Troy Dannen Talks Nebraska-Illinois Friday Night Game

Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen joined Sports Nightly on Wednesday night to offer thoughts on the football schedule news that dropped today.

Instead of Nebraska hosting Illinois on Saturday, Sept. 21, as originally planned, the Big Ten Conference announced the Huskers would instead play Bret Bielema’s Fighting Illini one day earlier, on Friday, Sept. 20.

The game will be nationally televised on FOX with kickoff set for 7 p.m. CT. It will be one of nine Big Ten contests televised by FOX during the season and will mark Nebraska’s 400th sellout in a row.

Friday night college games are a hot topic around these parts as many football fans view Fridays as sacred high school football nights.

However, nationally televised games are great for the university and its athletic department, Dannen said.

“You want to be on national TV and you want those games where you’re the stand-alone that everybody’s watching, everybody focused on you,” said Dannen, who is in Los Angeles with other Big Ten ADs and football/basketball coaches for league meetings.

Dannen is a Midwestern football guy through and through, though. He recognizes what fall Friday nights mean to the state of Nebraska, as well as other states that value and care deeply about the sport of football.

“I know Friday night games cause a lot of heartburn for a lot of reasons,” Dannen said. “We think of high school football, just the logistics of a Friday night game in the middle of a college campus. So there can be a lot of challenges along with it, but I think the ability to put the Huskers and that stadium, and our crowd, in the national limelight for a night game, it’s well worth the challenges that lie ahead with it.”

And, of course, money.

FOX paid big bucks for the right to televise Big Ten football games, and the member institutions will benefit greatly from that.

“We can be upset about it all we want, but we’re cashing a pretty large check from our television contract every year. This is the price of that check,” Dannen said. “So in order to fund what we want to do, you end up with a Friday night game here and there.”

Dannen believes last year’s Volleyball Day In Nebraska served as a nice test run for a Friday night football game.

“It might have been a good dry run for us in what it would look like during the week and how the impact would be,” Dannen said. “So, it’s a challenge for our operations crew, but it’s going to be a great environment. I just I love the fact that people around the country are going to be focused on us that night and watching the game at Memorial Stadium.”