Nebraska, Plainly

By Tom Callahan

The state is in a frenzy over its No. 1 team

It is insulting and, of course, untrue to say that there is nothing in Nebraska except a Big Red football team, but there is nothing else quite of the kind.

No mountains. No beaches. No big-league teams. Other than slow-changing seasons, burning summers, bitter winters, and autumns that can be rather a brilliant compensation, only this football team gathers up an entire state of people and brings them to one emotional place. In other regions of the country enamored of college football, there is never just one rallying point, and almost always a cluster of them. For no matter how dominant the University is, some will always root for State, never mind A & M. Over in Omaha, Creighton has stirred a certain passion for basketball, but to most Nebraskans this must seem as wrongheaded as when Creighton dropped football in the '40s. On the farm lands, in the sandhills, across the cattle country, through the Platte River Valley, as well as in downtown Lincoln and Omaha--really the only two cities in Nebraska--there is but one institution, and that is the State University, as in state of mind. Hundreds of miles from Lincoln, farmers who never went very far in school regard the University of Nebraska as their alma mater. In case you have not heard, it is a bumper harvest this year.

At Memorial Stadium, impishly referred to on fall Saturdays as the third largest Nebraska township (pop. 73,650), a principle has been literally etched in stone: "Not the victory but the action. Not the goal but the game. In the deed the glory." The words seem too high-blown to be associated with modern major-college football. Putting aside the moral excesses, just the logistical ones are awesome. And the Nebraska program, like so many others, is overgrown to the point of hilarity, but not to the exclusion of charm. Five years is the common hitch for a Nebraska football player, and there seem to be more of them than cornstalks. None of which depresses the local citizenry, a delegation of whom rises on Thursdays before dawn, sometimes 350 strong, to attend a 6:30 a.m. breakfast, with a pep band, where the special guests may be the secretaries of the football coaches and the door prize a home-baked cherry pie.

Souvenirs of the team are for sale seemingly around every bend in Lincoln. Loraine Livingston, the sparky proprietor of Cornhusker Corner, insists there are only a few outlets worth speaking of, and furthermore, "the fellow in the filling station is from Oklahoma," and she fairly spits, "just a transit." Cornhusker Corner is open twelve months a year, seven days a week, serving to paint the town red. The huge, rouge crowd that assembles on Saturdays somehow seems older than one would expect. The mood suggests a state fair. Bobby Reynolds, an insurance man from Grand Island who played for the Cornhuskers in 1950, in fact whose touchdown record finally fell just a couple of weeks ago, describes the gathering as a congregation, and his family has always occupied the same pew. "One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting right here at the Nebraska games," says the man who grew up to be the star of the team, and now, more than 30 years later, is still sitting there.

The brutality and bumptiousness of football were dismissed as fit subjects here 90 years ago by Willa Cather, the beautiful writer from Red Cloud, as cherished an alumnus as Vince Ferragamo, the handsome quarterback from Los Angeles. She admired the game as "one of the few survivals of the heroic," and it pleased her that football "arouses only the most simple and normal emotions" and "offers no particular inducement to betting." She wrote: "Of course it is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi; that is, they all alike appeal to the crude savage instincts of men. We have not outgrown all our old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we never shall! The moment that, as a nation, we lose brute force, or an admiration for brute force, from that moment poetry and art are forever dead among us, and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left. The only way poetry can ever reach one is through one's brute instincts. 'Charge of the Light Brigade,' or 'How they brought good news to Aix,' move us in exactly the same way that one of Mr. Shue's runs or Mr. Yont'* touchdowns do, only not half so intensely. A good football game is an epic, it rouses the oldest part of us. Poetry is great only in that it suggests action and rouses great emotions. The world gets all its great enthusiasms and emotions from pure strains of sinew."

