[Husker] divisions leaked

[Steve Schmadeke]

The commissioner touched on this himself when he was talking about the timing of introducing a possible ninth conference game to the schedule, of which he is a strong proponent.  He stated that the budgets of Big 10 schools are based on seven home games per year.  It's an assumed conference-wide policy.

Delaney went on to point out that a nine-game conference schedule requires a school to have five conference road games built into its schedule every other year, meaning that the only way to reach seven home games would be to have nothing but home games on the non-conference schedule that year.  In addition to the comments referred to earlier in this discussion, Tom Osborne also pointed out that several of the Big 10 schools are committed to annual home-and-home series with schools outside of the conference.  A specific example is Iowa and Iowa State.  Three other schools play Notre Dame on a near-annual basis as well.  Delaney's push for a ninth game will make it problematic for Big 10 schools to work out a schedule with other BCS schools simply because there is only one slot for a road matchup every other year.  The existing commitments are also why the nine-game schedule wasn't implemented immediately.  Because of those issues, the schedule change may not ever be implemented, though Delaney is a pretty strong commissioner.

BTW, Ohio State's representative pointed out later in the show that they "are blessed" with eight home games in 2012.

On Sep 2, 2010, at 7:10 AM, Jon Johnston wrote:

> Since they're supposed to make so much more money joining the Big Ten conference, how much longer are we going to buy this bullshit that we have to have seven home games as an excuse to play garbage teams? 
> 
> Jon J
> 
> On Sep 2, 2010, at 8:02 AM, Tony lambert wrote:
> 
>> TO commented last night on the BTN that playing other BCS teams probably wouldn't work because they would want a home and home series, TO said the reason it wouldn't work is that Nebraska needs seven home games and with a home and home series they couldn't get to seven home games.
>> 
>> Tony Lambert