Daily briefing: On Illinois-Nebraska, school records and free tickets for LSU-UCLA

Ivan Maisel’s “Daily Briefing” for On3:

Extra attention for Illinois-Nebraska

It’s been a very long time since Nebraska and Illinois have earned the kind of attention they will get Saturday. For all their mediocrity in recent years, the Huskers and the Illini are two of the more intriguing Big Ten stories this season. Nebraska, which fired Bo Pelini in 2014 for being unable to climb above 9-4 but has reached 9-4 only once since, needs to show some life in the fourth year under homegrown hero Scott Frost. At Illinois, Bret Bielema will begin to show whether his record at Wisconsin (68-24) or Arkansas (29-34) is the truest measure of his coaching ability. I’m guessing Wisconsin.

Unthreatened records

Here’s the beauty of the no-redshirt transfer: Quarterback Charlie Brewer, who won the starting job at Utah after spending four seasons at Baylor, arrived in Salt Lake with 9,700 career passing yards, more than 700 yards more than the Utes’ school record (set by Scott Mitchell in the late 1980s). You have to wonder if the wave of quarterback transfers is going to set in stone a lot of school passing records around the nation. So many quarterbacks who have the opportunity to hop the fence are doing so.

Nice deal for UCLA students

There aren’t many schools that still use the quarter system, when classes start not in August but rather in mid- to late September. Northwestern, Washington, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford and UCLA come to mind. The plus is that when players report to practice the first week of August, they have the campus to themselves for six or seven weeks. Focus remains solely on football. The minus is that when the season starts, the students aren’t around for games. Attempting to lure students to the LSU game at the Rose Bowl on September 4, UCLA announced they can attend for free. Maybe that will work: About three-quarters of the student body is from California.