The Nebraska football team strains its sinew in a weight room that Cub Scouts tour. In the foyer of this unbelievable expanse of sweat, set off by red velvet ropes and little curators' plaques, is a museum of the original Cornhusker barbells and exercise bike. One has to grin. Associate Professor Susan Rosowski of the English department agrees that a sense of humor is helpful. "There's a strange duality," she says. "On the one hand, we're terribly proud of our Big Red, but we're also a little defensive about how big it is here. We wonder how we fit into the broader world. Willa Cather spoke of the 'clammy shiver of embarrassment' she felt in the presence of Easterners merely at the mention of the name Nebraska. We all partake in this tribal ritual of football, this coming together in the community, this need for a common identity. But we are a bit self-conscious about it, and saved, I suspect, by a sense of humor. I think one of the reasons Nebraskans feel as secure as we do is Tom Osborne. He's so civilized."

This is not the universal impression of those against whom Head Coach Osborne has charged this season. Nebraska 44, Penn State 6. Nebraska 56, Wyoming 20.

Nebraska 84, Minnesota 13. Nebraska 42, U.C.L.A. 10. Nebraska 63, Syracuse 7. Nebraska 14, Oklahoma State 10. Nebraska 34, Missouri 13. Nebraska 69, Colorado 19. Nebraska 51, Kansas State 25. Nebraska 72, Iowa State 29. Nebraska 67, Kansas 13. And then last Saturday, to end an undefeated season, the most prolific (52 points per game) since the Blanchard-Davis Army team of 1944 (see box): Nebraska 28, Oklahoma 21. In a stirring game, which ended on a defensive stand, the Cornhuskers became the first team ever to score 600 points in a single season and if they defeat the University of Miami in the Orange Bowl Jan. 2, they will be the national champions and a team of special memory.

"There are no great football teams any more," observed the Washington Redskins' laconic Super Bowl hero John Riggins. "Except maybe Nebraska," he mused, "and they're not on our schedule, thank God." Riggins, a Kansan, was speaking a few days after the Perm State opener, a game set apart from the rest of the schedule, one that everyone in college football could watch. "I don't feel as bad about the Nebraska game as I might have at that moment," Perm State Coach Joe Paterno says, "because we may have played one of the best collegiate football teams of all time. Nebraska is certainly as good a football team as I have seen in my 33 years at Perm State. They are comparable to the 1965 Michigan State team and the 1959 Syracuse team with Ernie Davis. I can't recall ever playing or ever seeing a team as good as Nebraska was on opening day." Immediately, some pronounced Nebraska the best team ever. Expectations reached the point where, following 51-25 victories, Nebraskans fretted, "What's wrong with the defense," the vaunted Black Shirts? Nothing was, except in the context of the offense and the obligation to be the best at everything.

The three most renowned players are Tailback Mike Rozier, Quarterback Turner Gill and Wingback Irving Fryar, all seniors. Coming from Camden and Mount Holly, N.J., within ready reach of Philadelphia, Rozier and Fryar are city types and friends of long standing. As though consciously maintaining a Philly attitude, both are partial to scalley caps, the shapeless headwear that suits Eastern cab drivers so well, and they seem to own an endless collection. Gill is from Fort Worth, about the only place in Texas where a boy could grow up playing football and baseball and end up preferring baseball. "I just have more fun playing baseball," he says, realizing it is an absurd admission for one so near to a national championship. It was Tom Osborne's uncommon tolerance for a quarterback who would never be single-minded that delivered Gill to Nebraska. "People back home weren't so much upset that I chose Nebraska," Gill recalls, "as they were puzzled."

One percentage point short of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's 2.0 academic minimum, Rozier was required to detour through Coffeyville, Kans., for a year of junior-college classes. While Rozier was bowling over archrival Independence for the glory of the Coffeyville Red Ravens, strangers Fryar and Gill threw in together as freshman roommates, and Fryar attempted to ease their homesickness with tales of the terrific runner who would soon be joining them.

