For the second straight weekend, the Big Ten was made news without playing.

Last week, the conference was in the process of putting together a restart plan for football.

On Saturday, the Big Ten released its schedule 3.0, doing it a little bit at a time on Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff pregame show. The Big Ten also took up much of the conversation on ESPN’s “College GameDay,” which had interviews with Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields and Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren.

Nice flex and a heady play as the Big Ten is about to drop off the radar until its season starts the weekend of Oct. 24.

The Southeastern Conference kicks off next week and the ACC and Big 12 get cranked up, too.

Most notable on the Big Ten’s schedule was how Nebraska will start the season: at Ohio State and home for Wisconsin. Oof!

No Big Ten school made as much of a public fuss over the conference’s initial decision to postpone the season as Nebraska. The brutal opening schedule against the conference’s two division winners from last season might have been a coincidence but it did not go unnoticed.

The Huskers also play Penn State in the fourth game of the season, giving Nebraska easily the toughest cross-division games of any team in the West Division.

Nebraska had both Ohio State and Penn State on its original nine-game pre-pandemic conference schedule, along with Rutgers. The Big Ten used those schedules to set these schedules, dropping one of the three crossover games for each team.

Athletic director Bill Moos told the Omaha-World Herald that he pushed to rework schedules more thoroughly to provide competitive balance. He also suggested having only division games count toward the division race.

He said he lost every argument.

“For obvious reasons, I was hoping we could dissemble the schedule because of unique circumstances and rebuild it to be fair for each school in the conference,” Moos told the newspaper Saturday. “I was outspoken on that, to the point where they heard it from me every day. The rationale was there, I didn’t think we needed to follow it. Nebraska is playing five AP preseason Top 25 teams. Ohio State’s playing two.”

Nebraska has lost five straight against Ohio State, which has became a yearly rivalry since the Big Ten went to an East-West division structure. The Big Ten was hoping to create an annual showdown between two tradition-rich programs but has not held up its end of the deal. Average score: Ohio State 53, Nebraska 19.

The Buckeyes definitely caught a break with the new schedule. The crossover game that came off Ohio State’s slate was Iowa, leaving the Buckeyes with Nebraska and Illinois.

When the SEC redid its schedule to make it 10 conference games, the league ended up feeding its weaker teams to its powerhouses. Missouri got added to LSU and Alabama’s schedules. Arkansas added games against Florida and Georgia.

Regardless of whether it was intentional, conferences do not gain anything come College Football Playoff selection time by making life tougher on their best teams. The Pac-12 has learned that the hard way over the playoff era.