Nebraska Football is a lifestyle for people in the state of Nebraska. In Lincoln, the population given on the recent U.S. Census is 300,000 people. On a Saturday, Nebraska Memorial Stadium will sell out and be able to house 5% of the state's population of the state to watch the Scarlett and Cream go out there. Over the years, people of Nebraska have only had this to look forward to. In the major sports (Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey, and women's versions of each sport, respectively), the Nebraska Cornhuskers only have 5 national titles, all coming in football. The Nebraska Baseball and Softball teams have had varying levels of success over the years, making deep runs in the CWS and WCWS, but only getting as close as runner-up in the WCWS in 1985. This wouldn't even hold, as it would later be vacated due to ineligible players, and the NCAA would bar Nebraska from participating in the Softball postseason the following year. For the Basketball team, I am sure you heard enough about that during the March Madness season in 2026. Nebraska Men’s Basketball, to put it bluntly, has been very, very, very bad for a very, very, very long time. Until this year, we were the only team to have never won a game in the NCAA tournament, and worse than that, we have no presence of real NBA talent to ever go to the league. The women's teams have been alright over the years but never a national title contender and never truly making a run. Nebraska doesn’t even try at hockey, leaving that to its counterpart in Nebraska University of Nebraska at Omaha (Go Mavs) to pick up the slack.

For Nebraska, since 1962, the place to be is at Memorial Stadium with all of the other farmers, family, and friends to watch the Huskers succeed. For Nebraska, winning has not been a fight; it has been a lifestyle. Nebraska’s next head coach needed to be a winner and somebody who could shape and bring the school back to the glory of Osborne and Devaney. After around 1 month of searching, they found their man. A coach who had just 2 years prior been the head coach of the Super Bowl runners-up Oakland Raiders, A man who had been fired the previous season due to a 4-12 showing, and a man who would be the first outside hire in 42 years… Bill Callahan.

 

2004:

The new age has started under Head Coach Bill Callahan at Nebraska, and fans are excited to see how the new age of Nebraska Football will start… Until they don’t make a bowl game. The season would start great with a win over Western Illinois and looking good while doing it, only for the season to be upended with Southern Miss coming to town and beating the Huskers in Memorial Stadium and winning by a touchdown to put the Huskers at 1-1. The season would be up and down, with good wins against Missouri and Baylor while also having terrible losses like the 70-10 beatdown, which happened against Texas Tech, where Texas Tech would put up 49 points in the second half, which was more than Nebraska had scored in the last 3 games. The season culminated in 3 straight losses to Iowa State, Rival Oklahoma, and bigger rival Colorado. This left the Huskers at 5-6, which would leave the Huskers finished for the season early for the first time since 1969. Needless to say, Nebraska fans were calling for Callahan's head immediately after this season, saying there was a reason he was fired from the Raiders and to stop looking at 1 Super Bowl run.

The season ended early, but one thing Callahan did not do was stop after the season was over in desperate need for something to spark the program; he looked to the recruiting class to make an impact, and he found a young man from Portland, Oregon who would look to impact the game in the future. The diamond in the rough, the chosen one.

 

2005:

This season was strange when looking back on it in retrospect. Looking back, the 2005 season was much more of a success than the 2004 season simply due to making a bowl game, but reading articles and doing research tells me that this team just simply wasn’t all that good. Zac Taylor (Cincinnati Bengals Head Coach) was QB for this year and would be the following year as well, having ok success at the role, not doing anything special but not needing to due to superb defensive play. The season overall came in streaks with winning the first 4 games of the season only to stumble on the back half of the season losing to an unranked Oklahoma team and getting blown out by Kansas only to pick up the pieces and win 3 straight to end the season including a big 30-3 rivalry win over Colorado and a win over #20 ranked Michigan to officially claim the 1997 title from them. If you look at any reaction pieces from the time, you can still tell that the fans were not happy with the performance, but to be a mid-tier team is at least a step in the right direction, and your diamond in the rough redshirted it can only be up from here.

 

2006:

I was correct about going up, and for the first time in the Callahan era we are a ranked football team, being 20th to start the season. Nebraska would put in 2 easy wins against lower-level schools before the big USC vs Nebraska matchup. We would go on to lose a tight one against one of the best schools in the country but stay ranked for the majority of the season due to strong wins and tight losses, including a 2-point loss to a #5-ranked Texas team. Nebraska would finish the regular season with 3 straight wins, including over rival Colorado to claim their first birth in the Big 12 title game against Oklahoma, who would beat them by 14 in a strong defensive battle. This left Nebraska going to Texas for a birth in the Cotton Bowl against #10-ranked Auburn. Auburn got the win on strong defensive performances, including a 7-3 win over #6-ranked LSU at the time. Zac Taylor didn’t have enough, as only 3 points were scored in the second half of the 17-14 win for Auburn. People started to look at Nebraska in a new way. What is the mountain top, and does the bar need to be moved for a team struggling to even make a shot at the title game… oh, how they didn’t know the future.

 

2007:

The train is off the tracks, and it's heading straight for a cliff! Nebraska would start the season off ranked 20th in the country and, after 2 wins over Nevada and Wake Forest, would get another chance against USC, only this time to upset the #1 team in the country. Memorial Stadium was packed up for a night game, which started early with Corso and the Gameday team being in town for the huge matchup. Tom Osborne, the Athletic Director, was unhappy with the team coming to town, seeing it as a distraction. Corso would don the USC helmet, picking them to win over Nebraska, which would be true as fans started flooding out before the 4th started, with USC being up 42-10 at the start of the 4th. Nebraska would make it look closer, scoring 3 touchdowns and ending the game at 42-31, but fans knew this wasn’t the Nebraska they knew. It would only get worse from there, with Nebraska winning 2 more easy games before dropping the next 5 in a row, including a truly terrible 76-39 loss to Kansas, which would be the most a team has ever scored against the Huskers. They would rebound by winning 73-31 against Kansas State but then go and lose to Colorado 65-51. Ending an absolutely miserable season again at 5-7. The day after the season ended, Bill Callahan would go into Osborne's office. The meeting reportedly only took 5-10 minutes, and by mid-afternoon, Callahan was out of the building with all of his belongings and a buyout check for 3.1 million dollars for the final 2 years of his contract.

Fans were hoping to see a new age of College Football in the Cornhusker state and instead got an uninspired head coach who struggled at the college level. How would they recover, and what would happen to the diamond in the rough, the answer to the problem? How would Nebraska get back on track to be a National Title contender after a coaching tenure like Callahan's? The answer was rage!