The most dramatic story was of Rozier's last high school game, Thanksgiving weekend, the climax of an unusual season in Camden abbreviated by a gang war. That fall, the Wheels of Soul and the Ghetto Riders bore a certain grudge against each other. The leader of the Wheels had a relative playing for Camden and was not inclined to miss a game. "At the beginning of the third quarter, the shooting broke out," Rozier says. "It sounded like caps at first. Then there was smoke. We all hit the dirt. Both teams were face down around the 12-yd. line. The stands emptied. People were screaming. Babies were getting stepped on. Just as in the movie Black Sunday." Nebraska struck Rozier as a quiet place to play football.

Fryar says, "When Nebraska contacted me, I went and looked in the atlas. 'Lord,' I thought. 'It's in the middle of nowhere.' Actually, I wanted to be a Marine like my uncle. But my parents wouldn't let me. That first year, Turner and I both were so lonely, we tried to quit. Neither of our parents would allow us to come home. We were up there in the room, playing old records and crying, fighting the homesickness together." When Rozier arrived, they helped him resist the same urge to run away. "Nebraska is a place for slowing down and growing up," Fryar says for all of them.

Though each will receive votes for the Heisman Trophy, the award proclaiming college football's best player, Gill and Fryar consider Rozier's election this weekend a foregone and happy conclusion. When asked to describe Rozier, the runner, Fryar simply says, "Heisman." But Rozier personally expresses little interest in hardware. "All it is," he says, not wishing to be rude, "is a little statue of a runner. I guess if I win it, I'll give the hands to Irving and the head to Turner." The legs are his own.

Perhaps 5 ft. 10 in., 210 Ibs., Rozier is a brute with guile, whose balance is such that he seems to be bulldogged off the field more often than he is tumbled off his feet. Rozier's 29 touchdowns this season are an N.C.A.A. record. Among the last dozen Heisman-winning running backs, only Billy Sims of Oklahoma (1978) carried so seldom (an average 23 times a game compared with 30 last season for Georgia's Herschel Walker). Still, Rozier leads the nation's rushers with 2,148 yds., 7.8 per carry. In Rozier's third straight 200-yd. game this year, against Kansas, he set the school record of 285 yds. and then retired for the fourth quarter. Similarly, the passing and receiving figures of Gill and Fryar are stunted by the amount of time they spend as observers in the second half. "I look at the statistics and see Fryar's name under mine," says Iowa State's Tracy Henderson, the leading pass catcher in the Big Eight, "but I know who is the best receiver in the league."

When a football team scores 54 points a game, and sometimes has 72 or 84, a charge of running up the score is unavoidable. The talk wounds Osborne, who says, "We have tried to be decent to our opponents and fair to our players. We have some talented athletes who deserve to play. When you reach the point where you have to stop scoring in the first half, you have a problem." One obvious difficulty is the fact that Nebraska stocks experienced and skillful reserves in almost inexhaustible supply. Nate Mason, Turner's first replacement at quarterback, is a senior. And the runner behind Rozier,

Junior Jeff Smith, is a terror. "When you have an ability," Gill says, "you want to show it full out."

Osborne tries to respond to the issue with a smile, but he admits, "It has taken a lot of the fun out of the year for me." Following a complaint that the Cornhuskers had passed too freely in the first half against Kansas State, the coach agreed, "We have sunk to new depths of depravity." He is not a man to whom laughter comes easily. Tall, rawboned, freckled, formidable, Osborne at 46 still resembles the wide receiver he became for the San Francisco 49ers after Y.A. Tittle and John Brodie convinced him that there were no openings for quarterbacks. At Hastings High School in Nebraska (some 100 miles west of Lincoln), he had been the star quarterback, Nebraska's prep athlete of the year. Like his father and grandfather, Osborne proceeded to Hastings College as a matter of course. Although he might have played longer than his three seasons in the pros, it felt natural for him to return to his home state in 1962 to join the Nebraska staff being assembled by new Coach Bob Devaney.

