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Big Ten Football Championship I: Will the roof be open?
Look! Up in the sky…it’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s a…ummmm…a roof? Rain or shine, sleet or snow, the roof of Lucas Oil Stadium should remain open for the inaugural Big Ten Football Championship.
Full disclosure: we’re from the Northeast. Like folks in the Midwest, our concept of Big Ten football and its biggest games has nothing to do with the cozy confines of a closed stadium and only 63,000 seats. Understanding that the Conference has stated it will investigate other venues for the game going forward, the decision to hold the inaugural championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium is a disappointment.
The Big Ten Football Championship deserves a setting that resonates with the time-honored traditions of the half-million football fans who fill the open-air stadiums throughout the Midwest every autumn Saturday. Leave the cushy indoors for the pampered pros. Big Ten football is about brute strength and quarter-horse speed sticking Mother Nature in the breadbasket facemask first. There should be a slate gray sky, shrinking mercury and snow flurries the size of cotton balls tickling 100,000+ noses. Big Ten championship football should be about armies of fans wearing hoods and parkas bearing their teams’ colors - jammed shoulder-to-shoulder - preferably on bench seating. But that won’t be the case for Championship Game I. The stadium that is home to the flashiest professional passing game on the planet has little to do with Big Ten Football tradition. So let’s hope the Conference does the right thing and keeps the roof open…and then moves the game outdoors, permanently, to a big-ass stadium where it belongs. In fact, admit Rutgers into the conference and some day the Big Ten will have a reason to have its championship game at the new, open-air Meadowlands Stadium, within sight of the New York City skyline. Rutgers may never play in the game, but they might be able to convince Tony Soprano to show up and sign autographs.