Should Nebraska football avoid future Friday night games?

Amie: Well Nebraska didn’t have much of a choice. If Nebraska had its choice, obviously they would say no because they do not want to do this, but it is an awkward scheduling quirk that Nebraska fell on the wrong side of. Every single Big Ten road game they have this season, with the exception of Iowa, is homecoming for their opponent and the Big Ten does have some morals I guess in that they will not move homecoming games to Friday.

Nebraska gets the short end of the stick on that one for this week, and it’s really unfortunate. Trev (Alberts), back when he was here, said, ‘We don’t want this, this is not something that we are interested in,’ and the Big Ten this year says, ‘Well, too bad.’

Luke: Somehow that didn’t happen to Michigan, though.

Amie: Of course not, it’s Michigan. But also who’s scheduling Michigan or Ohio State for homecoming? No one.

I don’t think that we should be doing this but it’s a business, and the Big Ten is not beholden to the interests of its universities, it is beholden to the almighty dollar and the interest of the TV networks that have paid a lot of money to air these games. That’s where we’re at; I don’t think it’s changing and I actually think it’s going to get worse but we can still say that it sucks all the same.

Luke: I thought we should talk about this because like you said, there are going to be more Friday night games and not just Friday games potentially, they could play on other nights of the week as well.

Amie: We saw that last season with Nebraska playing on a Thursday. Granted that was at least to open the season, but I think that it’s going to get worse. I don’t know if the Big Ten will go full “MACtion” or anything, but it’s going to continue to happen and there’s nothing stopping it.

The reason why this was stopped in the beginning was because there’s a landmark court course that banned the NFL from infringing on high school and college. That’s why you don’t see any Saturday night games during the college season, so if somebody’s going to want to change it they’re going to have to sue.

Luke: The thing I think about too is this Week 0, Week 1 (schedule) is going to continue to spiral. Before you get those NFL windows, they’re going to think, ‘Hey, let’s just play college football every day of the week until the NFL starts.’ That could happen here in the future.

It’s also an 18-team Big Ten, so you can get real creative with bye weeks; you can play a game on a Wednesday depending on how you schedule those bye weeks. Of course I’m not saying all of this is going to happen, just that these non-Saturday games is part of what this new era of college football is about.

You feel bad of course for the local high school players and athletes, who should still get a lot of fans and recognition to their games, but they’re competing for attention and eyeballs. There’s lots of considerations here in Lincoln too about police, traffic, support for these games, so there’s lots of decisions that go way beyond the football field itself.

It’s a change to people’s rhythms, and I’m not a big fan of it. It is nice for teams to get that maybe marquee primetime game, but what we’ve seen a lot of the time is that it’s the least desirable games that get bumped to the non-Saturday windows. That’s just what’s happened to Nebraska here.