Big Ten media days are upon us. The festivities begin in Indianapolis on July 23. USC will be there. It’s time for the Trojans to get to know their Big Ten neighbors, even the ones which only recently moved into the neighborhood. Nebraska has not been a longtime Big Ten school, so the program’s greatest football moments naturally occurred long before Big Ten membership existed.
Nebraska was an elite college football program from the early 1960s through the 2002 Rose Bowl against Miami, a period of roughly 40 years. In that 40-year period, which moment was the biggest?
There are three candidates. One is the 1994 national championship victory over Miami in the 1995 Orange Bowl. That moment carries emotional weight in Nebraska because coach Tom Osborne, after more than 20 years of trying, finally won his first national championship. That might be the most meaningful moment in Nebraska football history.
The 1996 Fiesta Bowl win over Florida confirmed the 1995 Huskers as the greatest college football team in modern times. Only 2001 Miami rivals Nebraska in terms of juggernaut-level talent. Anyone who saw that 1995 NU team knows it is one of the greatest teams ever assembled.
Yet, the greatest moment — both profoundly satisfying within the Nebraska family yet resonant and important on a national scale — might be the 1971 Thanksgiving game against the Oklahoma Sooners. In a back-and-forth classic, the Huskers had the final say, winning 35-31 against their storied rival on the prairie. The game is still talked about more than 50 years later. It was called a “Game of the Century,” as were a select few other college football games of the era. This one lived up to the billing more than any other.
Having defeated Oklahoma in an epic battle, the 1972 Orange Bowl was comparatively easy for NU. Nebraska crushed Bear Bryant’s Alabama team 38-6 to complete a 13-0 season and win the national title. The 1971 Huskers were back-to-back champions. A program which was irrelevant 10 years earlier had truly become a colossus under patriarch Bob Devaney, who then handed the reins to Osborne to continue Nebraska’s long reign as a college football power.
You can’t really go wrong choosing any of those options, but we’ll take 1971, if only because that moment established Nebraska football at an elite level. Osborne’s successes might have been more spectacular, but they stood on the shoulders of what Bob Devaney started in Lincoln.
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