Corn won’t go at all on Rocky Top

On the end of nearly 20 years of anticipation for Nebraska-Tennessee and the future of nonconference scheduling.

Courtesy Tennessee Athletics

If you had to guess, how many times do you think Nebraska has played a road game at an SEC school? No, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and Texas¹ don’t count for the obvious reason.

Here’s the complete list without caveats:

• Sept. 11, 1976 – Nebraska 6, LSU 6: The top-ranked Huskers scored a touchdown 4 minutes in, but a bad snap meant a missed extra point and they were shut out from there. The AP pollsters dropped them to No. 8 the following week. The Tigers would go 7-3-1 that season, finishing sixth in the SEC.

• Oct. 2, 1982 – Nebraska 41, Auburn 7: This was the week after the infamous loss at Penn State, and the No. 8 Huskers made the No. 20 Tigers pay. I can only assume that team really had it out for cats after the loss to the Nittany Lions, but the historical record supports it: Nebraska went on to beat Auburn, Kansas State, Missouri and LSU that season.

Now the caveats. Nebraska also played Alabama at Birmingham’s Legion Field in 1978 (20-3, Bama) and the Tide played “home” games there frequently, so that gets maybe half credit. There was also the 1986 trip to South Carolina (27-24, NU) when the Gamecocks were still an independent, which I count as no credit.

At most, Nebraska has played a road game at an (original-ish) SEC school 2.5 times in its entire football history. If you’re a hypothetical Husker fan with the impossible-to-dream-of freedom to have attended every Nebraska road game for the past 50 seasons, you have the campus stadiums of Southern Miss and Wake Forest checked off but not those of Georgia, Florida or Alabama. Not even Vanderbilt, much less Tennessee.

And said hypothetical fan won’t be checking off Tennessee in the near future either after news last week that Nebraska nixed that series, a home-and-home (re-)scheduled for 2026–27. You’d think given Nebraska’s long and storied footballing tradition, that it intersected often with the South. Outside of bowl games, it simply hasn’t. It’s a strange hole in history given that the Midwest (broadly defined as the Big Ten) and the South (SEC) control the future of the sport and largely defined its past.

I’ve been married for 16 years, and this pair of Nebraska-Tennessee games is older than that. The series was announced in 2006, when I was still young enough to think, “cool, definitely going to that game in Knoxville because I’ve been doing whatever I want, when I want, and Nebraska never does this, so let’s check an iconic stadium off.” Originally scheduled for 2016­–17, the series got pushed a decade in 2013—Tennessee had a high-profile opportunity to play Virginia Tech at Bristol Motor Speedway in 2016—and now it’s off altogether after Nebraska agreed to pay $1 million to get out of the games.

The rationale per Nebraska AD Troy Dannen:

“We are making plans to embark on major renovations of Memorial Stadium that may impact our seating capacity for the 2027 season,” he said. “The best scenario for us is to have eight home games in 2027 to offset any potential revenue loss from a reduced capacity. The additional home games will also have a tremendous economic benefit on the Lincoln community.”

I get it, but I hate it. This explanation is a friend bailing on a trip scheduled years ago because he or she needs to save some money. You absolutely appreciate the stated need, and respect the responsibility, but you also feel guilty because you can’t shake the feeling this is an airtight explanation more than a reason. But what can you say? “Hey, friend, being responsible is important, but so are merriment and amusement, both mine and yours.” Doesn’t really work because they were smart enough to explain first.

Tennessee AD Danny White was mad enough about it to take to social media, tweeting he was “very disappointed” and telling Volquest “you really can’t pull an audible this late in the game.”

Fair enough. I’d expect Dannen to do the same if the roles were reversed, though I wonder if both ADs aren’t simply playing the parts they had in this instance. Dannen offers an understandable but unsatisfying explanation because he can, White plays the aggrieved because he can.

Instead of hosting Tennessee in 2026, Nebraska will play Bowling Green in Lincoln. The 2027 trip to Knoxville has been replaced with a home game against Miami (Ohio).² The Huskers have never faced either opponent and, as an annoying indie record store employee in the college football universe, I’ll get excited about those games in time.

