The logo the Big Ten came up with in 1992 hid an "11" in the negative space around the T in "Ten" after Penn State was added as the 11th team. This is the 25th anniversary of PSU's first football season in the league.

David Jones/PennLive

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It’s edging up on that time of year to plan football trips for this fall. Because the Big Ten has gone to a 9-game conference schedule (and there’s even noise about consideration of 10), more of those road trips for Penn State fans necessarily will be made to conference venues. You can whine and moan about that if you like, but this is the hand we’ve been dealt and the deck we’ve been playing with for a quarter-century now.

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Yep, this season will mark the 25th anniversary of Penn State's first in the league back in 1993. Not that the gears weren't being engaged for the move way before that. I still remember how shocked we all were on Dec. 15, 1989 when, just four months into taking this job, I came to the office and learned that PSU had been invited into the league of Midwestern schools I'd grown up watching. We weren't the only ones shocked. The other Big Ten coaches and athletic directors had not even been consulted.

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In December 1994, the late Bo Schembechler told me, hilariously, of his first notification on that day five years before. It came on a conference call with rookie commissioner Jim Delany that had been hastily convened that afternoon with the other 10 league ADs. As Schembechler told it, Delany intoned, "Gentlemen, Penn State has been invited to the Big Ten." Then, there was dead silence on the line for a few seconds before he broke it with the response, “Are you sh---ing me?” Bo had come around to the idea by the time of our phone conversation and two games with PSU. He just wished he’d been asked his opinion ahead of time.

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But really, the only reason the plan came off is that PSU’s Joe Paterno and Illinois president Stan Ikenberry, a former PSU vice president and chair of the conference presidents at the time, kept it secret and put it on a fast track without debate except among the league presidents themselves. It turned out that was a perilous idea, one that Ikenberry later admitted to me was barely executed. The proposal passed by a 7-3 vote in June 1990 in Iowa City after the coaches and ADs rebelled and demanded a 6-month debate period.

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Had a single additional vote fallen into the "nay" category, Penn State's invitation would have been rescinded. Longtime ACC commissioner Gene Corrigan told me a few years ago, after his retirement, that it's extremely likely his league then would have snapped up PSU and we'd have been traveling to places like Atlanta and Chapel Hill and Tallahassee and Clemson, S.C. all these 25 years. Actually, probably a year or two longer because the ACC surely would not have dragged its feet so long and gotten PSU into conference play by 1992 at the latest.

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Anyway, we’ve not been flying (or driving) south, we’ve been flying west. Nebraska, Maryland and Rutgers have since been added on and the Big Ten is a lot farther from the number in its name. That’s a lot of road trips to Big Ten campus locales during my 27 years on this beat – 101, to be exact. That doesn’t count neutral-site games at the Meadowlands (Rutgers), Indianapolis and Washington (Indiana) and Baltimore (Maryland). It also doesn’t count basketball.

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During that time, I have followed Penn State football to every campus in the league on at least 8 occasions (excepting the new members). Photographer Joe Hermitt has joined me on many of those since he joined the beat in 2000. As has beat writer Bob Flounders since 2002. The late Ronnie Christ preceded him. Greg Pickel is just getting started but has made most of the trips by now. We all talk about where we’re going every year and have our opinions on our favorite (and least so) venues in the Big Ten. There are running jokes and stories for every place we’ve been.

So, here they are: the towns, campuses, stadiums and game-day atmospheres of all the Big Ten locales, ranked #14 to #1. I’ve tried not to be too harsh. Everyone has to live somewhere. Anyway, any spot is more about its people than its buildings and food. Although, David Byrne wrote songs about buildings and food, so they do count for something.

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Ross-Ade Stadium in the year 2525. If man is still alive, if woman can survive.

Purdue Univ.

14. Purdue

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My mother tried to teach me if you can’t say anything good about something or someone, it’s better just to switch topics. But the topic is already set here so I don’t know what to do. Look, I loved Joe Tiller and Gene Keady and as long as they can keep a hold of Jeff Brohm, which I figure is this season, Purdue football will play above its pay grade. But we’re talking about West Lafayette here.

