Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/s...otball-hopes-for-breakthrough.html?ref=sports
Boasting of Nebraska's History, and Lately Little Else
by Marc Tracy, New York Times
LINCOLN - Sometimes younger fans enter the Best of Big Red store near Nebraska's campus and ask the owner, Mike Osborne, why, amid all the Cornhuskers apparel and tchotchkes -- earrings and garden gnomes and beer cozies that look like corncobs -- there is a football helmet in a glass case with one side painted in Nebraska's colors and the other in Oklahoma's.
"Old-timers like me look at it and get it," said Osborne, 51, a lanky, soft-spoken man who gives off a Mr. Rogers vibe. "Others are like, 'Why do you have an Oklahoma helmet?'"
The helmet is a silent reminder of one of college football's great rivalries --one now dormant, and one whose passion might take some explaining to fans under 40. It has been six years since the last meeting between Nebraska and Oklahoma and decades since their annual game was a rite of fall that merited the entire nation's attention, regularly holding in the balance a conference title, an Orange Bowl berth, and quite a few times, a national title.
And while the helmet is Osborne's favorite item in his store, it is also a reminder that the best of Big Red may be history. The most marketable thing about Nebraska is probably its past.
Asked if he felt conflicted about selling hope for the future of Nebraska football versus peddling memories of bygone days, Shawn Eichorst, the university’s athletic director, insisted the two “were not mutually exclusive,” but added, “Oh gosh, that’s who we are.”
Osborne is the ideal merchant of nostalgia. He is the son of Tom Osborne, the beloved former coach (and later United States congressman) who in the 1990s capped his 25-year tenure as head coach with a five-season run that boasted three national championships and a preposterous 60-3 record.
Lincoln was and remains a town festooned in Scarlet and Cream. Memorial Stadium’s sellout streak is at 349 games. Every season still begins with hopes towering over the plains like the 400-foot state Capitol across town.
“I always believe we’re always going to win,” said Denise McMeen, a waitress at Misty’s Steakhouse & Lounge, where the Nebraska pep band plays on Friday nights before home games.
But lately, that faith has gone unrewarded. To finish 6-7 last season, Nebraska had to win the Foster Farms Bowl, a contest that has had five names in 14 seasons. It has not won a conference title this century. Once one of college football’s blue-chip programs, the Cornhuskers now face unreasonable expectations in a conference filled with unfamiliar opponents.
The team’s previous head coach, Bo Pelini, was fired the day after the 2014 regular season despite a seven-year run in which he won at least nine games every season. That is the kind of success for which most programs would sell their soul. At Nebraska, it was not good enough.
“You still have a lot of the fan base that’s stuck in 1995,” Corey Poulosky, a local businessman, said.
“I recognize that the program is not what it used to be,” he added. “But I’m not satisfied with that.”
As if expectations were not already high enough, the Cornhuskers (2-0) have an opportunity to raise them Saturday, when they host No. 22 Oregon (2-0) before the beginning of conference play.
There is more than one truly, madly, deeply insane college football fan base, of course. But there may be none that face a larger, more poignant gap between historical accomplishment and contemporary reality than this one. The evolution of college football has eroded the team’s structural advantages and exposed its intrinsic shortcomings.
Nebraska is “one of those places that has that history that you can’t buy or invent,” the Cornhuskers’ second-year coach, Mike Riley, said in his office last month. “There’s still that idea of, Can we get that back?”
The Landscape Changes
In college football, geography is destiny. Much of the recent dominance of the Southeastern Conference and a few other teams can be directly traced to the proportion of top high school prospects concentrated in the region in which they are based. Several teams in Texas owe recent boosts in esteem to increased donations made possible by high energy prices. The Big Ten is known as a run-first conference and the Pacific-12 as a pass-happy one for the same reason: the weather.
Nebraska, meanwhile, is a smaller state in the middle of a lightly populated area. Lincoln is not a flashy place, and usually it is either very hot — sweltering like a steam room on a recent August afternoon — or very cold. There are no scenic beaches or mountain vistas to catch the eyes of recruits.
“There are nice cornfields,” Tom Osborne, 79, a native son, said with a smile.
