers, Maryland, and Nebraska also do not, to me at least, in any way resemble B1G games.

At least the games against Nebraska feel like Big Ten games ... a flagship Great Lakes University playing a flagship Northern Plains University ... I'm old-fashioned enough that playing Eastern schools like Penn State, Maryland or Rutgers is "even more different" to me than playing Nebraska.

And if Nebraska got kicked out of the AAU just after it got rushed into the Big Ten ... mostly because its Ag School funding is block granted and the competitive Medical School funding goes to UN-Omaha ... that's just more of the kind of annoying academic snobbery that forces the Big Ten to do all of that window dressing they do to try to set themselves apart from the football factory schools.