Even without Iowa, Nebraska wants to keep playing on Black Friday
Nebraska’s scheduling arrangement with Iowa is coming to an end after the 2019 season but the Huskers want to keep playing on Black Friday.
Nebraska has ended the season vs. Iowa on the Friday after Thanksgiving ever since the Huskers joined the Big Ten. Before Iowa, Nebraska’s annual Big 12 (or 8) game with Colorado was a Black Friday staple.
The Big Ten recently announced its schedules for the near future and Iowa is being replaced as the final game of the regular season by Minnesota in 2020 and 2021. Nebraska is hoping the games with the Gophers that don’t mean the end of the Black Friday tradition; the games have been tentatively listed as on Saturday.
“I want to clarify Nebraska’s position regarding the dates of our season-ending football games in 2020 and 2021 as announced earlier this week by the Big Ten Conference,” Nebraska athletic director Shawn Eichorst said in a statement. “At this time no final decision has been made on what dates these two games will actually be played. As in past years, the Big Ten releases opponent matchups and typically assigns these match-ups to Saturday. That has been the case in the past when we agreed to move our season ending games against Iowa from Saturday to Friday.
“Moving forward we will do everything possible to maintain our tradition of playing games on the Friday after Thanksgiving. We look forward to playing Iowa on the Friday after Thanksgiving through 2019.”
When it announced the schedules, the conference said it could potentially start rotating end-of-year opponents among teams in the Big Ten West. That means Nebraska could play Wisconsin the final week of a season in the future.
“All we wanted to try to do was mix and match the rivalry games,” Big Ten associate commissioner Mark Rudner told the Lincoln Journal-Star. “We know that Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Minnesota, all four of those games are rivalry games in their own right.”
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of Dr. Saturday and From the Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