Young college football fans from other areas around the country may have the impression that Nebraska football started around that time, a considerable miscalculation. Football at Nebraska goes back to 1890, when the team was known variously as the Old Gold Knights, the Antelopes or the Bug-eaters. This last unfortunate appellation stuck, as to the grille and windshield of passing automobiles, until around 1900 a Lincoln sportswriter decided Bugeaters was not a proper nickname for the players and began to refer to them as Cornhuskers. Coach Jumbo Stiehm's teams, vintage 1911-15, alternately called the Cornhuskers and the Stiehm Rollers, were regularly undefeated against the likes of Notre Dame. During the 1920s, Knute Rockne's Four Horsemen lost to the Cornhuskers twice. Nebraska employed legendary Coaches Fielding Yost before Michigan and D.X. Bible before Texas.

However, it is fair to say that Saturdays had been bleak for some time (three winning seasons in 21 years) before Devaney arrived in 1962. Unlike Osborne, he did not have to learn how to smile. On a wall of Devaney's office, now the chamber of the athletic director, two tattered hobos are in conference, and one is saying, ". . . then we lost our sixth to Keen State."

"I didn't know very much about Nebraska," reflects this joyful Irishman from Michigan who restored the Cornhuskers' glory. "For instance, how pretty the city of Lincoln really is. Scenery is not exactly a coach's priority. Duffy Daugherty [who coached Michigan State for 19 years] told me the people loved football and supported the team irregardless of the record. 'Of course,' Duffy said, 'they're more friendly when you win.' " Devaney won immediately and spectacularly. After a 3-6-1 season in 1961, the Cornhuskers took nine of eleven games in Devaney's first year and triumphed 36-34 in the Gotham Bowl, over Miami, incidentally. Nebraska won the national championship in 1970 and repeated in 1971. The latter edition is commonly thought of as the best college football team of all (a panel of coaches so voted last year), and it is the mark by which the current group is being measured.

Johnny Rodgers, the Heisman Trophy-winning flanker of that time, considers this team better. "They're faster than we were," he says. "The Big Eight was the toughest conference in the world in 1971 [Oklahoma and Colorado finished second and third in the Associated Press poll], but some teams are too good to be measured just by opponents. I think our team was, and this team is. We probably had a better defense, with guys like Larry Jacobson, Rich Glover and Willie Harper. Heck, John Button [three-time All-Pro Defensive Tackle for the Dallas Cowboys] played behind Jacobson, but it's hard to be intense defensively in a 60-point game. Osborne was a brilliant offensive assistant when I was there. I think they're even better because he's even better."

Succeeding Devaney in 1973 was not an instant pleasure for Osborne, who has a Ph.D. in educational psychology, the minimum degree of learning required for understanding college football fans. Maintaining a successful football program is less romantic work than constructing one, though no less hazardous. It took ten years, but now Devaney and Osborne each own 100 victories and are coming to be regarded as equal treasures. "I'm just glad to have survived," Osborne says. "We had some 9-3 seasons that were looked at around here as pretty average." It took him a considerable while to beat Oklahoma, but now he has done it three years in a row.

Osborne is amused to hear the players say he has mellowed over the past two or three seasons. This recurring report always delights him. By the time they are seniors, the players discover to their astonishment that Osborne is not the distant man who chilled them as freshmen. A few weeks ago, before the annual game between the freshmen and the redshirts (a task force, sophomores mostly, being held out a year), the varsity formed a funnel onto the field to usher in the next generation; the pure numbers of Nebraska football players collected all in one place brought to mind both the late movie director Cecil B. De Mille and the Red Sea.

Commandeering a local television station's videotape equipment, Gill and Rozier wandered the sidelines conducting mock interviews until, suddenly, through the view finder Rozier saw a stern closeup of Osborne. Gill stuck out the microphone and demanded to know, "Why have you been running up the scores?" Before OsI borne could answer, Rozier announced, "Sorry, out of film," and they raced away laughing. To be blessed with three preeminent players at once--four, including Offensive Guard Dean Steinkuhler--is an amazement to Osborne. He has that one. player coaches forever dream about, only three or four times over. "I will be surprised if we go down as the best or as one of the best teams of all time," he says. "But, offensively..."