The Huskers did have advantages, once. The state never seemed to run out of beefy linemen, as exemplified by the old version of the colorful mascot Herbie Husker, a blond farm boy with a smile on his face and bright blue overalls on his stocky frame. Something about the state’s identity helped the Cornhuskers develop the country’s most robust walk-on program, allowing them to hold onto more than their share of high-caliber players.
Even Nebraska’s cold weather had been of assistance. The team’s fortunes rose in the late 1960s when Coach Bob Devaney turned the offense over to his coordinator, Osborne, who — in part for fear that cold, blustery game days would disrupt his quarterbacks’ passes — featured the run-heavy option offense that maximized the Cornhuskers’ strength: pushing around opponents at the line of scrimmage or, failing that, running over and around them.
For a few seasons, Nebraska was almost unbeatable. The Cornhuskers won the 1970 and 1971 national titles and mounted a 32-game winning streak. From 1969 through 2001, they always won at least nine games and never finished a season unranked. Like snowbirds, they wintered in Florida, making 14 Orange Bowl appearances.
“We did it with a very strong identity, and that was we were a very physical team, we were going to run the football — ran the option — so we knew who we were,” Osborne said. “It wasn’t like one year we were one style, another we were another.”
Precisely at the time that television and mass media turned college football into a national spectacle, and then as cable made it a sensation, Nebraska represented the standard of excellence. The 1995 squad, regarded by many as the best college team ever, won its 12 games by an average of more than 38 points.
But college football changed. Television money helped democratize the sport to a degree. Nebraska’s status as one of a dozen or so programs that would always contend for the national title began to fade. In 1996, after the first round of conference consolidation, Nebraska suddenly had to beat not only Oklahoma and Colorado but also Texas and Texas A&M in the newly created Big 12.
The evolving landscape has allowed new powers to rise (Oregon, Texas Christian) and some traditional ones to entrench themselves further (Alabama, Ohio State). Great coaching can go a long way, which is why Oklahoma, a program similar to Nebraska in many ways, has been outstanding in recent decades during the long tenure of Bob Stoops.
With its vulnerabilities exposed, Nebraska struggled to keep up. It won only seven games in 2002, and two years later posted its first losing season (5-7) since 1961. After winning a share of the 1997 national title, Nebraska won the Big 12 just once, in 1999. It has never won the Big Ten, to which it fled before the 2011 season.
“They got used to winning,” Osborne said of Nebraska fans. “Once you’ve been there for a while, you never quite get used to losing.”
Past Preserved in Rituals
At Nebraska’s cavernous indoor practice field, where banners commemorate Big Eight titles and sunny bowl appearances, many of the current team’s players probably do not know about 1971. Some may not even know about 1995.
Tommy Armstrong Jr., the starting quarterback, said that when he was recruited out of southern Texas, Nebraska’s illustrious past barely came up.
“Before they showed me anything about football, they showed me the academic side,” he said, adding that he did not understand the historical sweep of Nebraska football “until I actually got here and saw my first game. How everything was a ritual.”
Riley has retained many of those rituals, including the Tunnel Walk entrance and the prized black jerseys bestowed upon the so-called Blackshirts — deserving defensive players — for practices. And there are new traditions: Riley established a talent pipeline known as Calabraska, between Lincoln and Calabasas High School in Southern California, after a spate of top prospects — most prominently Keyshawn Johnson Jr., whose father was an N.F.L. receiver — committed to Nebraska.
But fans here are also suspicious of Riley. Last year, Nebraska recruited no players from Texas, a state it had traditionally relied upon to fill some skill positions. And, even more troubling to die-hards, Riley runs a pro-style offense in which the quarterback must make sophisticated reads and tough throws. By taking to the air, critics fear that he has left the Huskers to the whims of November’s winds as well as severed Nebraska football from its roots.
“The way the team plays over time has become a reflection of the way people feel about themselves,” Mike Osborne, who has a master’s degree in sociology, said.
“People like to see hard-nosed football,” he added. “People like to see us running over people. People like to see us being smart, clever and not making mistakes, because that’s the way we view ourselves: as tough people who historically — the people who came here survived the Dust Bowl and kept the land going and producing crops — had to have a certain level of toughness about them.”
Pitch, pass or punt, what Mike Osborne would most like to see are more wins. Besides being a fan, he said, winning is better for business.
“It can only go on for so long,” he said. “You can only sell 20 years ago for so long.”