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About 15 years ago, I finally found a really good restaurant in this truck stop of a town in northwest Indiana. It was like stumbling upon an oasis in Yemen. The next time we went back, the place was gone. One time a couple of friends asked where they could get some good Italian and the hotel clerk pointed across the street to the Olive Garden.

As for Ross-Ade Stadium, it's the middle-aged guy who quits caring and just sort of lets himself go. I can’t imagine it looks a hell of a lot different now than when Bob Griese played there. Big plans are on the agenda for a super-spectacular makeover, but right now they’re just renderings.

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Purdue is a really good school known for its engineering. Neil Armstrong was a graduate. And I suspect it will maintain its reputation in the foreseeable future because there is absolutely nothing here to distract even the most casual student.

For years, we stayed at a creaky Holiday Inn right on Interstate 65. I mean, you can hear the traffic roaring by. Which only reminds you they’re all going someplace else and you’re not.

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Computer rendering of what a clear day might look like at Spartan Stadium.

13. Michigan State

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I was talking to Hermitt recently trying to recall if we’d ever been to a game at Michigan State where the weather was something approximating half-decent. Eleven trips into East Lansing and I can’t recall seeing the sun except once when it was like 19 degrees. That’s how it is in November and actually most of the other months. Spartan Stadium is generic. At least it now has grass instead of plastic. When I was a kid, it was a green billiard table covered in what they called Tartan Turf.

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Some of my best friends in sports writing have covered Michigan State football and basketball. That means they have no choice but to live in or around central Michigan. A bunch of them are really good wordsmiths. Which confirms a theory I have: Suffering and pain breeds great writing.

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The Doug Graber-Joe Paterno midfield meeting after the 59-34 decision in 1995 is one of the great moments in Penn State-Rutgers lore, yet it wasn't in Piscataway.

12. Rutgers

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This could be a Penn State geographic rival if it ever got its act together but that’s a Jupiter-sized “if”. For the time being, Rutgers is a pain in the butt to get in and out of with a substandard parking situation. The fan base is overpopulated with knuckleheads. And it seems to be no better than treading water on the field.

Considering some experiences of people I know when Rutgers football was actually nationally ranked under Greg Schiano, we oughta be careful what we wish for. I remember hearing about friends who went to the legendary Louisville game in November 2006 and they stood in interminable lines just to board buses that got them in and out of what is now called High Point Solutions Stadium. It was, as they say, a total s---show. Maybe we’re all better off with crowds of 30,000 or so.

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My lasting memories of @Rutgers games are still "neutral-site" trips to Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands. One was the Doug Graber-Joe Paterno confrontation at midfield after the Mike McQueary mop-up TD pass in 1995. Only time I ever heard Paterno swear (on the TV replay) which was pretty funny in that Brooklyn accent: "Aww, bools--t!" The other is a 1992 game where my wife and her buddy Denise who then lived in New York City bought cheap seats and witnessed some pure north Jersey. In the row in front of them, a heavily sprayed 40-something woman gestured with her lit Parliament toward the Nittany Lion mascot down on the field and remarked to her muscled-up hubby, "Look at da beah." To which he responded: "It's not a beah, it's a loyin. Nittany Loyins." To which she tossed her head aside, took a drag with her taloned index and middle fingers skyward and dismissed: "Whatevah."

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Larry Johnson running for a school-record 327 yards at Indiana in 2002.

AP photo

11. Indiana

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If Maryland football has been a stepchild to basketball, Indiana football has been a ward of the state. I know IU’s Memorial Stadium has undergone some renovation recently, so it’s not as forlorn as it was when we first started coming to Bloomington in 1994. It was then known throughout the league as the one place where fans of much more popular teams, shut out of tickets at their own stadiums, could be guaranteed of finding great seats and taking over the place.

