I took a look at this and immediately said “uh oh”. Bielema has what he needs established with his team, while we have a new staff, new scheme, and new players. When I saw this news, the first thing I did was run to our schedule to see if we had a bye prior. Nope. And what’s worse is we play Michigan who is as physical as it gets. So we are going to be beat the heck up, short week after that, and traveling to a visiting school.
I would be all for this if we had a bye the week prior. Shorten the amount of time between games, and give yourself an extra day of rest before the following week. But for some reason we then will have a bye AFTER the Illinois game. That just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. But I also know that the B1G tries to do these things for schools that have trouble drawing crowds anyway. Unless a team like Nebraska asks for it during a home game (like Iowa), we aren’t playing on a Friday.
I have been looking at our schedule, and I am kicking around us starting 4-0 or 3-1, very reasonable. With that said, this news makes me think we hit a pretty rough spot for the Michigan and Illinois game, which isn’t what we need.
If we can sneak up on the Gophers, we can be 4-0 where these two losses may not hurt us as much. But this was definitely a gut punch.
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So, why does Trev have to agree to this?
I believe home team has the final say. So we don’t really have a say? But i’m speculating.