Around the Empire

Hello and welcome to the inaugural edition of Around the Empire, your weekly roundup the best Big Ten sports coverage, Midwestern culture, and brilliant wit from your favorite writers at Off Tackle Empire.

This week's edition might be a bit like your first attempt at a pancake on a Saturday morning: slightly lumpy, maybe mishapen, probably a bit burnt. But if you stick around, there will be better pancakes in the weeks ahead.

2024 is a massive college sports year. We've got the Big Ten Tourney and March Madness rapidly approaching, the radical reshaping of the conference map with the fall football season, plus a summer with plenty of B1G athletes heading to the Paris Olympics. We'll be here to cover it all and we hope you will be too.

Thanks for signing up, reading along, and sharing this email with your friends. The next batch of pancakes will be golden-brown.

This week's photo comes courtesy of my iPhone, featuring a rainy trip to historic SECU Stadium in College Park in October 2022. Not pictured: Maryland fans.

If you'd like for us to feature your picture of a memorable stadium trip, an epic tailgate, a dog wearing a school bandana, or any other piece of Big Ten or Midwestern culture, email your submissions to me here or message me on the cesspool formerly known as Twitter here.

🍺 The Six Pack

This week, Off Tackle Empire continued our retrospectives on the football season that was, broke down the myriad ways that the new Big Ten Tourney structure could be fixed, checked in on the B1G wrasslin' scene, and lamented the hire of Iowa's new OC.

Purdue Boilermakers: Football 2023 Season Autopsy

Northwestern Wildcats Football: 2023 Postmortem

The Nation’s Premier Wrestling Conference:

Week Three

Iowa Finally Replaces

Brian Ferentz

The new Big Ten Tournament format is a mistake.

Here’s how we’d fix it.

Your Ohio State Buckeyes Post-Mortem

🌎 Beyond the Empire

Well, it hasn't exactly been a great few weeks in the traditional sports media landscape, but our friends across the Big Ten blogosphere are doing fantastic work keeping up with all of the goings-on in the numerically-challenged conference of ours. If you see any great stories you want to feature here, send them in each week!

🦡 Scary Alvarez imagines how Twitter would have covered UW news of the past at Bucky's 5th Quarter

🚂 Over at Hammer and Rails, PURB87 breaks down the horrendous road/home split in the B1G this season

🦁 OTE and Black Shoe Diaries writer Misdreavous79 celebrates the Nits winning against Rutgers at Jersey Mike's Belarusian prison on the Piscataway

🖤 Jerry Scherwin at Black Heart Gold Pants rages about Iowa's lack-Lester OC hiring

🐈 Jake Mozarsky at Inside NU finds a silver lining in the epic OT loss to Purdue on Wednesday night

🔴 L.C. Norton profiles hometown kid and Hoosiers hero following his huge game in the Indiana-Iowa match this week

🌽 Oh nothing, just an epic comeback for Nebrasketball last night! Nate McHugh at Corn Nation recaps the historic win over the Badgers.

📅 Upcoming Big Ten Schedule

February 2
Ohio State at Iowa: 6:00 PM CT, FS1

February 3

Penn State at Indiana: 11:00 AM CT, FS1

Northwestern at Minnesota: 1:00 PM CT, BTN

Rutgers at Michigan: 3:00 PM CT, BTN

Maryland at Michigan State: 4:30 PM CT, Fox

February 4

Nebraska at #14 Illinois: 5:30 PM CT, BTN

#2 Purdue at #6 Wisconsin: 1:00 PM CT, CBS

February 6

Rutgers at Maryland: 5:30 PM CT, BTN

February 7

#6 Wisconsin at Michigan: 6:00 PM CT, BTN

Nebraska at Northwestern: 8:00 PM CT, BTN

🥃 Last Call

Good night, sweet prince.

That's it for this week. Thanks to the three of you that made it this far. Now go join in the conversation with the rest of our community of beloved miscreants, rapscallions, and n'ere-do-wells at Off Tackle Empire. If you can, please send this newsletter to a friend! Or an enemy, we don't much care.

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Have a good week, all. It's almost Saturday.

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