I always think that when people say "they were one kick away from a 3 peat!". That's not how it works as previous years do build into others. Look at lots of other teams the year after they won and don't have quite the same fire/edge as the year before. Hard to keep the same level of motivation.
Often true - but those teams from 1993-97 were different than the average bear. They were pretty self-motivated and hungry. There were a lot of great players on the 93 team who stirred up the drive for excellence and you see a new crop of leaders rise up on the 94 team. Let me throw out some last names and you tell me which ones would not have run through a wall for Tom in 94 even if they had won the NC in 93. The 95 team obviously would not have had a letdown.
Frazier, Alford, Harris, Muhammad, Phillips, Schlesinger, Stai, Childs, Tormich, Miles, Stewart, Zatechka, Peter, Connealy, Berringer
My thinking is that this group - starting wt the 93 team were on a whole new higher level than Tom's previous teams - since 1983. Yes we had some good teams after the scoring explosion - primarily let by QB Steve Taylor but none of them had the fire, motivation and talent that those teams of Tom's last 5 years.
Let me add some real :koolaid2: here and go full bore homer on you. One could easily argue, that if half the team didn't get sick prior to the 96 Big 12 Championship game ( I still think Texas paid someone to spike the food - :ahhhhhhhh - why not get conspiratorial since this is just a message board where we can post anything!!) we could have/should have beaten Texas :hookerhorns in that game and played for the NC even wt that early season loss to Arizona. So yes, with a break in the FSU game (no bad ref calls) there could have been a path to a streak of 5 in a row. Skip 1998 as the rebuild year and the1999 team outside of that fumble crossing the goal against :hookerhorns , we could have been looking at 6 NC in 7 years. The 99 team was arguably one of the better teams to have not won the NC (83 and 82 being the other 2 Nebraska teams that were great teams wtout a NC)