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I actually have a sneaking affinity for this school just because so many wacky things have happened over the years. We (and the PSU team) used to stay at this kind of creepy lake “resort” out of a Stephen King novel. Flounders called it “The Shining Hotel” because it was a weathered old summer cottage complex that had always closed up for vacation season by the time we got there. It was about 20 miles outside of Bloomington and pitch black in the late fall. One of the writers couldn’t see where he was going as he returned from dinner and came very close to driving his rental car down an abandoned boat launch into the lake.

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Look, Bloomington is fine. It’s actually sort of a pretty campus full of limestone buildings that gleam on a nice day. It just seems like we’ve missed most of those.

What I’ll always remember is Larry Johnson running for 327 yards, then being removed with close to a full quarter to go in 2002. He could’ve had 500. And he did this on turf so neglected a lot of it had turned to dirt. The grounds crew had spray-painted it green to resemble grass.

Another lasting memory was rising in the press box elevator and recognizing John Mellencamp from behind by his height and pungent odor of Lucky Strikes.

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Then, there was Hermitt getting locked inside the stadium upon sending his photos in 2013. After tossing his equipment to The York Daily Record's Frank Bodani, Joe had to stack a couple of 55-gallon drums he found next to a locked gate and vault over to escape. Hermitt wanted IU to be 14th but I think the place builds character.

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If Maryland ever builds a consistent winner, evidence indicates the fans will come out.

Univ. of Maryland

10. Maryland

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I actually have a greater affinity for the University of Maryland than this ranking might indicate. In the old days of basketball at Cole Field House, I was down there a lot watching Gary Williams’ teams. And my uncle was an adjunct professor there in retirement.

But football has always been a stepchild at the place. I was doing a high school game at Scotland the day of Penn State’s wild 13-13 tie at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium in 1989, so I missed that. And two of the next three PSU games at the Terps parks were also in Baltimore – 1991 at Memorial Stadium again (47-7, PSU) and 2015 at the Ravens’ M&T Bank Stadium (31-30, PSU).

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Until last year’s 66-3 demolition, then, the only football game I ever saw in College Park was the 70-7 dismemberment in 1993 at what they then called Byrd Stadium. So, I don’t have a lot of thrilling game-day experience to draw upon in College Park. Tradition builds fan devotion which is dependent upon winning and there just hasn’t been much of that at Maryland. Even during the Jerry Claiborne era and farther back when the schools played all but three years from 1960 to 1993, State has dominated.

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The beauty, culture and a world of great international food of Washington is right next door, so there's that. And the stadium venue is nice enough. They've given the old place (built in 1950) a pleasing renovation. They are trying here. This is the one real potential rival Penn State has geographically in the B1G and if the Terps' recent Top 25 recruiting classes ever start kicking into results, maybe this will generate into what all the Big Ten's Midwestern schools have – a drivable rivalry game. Right now, the football part is just sort of a boring field trip.

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Misappropriated Bo Schembechler slogan from 1969 does not really indicate how long the present-day stay must be.

9. Michigan

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Look, my wife grew up and was raised in this state. I have in-laws living here now. My brother-in-law made a good living coaching at this school for 23 years. One of my nephews played here. I love them. They’ve lived here 26 years. I love their house. I’m glad they’re happy here.

But, it’s like this: I don’t like Michigan. The weather sucks. None of the residents can pronounce words correctly. They use their palms as maps. You get there on Friday and by Saturday afternoon you’re making absolutely positive you’ve checked in for your flight 24 hours in advance.

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The campus is fine. Better than fine if you’re into an overabundance of button-down Oxford cloth and overpriced craft beer. Contrasting with their counterpart rival Ohio State fans who aren’t self-aware enough to attempt hiding their gauche manner, Michigan fans are unduly tweedy and laboriously collegiate. They all seem to think U-of-M is right on the verge of replacing Dartmouth to take its rightful place among the Ivies. They’re just all tiresome.

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The stadium? Yeah, the Big House. It’s the most amazing giant featureless bowl in the world. It’s not loud. The geriatrics sit on their hands until something wakes them. Honestly, it reminds me a lot of Beaver Stadium before Guido D’Elia arrived and shook the place up. (More on him later.) Let’s just call it an irrational creation of Keith Jackson and move on.

