They could call it the Skyline Bowl or the Lakefront Classic: Northwestern versus Illinois in an annual Soldier Field shootout between the state’s Big 10 teams.
Both teams are playing in Soldier Field this week.
Why don’t they play each other there?
It’s a brilliant idea. But Northwestern will go to the Rose Bowl before it happens.
“In the near future, I don’t see us moving one of our games with them to Soldier Field,” said Northwestern Athletic Director Rick Taylor, citing a desire to attract a stable fan base to Dyche Stadium.
“But we wouldn’t mind if they’d do it to accommodate our fans.”
Don’t look for that to happen. Illinois AD Ron Guenther moved the Fighting Illini’s Thursday night opener in Soldier Field, but he knows Champaign-Urbana businesses would scream if he tried to shift a game against a traditional rival to the city.
The Fighting Illini likely would view the game as a road trip, even though they claim 120,000 alumni in the Chicago area, or roughly three times the number who graduated from Northwestern.
But moving the game to Chicago could not help but juice up a rivalry that hasn’t been a big draw on either campus recently.
The games in Champaign the last two years have attracted crowds of only 49,940 and 52,332 in 70,000-seat Memorial Stadium.
And only 26,542 turned out in the rain for the 1991 contest in Evanston.