Boasting of Nebraska's History, and Lately Little Else
by Marc Tracy, New York Times
LINCOLN - Sometimes younger fans enter the Best of Big Red store near Nebraska's campus and ask the owner, Mike Osborne, why, amid all the Cornhuskers apparel and tchotchkes -- earrings and garden gnomes and beer cozies that look like corncobs -- there is a football helmet in a glass case with one side painted in Nebraska's colors and the other in Oklahoma's.
"Old-timers like me look at it and get it," said Osborne, 51, a lanky, soft-spoken man who gives off a Mr. Rogers vibe. "Others are like, 'Why do you have an Oklahoma helmet?'"
The helmet is a silent reminder of one of college football's great rivalries --one now dormant, and one whose passion might take some explaining to fans under 40. It has been six years since the last meeting between Nebraska and Oklahoma and decades since their annual game was a rite of fall that merited the entire nation's attention, regularly holding in the balance a conference title, an Orange Bowl berth, and quite a few times, a national title.
And while the helmet is Osborne's favorite item in his store, it is also a reminder that the best of Big Red may be history. The most marketable thing about Nebraska is probably its past.
Asked if he felt conflicted about selling hope for the future of Nebraska football versus peddling memories of bygone days, Shawn Eichorst, the university’s athletic director, insisted the two “were not mutually exclusive,” but added, “Oh gosh, that’s who we are.”
Osborne is the ideal merchant of nostalgia. He is the son of Tom Osborne, the beloved former coach (and later United States congressman) who in the 1990s capped his 25-year tenure as head coach with a five-season run that boasted three national championships and a preposterous 60-3 record.
Lincoln was and remains a town festooned in Scarlet and Cream. Memorial Stadium’s sellout streak is at 349 games. Every season still begins with hopes towering over the plains like the 400-foot state Capitol across town.
“I always believe we’re always going to win,” said Denise McMeen, a waitress at Misty’s Steakhouse & Lounge, where the Nebraska pep band plays on Friday nights before home games.
But lately, that faith has gone unrewarded. To finish 6-7 last season, Nebraska had to win the Foster Farms Bowl, a contest that has had five names in 14 seasons. It has not won a conference title this century. Once one of college football’s blue-chip programs, the Cornhuskers now face unreasonable expectations in a conference filled with unfamiliar opponents.
The team’s previous head coach, Bo Pelini, was fired the day after the 2014 regular season despite a seven-year run in which he won at least nine games every season. That is the kind of success for which most programs would sell their soul. At Nebraska, it was not good enough.
“You still have a lot of the fan base that’s stuck in 1995,” Corey Poulosky, a local businessman, said.
“I recognize that the program is not what it used to be,” he added. “But I’m not satisfied with that.”
As if expectations were not already high enough, the Cornhuskers (2-0) have an opportunity to raise them Saturday, when they host No. 22 Oregon (2-0) before the beginning of conference play.
There is more than one truly, madly, deeply insane college football fan base, of course. But there may be none that face a larger, more poignant gap between historical accomplishment and contemporary reality than this one. The evolution of college football has eroded the team’s structural advantages and exposed its intrinsic shortcomings.
Nebraska is “one of those places that has that history that you can’t buy or invent,” the Cornhuskers’ second-year coach, Mike Riley, said in his office last month. “There’s still that idea of, Can we get that back?”
The Landscape Changes
In college football, geography is destiny. Much of the recent dominance of the Southeastern Conference and a few other teams can be directly traced to the proportion of top high school prospects concentrated in the region in which they are based. Several teams in Texas owe recent boosts in esteem to increased donations made possible by high energy prices. The Big Ten is known as a run-first conference and the Pacific-12 as a pass-happy one for the same reason: the weather.
Nebraska, meanwhile, is a smaller state in the middle of a lightly populated area. Lincoln is not a flashy place, and usually it is either very hot — sweltering like a steam room on a recent August afternoon — or very cold. There are no scenic beaches or mountain vistas to catch the eyes of recruits.
“There are nice cornfields,” Tom Osborne, 79, a native son, said with a smile.