For a professional opinion, Bobby

Beathard, the livestock judge of the Washington Redskins, has been consulted. "Fryar is what we call a burner, unbelievable speed," he says. In fact, the Redskins did not credit the clocking provided by the school. "He runs a 4.28 forty [yards]," says Beathard with a chuckle. "That's our time." Plus he enjoys collisions. "Not to take anything away from Rozier," Beathard says, "but Fryar should be considered more of a prize in the National Football League, a game breaker. Not quite a burner, Rozier is an excellent back who breaks tackles and does a lot of good things on his own, sometimes makes his biggest plays out of nothing. On a great team, you have to look closer to see how good a player is. Back when Charles White was winning the Heisman at U.S.C. , he was really just an average back on a top team, a tough kid who went about as far as the blocking took him, though not much farther. Rozier would still be a top back on an average team. As for Gill, he's short [6 ft.], but a skilled athlete, and not just a runner, a real passer."

The way Gill explains their smooth relationship, each possesses something of his own. Mike is going to win the Heisman, Irving is coveted most by the pros, and Turner is the option quarterback with all the options. "I wouldn't have played

football if I couldn't have played quarterback," he says, "and I won't be converted to anything else just to make the N.F.L." Gill says this resolutely, not arrogantly. "Look at me as a quarterback, and if I'm not good enough, that's it. I'm independent, and I have a lot of confidence in myself. I became a quarterback frankly because I liked the idea of everything starting with me. I guess that's why I prefer baseball. It's more of an individual's sport." He is a shortstop, one who has yet to prove he can hit (a .285 batting average last season for Nebraska).

Drafted by the New York Yankees last June, Gill rejected a moderate bonus in order to return to school, and will go back into the lottery this year.

The right guard, Steinkuhler, is the quintessential Nebraska football player. Under the hometown column of the team roster, occasional entries from New Jersey and Texas, California, Colorado or even Connecticut are fairly obliterated in a hailstorm of small Nebraska towns. It reads like the appendix of an almanac: Plattsmouth, Scottsbluff, Bell wood, Fremont, Waterloo, Dix, Ponca, Shelby, Wahoo, Hildreth, Crete, Burr... Steinkuhler is from Burr.

He cuts a giant figure, although he is not even close to being the most humongous man on the team. Several of the Nebraska linemen resemble telephone booths with 19-in. TV sets on top. At 6 ft. 3 in., 270 Ibs., straw-haired and bottle-jawed, Steinkuhler is the tobacco-spitting image of "Herby Husker," Nebraska's mascot in bib overalls. Pro-football scouts are afraid to say how good he is, because he may be the best offensive lineman they have ever seen. "In Steinkuhler, Fryar and Rozier," says Dallas Cowboy personnel man Gil Brandt, "Nebraska might have three players drafted in the first ten." That such a player could come out of Burr (pop. 101 and getting smaller--"I don't look for it to last much longer," Steinkuhler sighs) is more than farfetched. When the All-America teams are announced, Burr will become the smallest town to have produced an All-America. It is a place without a policeman, or a need for one. From kindergarten through eighth grade, Steinkuhler attended country school in the company of three classmates, one of them a girl. "We had to round up everybody in town to play any sort of sport," he says. "We drank a lot of pop in Burr and mowed a lot of lawns."

Journeying twelve miles to high school in Sterling (pop. 526), Steinkuhler played only eight-man football. Perhaps the larger emphasis on versatility in this game is what made him a faster, nimbler, smarter big man, and not just a mauler, though Steinkuhler is that too. He is gentle-spoken, all the same. With his glasses on, he seems too decent for trap blocking. "Every kid in Nebraska dreams of playing football for the Cornhuskers," he says. "Everything seems so big here, and it is big. I don't even know some guys' names, and that's pretty embarrassing. I guess I don't know more than about 60 players personally. But you kind of know where they're from and what their dreams are. To me, I expect this is about the best time I'll ever have, and about the best memories. When the last few seconds are on the clock now, I've been hashing over what happened and realizing that it's one less Nebraska game for me. Even when the crowd is not there, I'm looking around the stadium a lot these days and remembering."