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Illinois' old brick Memorial Stadium is ancient but has character.

8. Illinois

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I’m not going to pretend Champaign-Urbana is exactly scenic. It’s not. In fact, there’s an abundance of old grain silos and a power station with a giant smokestack smack in the middle of town. But the campus is pretty with a nice big quad. And this is the place where my favorite descriptive writer Roger Ebert learned his craft.

I’ve been here nine times, the first for the memorable 1994 tussle that sent Penn State to its first Big Ten Rose Bowl. Getting in and out by air is not always easy. We drive in from Chicago now. We used to fly into Champaign until 2005 when the single connecting flight out on Sunday morning was canceled and we ended up there until Monday. I spent over an hour once at that airport waiting for a taxi. In the days before Uber, I watched the last cab wander off while I was fetching luggage, then called and called to no avail.

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But we've had some pretty fun times at the townie bars around here including one where we encouraged a local (imagine the drunk Stanley picks up at the bowling alley in The Deer Hunter) who seemed bent on picking up one of our party. There are lots of great campus and neighborhood joints in C-U.

As for 95-year-old Memorial Stadium, if the pathetic UI athletic department ever gets its act together, the old hulk is big enough (60,000) to handle a perpetually hopeful fan base. And it’s had a facelift recently that’s scrubbed it up nicely.

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An ESPN story by Tom Rinaldi about the new tradition of the "Kinnick Wave."

7. Iowa

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When you travel a lot, a remarkable number of American metro areas feel the same anymore. Everyplace seems like Indianapolis, an endless expanse of Jiffy Lubes and Long John Silvers. That's why we all crave cities and states that feel unique. Iowa is one of those places. Not that Cedar Rapids and Iowa City don't have their share of franchise hell like every other mid-size city and campus town. But something about Iowa lets you smell the dust on its overalls. These are rural people at heart and they have no major-league pro sports. The Hawkeyes are their team.

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That alone makes me look forward to a trip to Kinnick Stadium. You know exactly where you are. Years ago, we used to stay at this strange hotel with a karaoke bar called Zaza's. The owner had it lined with autographed glossies of every – and I mean every – celebrity who'd ever set foot in the joint. Think Carol Wayne, Karl Malden, James Franciscus, Kaye Ballard, along those lines.

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I’ve written before about how Kinnick is nestled sort of next to a residential neighborhood. Just in the last couple of years, the massive Stead Family Children’s Hospital has risen above it, the one from which pediatric patients watch the game and wave to fans at the first-quarter break.

But it’s also pretty clear that the fans drive from hundreds of miles around to come to games. And, while they’ve been tough in spurts on Kirk Ferentz during his league-long 19 years as head coach, when this crowd senses an upset, trust me, they are a force of nature. They are all in behind the Hawkeyes.

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I saw it when Iowa handed B1G champion Penn State its only regular-season loss in 2008. We could feel it through the bar TV at our Indianapolis hotel two years ago when #2-ranked Michigan strutted into Kinnick as 21-point favorites and staggered out with a 14-13 loss.

I’ve been to Iowa City nine times, the first being the Dick Vermeil “Penn State’s passing game sucks” 31-0 PSU win in 1993 when John Sacca was benched never to return. No matter how mundane the game, something strange and unexpected always seems to happen.

We’ve learned not to challenge the traffic entering Kinnick and always heed Hermitt’s persistent advice to arrive super-early: “Yeah, I really kinda wanna get over there.” And I once got a $122 speeding ticket for coasting down a campus hill leaving town at 31 in a 25 zone. So, this is as high as you get, Iowa.

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Minnesota football isn't any better than it's ever been, but TCF Bank Stadium has exponentially upgraded game days in Minneapolis.

6. Minnesota

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Minneapolis is one of the most underrated cities in the country. It’s clean and beautiful downtown with all sorts of new or newish developments. I can’t think of a prettier city in America at dusk with all the lights lining the streets. It’s too bad we don’t get a crack at it more often.