But I’d been excited about Nebraska-Tennessee for almost 20 years. Over 1,394 games played, the Huskers have been the road team at an SEC stadium twice. On top of that, Tennessee is the Southern Nebraska. Or Nebraska is the Midwestern Tennessee. Both programs reached their pinnacle (to date) in the back-half of the 1990s, the Huskers winning their third national title in four years in 1997 (by beating Tennessee) and the Vols taking the trophy in 1998. The only power program that matters with a longer conference-title drought than Nebraska is Tennessee.³ While the Vols have been better more recently, reaching the College Football Playoff in 2024, both programs have been about as relevant nationally this century as the first PlayStation.⁴

That’s an intriguing narrative. Husker fans getting to visit Neyland Stadium—or Vol fans getting to visit Memorial Stadium—is just an extremely rare bonus in this whole thing.

But the bigger issue than a good game lost is that there’s virtually no incentive for a Nebraska or a Tennessee to play each other as the sport currently exists. How many teams made the first 12-team playoff based on strength of schedule? Zero, though Georgia might’ve if it hadn’t beaten Texas in the SEC title game.

How many teams missed the field based on their strength of schedule? Zero. Alabama (20th SOS per ESPN’s FPI) was left out in favor of SMU (41st). There is, right now, less upside for Nebraska to beat Tennessee (or vice versa) in 2026–27 than there is upside to remaining undefeated as long as possible. The unfortunate reality is it’s better to be thrown out of the party than to throw yourself out.

Maybe that will change in the near future. The irony of the Nebraska-Tennessee series cancellations is that it was announced days after the Big Ten and SEC commissioners had met in New Orleans to ostensibly discuss how they wanted the future of college football to go. The most powerful of the power conferences hold all the cards, so there’s no reason for the Huskers to play Tennessee (or vice versa) as things are structured. The gains from a win are lesser than the non-gains (though not necessarily losses) of beating Bowling Green or Miami.

This is a problem that the powers would do well to address. If we’re headed for an auto-bid future by conference—and all available evidence suggests we are because this is the messiest sport a person can possibly care about—I’d actually prefer the conferences decide it themselves. If the Big Ten and SEC are successful in guaranteeing four automatic bids in the Playoff starting in 2026, so be it. Let the conferences decide which teams they’re sending.

They could do this by either crafting and agreeing to a system everyone understood, or they could decide it from on high. No national committee necessary. The latter would be more in line with college football’s history but would eliminate so much complaining.

And the conference-decides approach might be the only thing that offers us interesting nonconference games in the near future. With an independent committee, the strength-of-schedule debate is eternal. Without one, there’s no penalty for scheduling the most intriguing, revenue-producing games possible.

If Nebraska can schedule road games at Tennessee, Georgia and Florida in nonconference play in 2027 and not worry about what such a schedule would do to its playoff chances, who doesn’t come out ahead in that scenario? Nebraska, should it be in playoff contention in 2027, comes out ahead for having played tough games prior to the ones that decided playoff placement. Hypothetical fan who goes to every road game gets to visit three iconic stadiums, but even the fan saving to go to one game gets a meaningful destination with what works in their schedule.

The city of Lincoln would lose out on revenue if NU played an all-road nonconference schedule, but that’s why it would never happen. Some accepted truths are in fact truths, so you stagger the road games—maybe at Tennessee, Florida at home and at Georgia with the opposite the following year. Whatever.

Point is, Nebraska won’t be hosting or visiting Tennessee in the next two seasons because this is the everything-in-flux way we’ve gotten to this point. It doesn’t have to be the future.

1. And Arkansas, which Nebraska has only played once though it seems like those programs should’ve played a bunch of times.

2. Nebraska also announced a home game against Northern Illinois for 2027, so your nonconference schedule that year is Northern Illinois, Miami (Ohio) and Northern Iowa. It’s unclear if Nebraska can win the MAC by going 3-0 in those games, but that’s a MAC schedule.

3. UT won its last SEC title in 1998, NU its last conference title of any kind, though it was the Big 12, in 1999.

4. PlayStation 2 was released in spring of 2000, and, as a Nintendo guy to that point, I remember this vividly.