Because so many Nebraska sons from hidden corners would think of playing nowhere else, the "walk-on" yield of tryouts is bountiful. This is what expands the university's football-playing population to sometimes well beyond 250. Of the 95 to 105 players who dressed for home games this year, as many as 45 were former applicants who arrived at the school without any promises. Many walk-ons are eventually tendered scholarships, but at the moment three senior starters are paying their own way: Fullback Mark Schellen, Tight End Monte Engebritson and Middle Guard Mike Tranmer, a defensive co-captain. "I just wanted to start one game," says Schellen, who finally succeeded at that in the Orange Bowl last season. Now he is the blocking back for Rozier and says, "Even though I don't get the ball that much, when I've blocked well, I'm fully satisfied."

In the lavish weight room under the west stands, Schellen is a legend exceeding even departed Center Dave Rimington, that great tract of beef who was the Cincinnati Bengals' first draft choice this year. Restyling his bulk from 260 Ibs. to 219 Ibs., Schellen has bench-pressed 475

Ibs. and lifted 955 Ibs. in the clutches of a medieval-looking leg rack called a hip sled. Both are school records. On top of all this, he trails just a blink or two behind Irving Fryar in the 40-yd. dash. Schellen will be a professional football player. Mike Tranmer, also an enthusiast of weights, will not be. "If I was 6 ft. 4," says Tranmer, who weighs 230 Ibs. but is only 5 ft. 11 in., "I think I still wouldn't want to play pro. Football has been great, but it's almost over for me, time to move on."

Tranmer and his wife will return to a farming life in Lyons, a town of 1,214 some 80 miles north, and try to make enough money in hogs to pay the student loan he has taken out for tuition every year. "As long as I played football for Nebraska," he says, "that's all that concerned me. I'm fulfilled."

The small matter of the Orange Bowl remains. In the University of Miami, Nebraska meets a most suitable opponent Jan. 2. For a time, Texas, the only other undefeated team, was inspiring those irrepressible entrepreneurs who rise up every year and propose a college championship game. If lacking offensively, the Longhorns seem to be the defensive flip side of the Cornhuskers, and were widely admired by the New York Times computer, which uses bloodless logic. "I can promise you one thing," Texas Cornerback Mossy Cade said eloquently several weeks ago. "It would not be a high-scoring game." However, when Texas could barely beat Houston and T.C.U., the computer transferred its affections to Auburn, which had lost to Texas.

For the Orange Bowl's 50th renewal, Miami, the game's original loser, was a sentimental but not a financial favorite. Committeemen estimate that $10 million could be lost in tourist trade. So no one paved the way for Miami (10-1), which had a hard road after losing its opener to Florida, 28-3. The Hurricanes are coached by Howard Schnellenberger, a former pro assistant of Don Shula's and head coach for the Baltimore Colts. Having immediately lost his star quarterback this year to injury, Schnellenberger had to choose quickly from three freshmen and selected Bernie Kosar to run a sophisticated pro-style passing offense. Kosar is 6 ft. 5 in. tall and favors throwing to a tight end named Glenn Dennison, who has not only good hands but noticeably large ones. The Hurricanes have an ungigantic but fierce defense. Like Nebraska, Notre Dame was far bigger, but the Irish could not score against Miami. "I would rather play Harvard," says Bob Devaney.

Winning the national championship is a quest for the three friends, Rozier, Gill and Fryar. "We could have won three in a row," Fryar says.

"It has been right there in front of us, and it just slipped away." Two years ago, the Cornhuskers failed in the Orange Bowl by one touchdown to Clemson. Last season, they lost only to Penn State, in the final minute.

"For a long while," says Rozier, "I thought the refs cheated us in the Penn State game. But I finally came to realize that refs don't win or lose. You do." For a moment, he is in thought. "We have a God-given talent. Where else could it come from? You're taught the plays, the holes, but not how to run. We're beatable--everybody is--but I think we're special."

Not the victory but the action. Not the goal but the game. In the deed the glory. --By Tom Callahan

*J.E. Shue and J.G. Yont were Nebraska stalwarts in 1893. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.