I can also now rank Minnesota football here as a desirable destination because they built the new TCF Bank Stadium in 2009, replacing the operating vacuum bag known as the Metrodome. A game-day experience there was like spending four hours at a videogame arcade. They used to run mics into giant speakers and pumped amplified ambient noise out of them to make the crowd sound noisier.

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Minnesota football remains the only program in the league (not counting new arrivals Maryland and Rutgers) not to have been to a Rose Bowl since the Kennedy administration. The athletic department has been a revolving door of charlatans and scandal dating back half a century. That said, I’ve always found the fans to be hopeful and pretty supportive of the Gophers.

Random story: Our first trip into the new stadium in 2013, we made a wrong turn and ended up way on the wrong side of the stadium complex with no easy way to get around traffic barricades. We stopped to ask a cluster of four guys tailgating in some lonely parking lot for directions. I wish I could communicate in print the vowel sound a couple of these guys made in response, but it was straight out of Fargo, like the boy-are-you-in-trouble noise your granddad made when he found out you got caught raiding your dad's liquor cabinet: "Oh, hoa, hoa, hoa, hoooa."

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Cobheads get involved at a Nebraska game back in the Big 12 days.

5. Nebraska

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I’m a sucker for simple Plains courtesy and that’s why I always look forward to a trip to Omaha and Lincoln. It reminds me of Birmingham/Tuscaloosa in that the quotient of knuckleheads per square mile is lower than what you’d expect for the unbridled devotion and magnitude of the fan base. They like to have fun, they’re proud of what they’ve built and they love having you in to show you. The hospitality is part of the product. They can’t even heckle correctly. Hermitt remembers one of the too-polite patrons attempting to rankle Paterno before the 2003 game with: “Hey, Joe, the Lion sleeps tonight.” Good one!

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I’ve only been to Nebraska twice (2003, 2012) but both times I walked through the tailgate fields and had great talks with local fans I neither sought out nor expected. To me, the fact that the UNL program has been stumbling around pretty much throughout the last 15 years proves that these folks do not dissuade easily. They still fill Memorial Stadium with red for every game. I guess there’s something to the fact that, along with Iowa, these are the only two states with no major-league sports in the Big Ten footprint. They’re all in on the Huskers and there’s a certain charm in that.

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A Beaver Stadium Whiteout crowd in 2015.

PennLive/Joe Hermitt

4. Penn State

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As purely a game locale only, I don’t think you can beat PSU and its surroundings these days. Starting 13 years ago with the landmark 2005 season, Beaver Stadium became a real challenge for invading forces, the sort of trip they have to plan for. It’s hard to remember now, but before that, it really was pretty much a country-club crowd, a lot like Michigan. Lots of people, but not very loud. That ended when the Michael Robinson/Tamba Hali/Paul Posluszny team signaled PSU’s on-field renaissance and Guido D’Elia jacked up the juice with a little selective audio augmentation. It’s been one of the three toughest places in the league to play ever since.

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And it’s peerless as a tailgate venue. The mountains, the bucolic setting. On a nice fall day, it’s pretty much tailgate nirvana. The stadium itself is sort of nondescript, lacking in character. There’s not a lot to do in the town until the game starts. And it’s a pain in the ass to get there. In that way, it’s like all the other rural venues in the league. But once you’re there and it’s game day, none of that matters. All in all, on a good weather day, I think it’s the prettiest place to watch a game in the league and right there with venues like Washington and Brigham Young nationally. (Not counting UCLA here; it’s not Pasadena, but nothing is, and that’s not a campus stadium anyway.)

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Architecturally, 96-year-old Ohio Stadium has no peer in the Big Ten.

3. Ohio State

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The Columbus I knew when we moved away three decades ago was only just beginning to turn into the cosmopolitan city it’s become since, really the coolest Midwestern city outside of Chicago. Terrific restaurant town, lots of distinct neighborhoods and districts, full of young adults and the youthful vibrancy that goes with the populace. You can make a great 3-day weekend out of this town.