The Huskers did have advantages, once. The state never seemed to run out of beefy linemen, as exemplified by the old version of the colorful mascot Herbie Husker, a blond farm boy with a smile on his face and bright blue overalls on his stocky frame. Something about the state’s identity helped the Cornhuskers develop the country’s most robust walk-on program, allowing them to hold onto more than their share of high-caliber players.
Even Nebraska’s cold weather had been of assistance. The team’s fortunes rose in the late 1960s when Coach Bob Devaney turned the offense over to his coordinator, Osborne, who — in part for fear that cold, blustery game days would disrupt his quarterbacks’ passes — featured the run-heavy option offense that maximized the Cornhuskers’ strength: pushing around opponents at the line of scrimmage or, failing that, running over and around them.
For a few seasons, Nebraska was almost unbeatable. The Cornhuskers won the 1970 and 1971 national titles and mounted a 32-game winning streak. From 1969 through 2001, they always won at least nine games and never finished a season unranked. Like snowbirds, they wintered in Florida, making 14 Orange Bowl appearances.
“We did it with a very strong identity, and that was we were a very physical team, we were going to run the football — ran the option — so we knew who we were,” Osborne said. “It wasn’t like one year we were one style, another we were another.”
Precisely at the time that television and mass media turned college football into a national spectacle, and then as cable made it a sensation, Nebraska represented the standard of excellence. The 1995 squad, regarded by many as the best college team ever, won its 12 games by an average of more than 38 points.
But college football changed. Television money helped democratize the sport to a degree. Nebraska’s status as one of a dozen or so programs that would always contend for the national title began to fade. In 1996, after the first round of conference consolidation, Nebraska suddenly had to beat not only Oklahoma and Colorado but also Texas and Texas A&M in the newly created Big 12.
The evolving landscape has allowed new powers to rise (Oregon, Texas Christian) and some traditional ones to entrench themselves further (Alabama, Ohio State). Great coaching can go a long way, which is why Oklahoma, a program similar to Nebraska in many ways, has been outstanding in recent decades during the long tenure of Bob Stoops.
With its vulnerabilities exposed, Nebraska struggled to keep up. It won only seven games in 2002, and two years later posted its first losing season (5-7) since 1961. After winning a share of the 1997 national title, Nebraska won the Big 12 just once, in 1999. It has never won the Big Ten, to which it fled before the 2011 season.
“They got used to winning,” Osborne said of Nebraska fans. “Once you’ve been there for a while, you never quite get used to losing.”
Past Preserved in Rituals
At Nebraska’s cavernous indoor practice field, where banners commemorate Big Eight titles and sunny bowl appearances, many of the current team’s players probably do not know about 1971. Some may not even know about 1995.
Tommy Armstrong Jr., the starting quarterback, said that when he was recruited out of southern Texas, Nebraska’s illustrious past barely came up.
“Before they showed me anything about football, they showed me the academic side,” he said, adding that he did not understand the historical sweep of Nebraska football “until I actually got here and saw my first game. How everything was a ritual.”
Riley has retained many of those rituals, including the Tunnel Walk entrance and the prized black jerseys bestowed upon the so-called Blackshirts — deserving defensive players — for practices. And there are new traditions: Riley established a talent pipeline known as Calabraska, between Lincoln and Calabasas High School in Southern California, after a spate of top prospects — most prominently Keyshawn Johnson Jr., whose father was an N.F.L. receiver — committed to Nebraska.
But fans here are also suspicious of Riley. Last year, Nebraska recruited no players from Texas, a state it had traditionally relied upon to fill some skill positions. And, even more troubling to die-hards, Riley runs a pro-style offense in which the quarterback must make sophisticated reads and tough throws. By taking to the air, critics fear that he has left the Huskers to the whims of November’s winds as well as severed Nebraska football from its roots.
“The way the team plays over time has become a reflection of the way people feel about themselves,” Mike Osborne, who has a master’s degree in sociology, said.
“People like to see hard-nosed football,” he added. “People like to see us running over people. People like to see us being smart, clever and not making mistakes, because that’s the way we view ourselves: as tough people who historically — the people who came here survived the Dust Bowl and kept the land going and producing crops — had to have a certain level of toughness about them.”
Pitch, pass or punt, what Mike Osborne would most like to see are more wins. Besides being a fan, he said, winning is better for business.
“It can only go on for so long,” he said. “You can only sell 20 years ago for so long.”
