You have to understand what Nebraska football means up here. It isn’t exactly religion the way Kentucky and North Carolina basketball is, and it isn’t exactly a birth-right like Alabama or Ohio State football, and it isn’t exactly a passion like Red Sox baseball in New England. No, here, Nebraska football defines precisely how people see themselves. Nebraska football, plainly, is who these people are.
There’s a children’s book they have in stores here called: Husker Football for Kids! Yes, they do love exclamation points in Nebraska. According to the Journal Star, the sign placed on the door announcing the Pederson Firing Press Conference read: “Welcome to the Visitors Center! Press Conference at 4:00 p.m. Today. Please join us …”
Anyway, while I’m certain that other college football programs have children’s books like Husker Football for Kids! (or Counting With the Huskers! or Hello, Herbie Husker!), I also suspect no other book has quite the same lesson.
In Husker Football for Kids!, Nebraska’s football team faces the Idaho PotatoPeelers (funny, I thought they were on Kansas’ schedule), and it’s a tough game. Idaho puts up a good fight. In the end, though, Nebraska pulls off the victory, which leads to the final page, and the big lesson.
“As the teams walk off the field,
Husker fans cheer
For the Cornhuskers and the PotatoPeelers
Because they BOTH played a good game.”
There it is, in a nutshell, the image Nebraska fans have built through the years as America’s Classiest Fans. Even more, though, this is the image Nebraska fans have of themselves. You have to understand it has been this way going on almost 50 years. Grandfathers in Nebraska can barely remember before Bob Devaney took over the program in 1962, and from that year until three seasons ago, when the coach who dare not be named (Bill Callahan) took over, the Cornhuskers never had a single losing season. They never missed a bowl appearance. They were almost always in the national championship fight.
All that winning, after a while, becomes a part of you. It isn’t that Nebraska fans got spoiled — that’s not the right word. They built a lifestyle around all the winning football, much the way people in Seattle built their lifestyles around rain and coffee or people in Los Angeles build their lifestyle around highway traffic.
