Big Ten football is coming to Friday nights in 2017 and beyond.The conferences new TV contract, which begins next season, will include a package of six Friday night games. The news was first reported by the Chicago Tribune?and later announced by the Big Ten.The Friday night games will be limited to September and October and wont include every team. Schools with huge stadiums, such as?Penn State and Ohio State, wont be asked to host them. And Michigan has declined to participate in Friday night games at home or on the road, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany told the Tribune.The Big Ten plans to announce the 2017 Friday night schedule within the next four to seven days.Several assistant coaches in the Big Ten told ESPN that they thought Friday night games would negatively affect recruiting. Friday nights are traditionally high school football nights.Friday night games would put the Big Ten in a recruiting disadvantage, said one Big Ten assistant coach. No other conference has the game-day atmospheres of this league. Combined with two teams, or whoever is playing, would not have the opportunity of going to recruit on Friday nights, as well [as] to watch prospects play.As another assistant said, It kills us with recruiting. One of the best things about our place is the game-day environment. Those kids wont be able to experience that, because they will all have their games.And another assistant added, There is [no advantage]. Most, if not all, high school kids play on Friday nights, which means you would lose one game for recruiting.Both the Wisconsin Football Coaches Association and the Michigan High School Athletic Association expressed disappointment about the decision.?The Friday night games will continue through at least 2022, the Big Ten said.We had hoped that the Big Ten Conference would stay above this, MHSAA executive director John E. Jack Roberts said. We think this cheapens the Big Ten brand. Fans wont like this. Recruits wont like this. And high school football coaches wont like this.?Penn State released a statement on Wednesday making it clear that if Delany changes his mind about not asking the school to host a Friday night game, it would decline the request.?Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith told ESPN that the school would be able to host a Friday night game only during its autumn break, which typically occurs the second week of October.We dont have classes on campus that Thursday or Friday, so operationally, it works because were not dealing with parking issues or classes or any of those conflicts that a game would get in the way of.Ohio State would be open to playing Friday night road games in September.Michigan State said Wednesday it would agree to host a Friday night game -- but only on Labor Day weekend. The Spartans previously have hosted Friday night games on that holiday weekend; but according to the MHSAA, that didnt conflict with the high school schedule in Michigan, because most of the states prep games are played that week on Thursday.?Wisconsin also said?it is open to hosting games at Camp Randall on the Friday night of Labor Day weekend in selected years, but it has not committed to hosting them at any other time.Badgers athletic director Barry Alvarez said he had great respect for the tradition and importance of Friday night high school football games in the state of Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest. But he also said it was the right time to explore additional opportunities for exposure on Friday nights on a limited basis.Indiana AD Fred Glass told the Indianapolis Star that the Hoosiers have agreed to play a conference opponent on Friday night once every three years.Glass told the Star that he and Purdue counterpart Mike Bobinski spoke with the head of the states high school athletic association before agreeing to play occasional Friday night games. The Boilermakers also agreed to play on Friday nights. Illinois also says its on board with hosting Friday night games.Minnesota athletic director Mark Coyle wrote in an email to The Associated Press, We will play the schedule assigned to us by the Big Ten.Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel confirmed in a statement that the Wolverines dont plan to play at all on Fridays. Manuel said his chief concern was more for fans that would have to make long trips to the games earlier in the week.With our large fanbase, Michigan fans and alumni travel significant distances to attend games, making Saturdays our preferred day for all football games, he said.The Friday night slate will include three nonconference games and three conference contests. Until now, the league has resisted playing on weeknights, with the exception of the opening week of the season. The Big Ten has no plans to play on Thursday nights, senior associate commissioner Mark Rudner told the Big Ten Network.ESPNs?Tom VanHaaren, Adam Rittenberg, Dan Murphy and Jesse Temple contributed to this report. Information from The Associated Press also was used. Dale Murphy Jersey . 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Thats a sure sign that a team is in a slump and is searching for answers. "Its embarrassing to be at home and play the way we did," said defenceman Josh Gorges. PARIS -- After a career of athletic success, Kim Gevaert regretted that her kids werent born when she was in her prime and didnt see the sprinter make history at the Beijing Olympics. A consolation was that the children were on hand eight years later, when their mothers history was finally put right.Gevaert and her teammates from Belgiums sprint relay squad in 2008 are among the first beneficiaries of what is quickly becoming the biggest rewriting of Olympic history. The story, for kids at least, is tricky to grasp, as Gevaert discovered when she tried explaining in September to her seven-, five- and three-year olds why a stern-looking man in a dark suit had just hung an Olympic gold medal around her neck, even though she retired years ago, in a packed Brussels stadium with an ecstatic crowd.But really, its simple: Dozens of medals that drug cheats won in Beijing, and again four years later in London, are finding their way to rightful owners, Gevaert included, thanks to an International Olympic Committee crackdown on dopers who escaped detection in 2008 and 2012 but are now being caught by advances