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A sizable section of the fan base is a little zealous and obnoxious, so there’s that. You can run into trouble with hillbilly drunks who really have nothing to do with the school but have latched on to the football program as their religion. Get a little booze in them and there’s no reasoning. You know the type; they surround every major program, just a few more here.

But man, there is no 4-hour game experience in the league that compares to the Shoe. The architecture of 96-year-old Ohio Stadium beats every other in the league by a lot. The band and its entrance are by far the most dramatic. And they tend to have a pretty competitive team.

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This has nothing to do with anything except the anniversary of PSU's league innaugural, but it's funny: Twenty-five years ago this October on the John Galbraith farm west of Columbus, Ohio State held a reception inviting Penn State coaches and media to dinner at the Galbraiths' spectacular lodge-like banquet room decorated with an ostentatious display of mounted big-game heads that would've made Teddy Roosevelt blush. During a standing toast, Columbus Dispatch OSU beat writer Tim May, nudged me with a "Jonesy, psst," then motioned up to the display of taxidermy and whispered: "Roadkill."

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Northwestern opened its new Ryan Fieldhouse lakefront training facility on April 6 and it is the single most spectacular athletic complex in the Big Ten.

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2. Northwestern

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This really isn’t about the game-day atmosphere, per se. Let’s face it, Northwestern is a private school with Ivy League-level fans; it’s not going to approximate the volume in any way of the big football factories – in noise, intensity, fervor or numbers. But here’s the thing, and one of my partners, Bob Flounders said it perfectly: If you were going to suggest a Big Ten college football weekend to somebody, this is one of the first places you’d list. We always love seeing Northwestern on the schedule.

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First of all, Ryan Field is easy to get in and out of simply because it only holds 47,000 and almost never is filled. A normal crowd is closer to 35,000. You can park all up and down Central Street and the walk to the stadium is leafy and residential. Plus, once you get to the stadium, our favorite on-site junk-food joint in the Big Ten is right there – Mustard’s Last Stand. Awesome sausage sandwiches and plenty else.

If you have some extra time, a trip down to the Ryan Fieldhouse athletic training facility on Lake Michigan might be in order just to gape at exactly what Northwestern has erected. It blows away every other such facility in not only the conference but probably the entire country.

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And finally, you're in Chicago but not in Chicago. You're in the northern lake suburb of Evanston. Between there and Downtown is a metric ton of fun – Wrigleyville, Clark Street, Lincoln Park, Old Town. You could live here your whole life and not visit all the great bars and eat all the great food, especially all the Polish and Czech and Slavic variations. If you can't have a good time in Chicago, you're really just not trying.

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The Camp Randall fans Jump Around at the third quarter break of the 2016 Ohio State game.

1. Wisconsin

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A lot of this has to do with the fact that, in general, I love Wisconsin fans the most of any in the Big Ten. They’ve always been genuine and passionate and fun-loving even when their teams sucked which seems like a long time ago now. It wasn’t really. Badger football turned around in the early ‘90s with the leadership of AD Pat Richter, president Donna Shalala and head coach Barry Alvarez and it’s never looked back.

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The campus is situated smack between two lakes so the weather isn't always pleasant when the north wind blows. But wintry conditions only seem to make ancient Camp Randall Stadium more like a fortress and the fans more like a horde of baying zealots – which they are, in a good way. And when the weather is good in early fall? Wow. To me, it's just the perfect Midwestern campus venue. Good bars, good people, good team, good times.

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I gotta say, I'm not nuts about Camp Randall when all the happy drunks – which is everyone in the house – start doing Jump Around at the third-quarter break. The old hanging lamps in the press box start swinging back and forth like you see in Japanese earthquake footage. How does anyone know a 101-year-old stadium is built to withstand performance art by 80,000 people? Has anybody done tests? But if I'm gonna die a college football death, I guess why not here?

EMAIL/TWITTER DAVID JONES: djones@pennlive.com

Follow @djoneshoop

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