Saturday was about as bad a situation as you could design for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. They lost. They lost to a perennially bad football team. They lost in the opening game of the college football season, one of only a few football games on television all weekend.
It’s the fourth year under Scott Frost. Things aren’t going well. Things show no sign of going well soon. And the fears are getting existential. Or, if they aren’t, they should be.
The last time Nebraska finished a season ranked in the top ten was 2001. That’s twenty years ago now, the same span of time that separates 2001 from 1981, or 2021 from 2041, or, to choose a not-entirely-random example, from 1966 to 1986.
In the middle of the last century, Michigan State was a national power. Four times between 1952 and 1956, multiple organizations named the Spartans the national champions. The program suffered just three losing seasons over a 26-year stretch.
Today, nobody thinks of Michigan State as a national power. Few college football fans were around for that stage of Michigan State’s life. Over a three-year span last decade, Michigan State won a Rose Bowl, won a Cotton Bowl, and lost in a College Football Playoff semifinal, and even that wasn’t enough to draw “Michigan State is back” reactions the way we get reactions saying Notre Dame is back, or saying Texas is back. Michigan State can’t be back. In the collective memory of college football fandom, there is nothing to which they can return. And it’s been that way for a while.
This is the fear for Nebraska. The longer time goes on, the further the Huskers get from 2001, the more seasons the Huskers find themselves sat upon in their own division by Wisconsin and Iowa and Northwestern and now perhaps even Minnesota and Illinois…the more memories of Lincoln as the home of a powerhouse fade. You can be a great program for 26 years and wake up three or four decades later to find yourself forgotten. Nebraska isn’t there yet. But that’s the fear. Or, if it isn’t, it should be.
Interesting observation… At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, back when I was a kid, Nebraska was really something. But you’re right. Who cares anymore? And, to your point, will anyone ever care again? Sometimes you can’t reclaim what you’ve lost, no matter how hard you try. I think that’s true for a lot of things that are much more “important” than college football, too…
it’s delicious, isn’t it? watching them implode in slow motion.