in the science of drug testing.Taken out of storage and reanalyzed, urine samples from those games are now proving positive for anabolic steroids and other banned performance-enhancers that labs couldnt spot at the time. So far, the nearly 1,400 retests have caught 98 athletes. Disqualifications started as a drip, with the IOC first announcing in June 2015 that open-water swimmer Olga Beresnyeva of Ukraine was being stripped of her seventh place in London because retests found she used the banned blood-booster EPO.They have since swelled to a torrent. In the last four months, after reanalyzing their samples, the IOC has ordered 17 medal winners from Beijing -- which has now lost more medalists to doping than any other games -- and nine from London to hand back their golds, silvers and bronzes. More are expected to follow as the retesting continues and expands to samples from the 2014 Sochi Games, the IOCs medical director, Richard Budgett, told The Associated Press in a phone interview.Its both a wonderful story but a very sad story at the same time, Budgett said. Because those athletes who should have got medals have had to wait an incredibly long time.At least, in the end, justice has been done, he added. It will be good for the deterrence of future cheaters.Those caught include Yulia Chermoshanskaya, the anchor runner for Russia in womens sprint relay in Beijing. She and her teammates were stripped of gold after two anabolic steroids, stanozolol and turinabol, were found in Chermoshanskayas urine reanalyzed this year. Tests can now detect if athletes used the drugs weeks before competing. Previously, the detection window was mere days.That bumped the silver medalists -- Gevaert, Olivia Borlee, Hanna Marien and Elodie Ouedraogo -- to first place. The first Belgian women ever to medal on an Olympic track will never know how they would have felt had they, not the Russians, stood on top of the podium in Beijing and heard their anthem play. But they got, albeit belatedly, the next best thing: a rousing ceremony and standing ovation at a track meet in Brussels King Baudouin Stadium on Sept. 9. Gevaerts kids were in the 40,000-strong crowd and saw her and her teammates, all wearing golden tops, be driven around in an open-top vintage car and former IOC President Jacques Rogge hang the medals around their necks.They were able to be part of a very special moment in my career, Gevaert, who retired shortly after Beijing, said.The stadium was full, the crowd was very enthusiastic, she added. They made it a fabulous occasion. Even after eight years, it was a magical moment.The reallocation of medals isnt automatic. To make sure that theyre not handing medals from one dopper to another, the IOC is also retesting the samples of athletes who are next in line.dddddddddddd. Dina Sazanovets, for example, placed fourth in her 69-kilogram weightlifting category in London but wont get the bronze stripped from her Belarusian teammate Marina Shkermankova, because retests found steroids in both of their samples. The Belgian sprinters samples, on the other hand, were negative when retested, Pierre-Olivier Beckers-Vieujant, head of the Belgium Olympic Committee, said in a phone interview.Even if retests find nothing, the IOC is not obliged to reward those further down, if it feels they are too compromised to deserve a medal. The womens 1,500 meters in London looks particularly problematic. As fourth-place finisher, Tatyana Tomashova would theoretically be in line for bronze, after race winner Asli Cakir Alptekin forfeited gold for doping. But the Russian served a doping ban of two years and nine months before competing in London. For the moment, the IOC has not reallocated the medals and still lists Tomashova as fourth.American Shannon Rowbury, who placed sixth, wonders whether she might end up among the medals and struggles to reply when people ask where she finished.Its a really helpless feeling to just be sitting and waiting and, you know, hoping that justice will be served, Rowbury said. With London in particular, there are just so many question marks and so many `What ifs?Once the IOC determines who gets what, it has guidelines but no firm rules governing exactly how athletes should be awarded their reassigned medals. It leaves the choice of ceremony up to national Olympic committees, recommending that they invite dignitaries and the media and play the Olympic anthem.When Australian race walker Jared Tallent received his London gold, stripped from a Russian drug cheat, nearly four years late this June, he was given a choice of venues. He opted for Melbourne, because he grew up nearby, and the citys Old Treasury Building, because its a really nice place and I could have all my family and friends there. It was all televised on TV, a pretty special occasion.He first returned the silver.It was a weird feeling, giving that medal back. That was about a month before my medal ceremony, so I didnt have an Olympic medal for a month until I got a gold replacement, he said in a phone interview.Irish walker Robert Heffernan, who got bumped up from fourth place in that race, received his bronze on Thursday in his hometown of Cork, regaled with a piper, plenty of pomp and a jubilant crowd that filled City Hall with cheers as the medal was finally hung around his neck. Heffernan delayed the ceremony until after competing at the Rio Games this August because he wanted to fully enjoy the occasion with family and friends after his four-year wait.Its been a very long, drawn-out affair, his manager, Derry McVeigh, said in a phone interview. If youre just focusing on this medal all the time, it can just take over your life.Beckers-Vieujant, the Belgium Olympic chief, traveled himself to Switzerland to pick up the golds for Gevaert and her teammates and drove them back, in a very nice lacquered wooden box, by car to Brussels. Not the original medals that the Russians got, these were drawn instead from an IOC stock of replacements.The IOC luckily still had a few gold medals left from Beijing, he said.He rushed them to an engraver, to mark that they were won for sprint relay, before the handover in the cheering stadium.It was a marvelous moment, he said. Unforgettable.The sense of justice restored gave it additional warmth.---AP Sports Writers Stephen Wilson in London and James Ellingworth in Moscow contributed to this report. ' ' '
