Nebraska Football: The Fans Are Right, Nebraska Is the Best Program Ever

After further review, Nebraska is the best program in anything. Ever.

Better than the New York Yankees. Better than the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. Better than Manchester United's 19 English league titles. 

Ask their fans. If you say something negative about the Nebraska football program, you may as well be an illegal facing unconstitutional Unicameral legislation.

Nebraska is better than Notre Dame. No, Nebraska IS the Notre Dame west of the Mississippi. Nebraska is better than Southern Cal. 

Husker Nation is its own religion. The pulse of the entire state lives their lives on the success or failure of kids playing a silly little game.

These fans, of course, scared Notre Dame so bad during the Knute Rockne-era that the Fighting Irish had to cancel the series. Notre Dame scheduled Southern Cal instead, and the rest is history. 

Nebraska is better than Oklahoma. Nebraska won two Big XII titles; Oklahoma won seven during the decade and a half of the original Big XII. A 2-4 record in Big XII title games is better than anything imaginable.

Nebraska is better than Texas, despite only beating them one time during the Big XII era. Nebraska fans site the 1974 Cotton Bowl and the 1999 Big XII title games as the reason. In the 1974 Cotton Bowl, Fremonter Ritch Bahe scored a touchdown.

His mother was my kindergarten teacher in Fremont. Mrs. Bahe, a Fremont legend along with her late husband Al, brought in his jersey from that game as show-and-tell. 

This lad was in awe.

The Big XII South Division won the last seven Big XII Championship games, which doesn’t count. Evidently. 

The Huskers got tired of Texas and Oklahoma owning the league, so the Big Ten is better. Nebraska will now pick on somebody its own size, namely Iowa and Minnesota.

“Minnesota has a great program,” said Bob Devaney in the 1980s on his KETV-7 Bob Devaney Prediction Show. This, of course, not long after the Huskers beat the Gophers 84-13 on the road on a game shown locally on the aforementioned Omaha ABC affiliate.

It was on my Dad’s birthday.

Nebraska is too good to play Missouri again, especially after the Tigers were better than the Huskers pretty much the entire 21st century thus far. Missouri’s on paper resume’ is better than Nebraska’s in this century. Put the Victory Bell on eBay.

Nebraska is too good for Kansas, Kansas State, and Iowa State, too. Money still talks. 

Kansas State and Colorado have won Big XII titles in the 21st century. Nebraska has not.

Apparently, 10-4 is good enough these days in the Cornhusker state. Long gone are the days of a one-game season against Oklahoma on Thanksgiving weekend where the entire state sat in front of the television with the whole season in the balance. 

Bill Callahan was doing a great job, Husker fans. That fake punt call in the Cotton Bowl against Auburn was a gem. 

Bo Pelini has the best temper of any college football coach in the country. Pelini is the best college football coach the history of the game, most definitely at Nebraska.

Nebraska has never cheated. Once. Ever.

1984 Orange Bowl? Nah, didn’t happen. 

I had tickets to that game. Couldn’t go because of a snowstorm.

Nebraska is clean. Every single one of the other programs in major college sports cheats, but not Nebraska.

Steroid-filled fullbacks from Brainard don’t count. Steroid-filled Eight-Man linemen don’t count either.

Quarterback Taylor Martinez will win the Heisman Trophy in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Martinez is better than former Heisman winner Eric Crouch. Martinez is better than Turner Gill and Tommie Frazier, hands down. 

The fans don’t realize that this writer drove from Rapid City, South Dakota straight through to Shreveport, Louisiana, to see John David Booty and Jacob Hester play at Evangel Christian Academy. The next day, he went to the Texas A&M game in College Station. 

Still trying to figure out how they won that game. It was on TBS, met Craig Sager on the field afterwards. You know, the time where the Nebraska fans invaded Kyle Field, only to be leveled by A&M cadets. 

This writer attended the Troy State—as it was called at the time—in 2003. Thanks to a great friend that played college football under former Nebraska offensive coordinator Shawn Watson at Southern Illinois, he realized Nebraska was getting pounded by inferior talent up front.

That was the game Jordan Congdon hit the upright three times in warm-ups and twice again during the game.

This is the guy that refuses to watch the two-point conversion in the 1984 Orange Bowl. I was luckily spared from the pain that would have followed for the rest of my life.

I have no clue what I’m talking about. At all.

His favorite Husker team was the 1983 Scoring Explosion team. They were the best ever to play in college football, but money talks.

Speculation, of course. Mike Rozier and Irving Fryar switching jerseys in warmups before the game had nothing to do with anything, right? 

He wishes he could have seen the best ever college football player to lace up cleats, Omaha-native Johnny Rodgers. He wishes he could have been in attendance on Thanksgiving Day 1971, a game where Oklahoma fans are proud to say they were second best on the day.

It was the greatest game ever played.

When you cross Nebraska fans, they don’t forget. When you speak the truth about its program, it only leads to problems.

Good luck in the Big Ten, Nebraska. I truly hope they win it every year. I hate the Big Ten so bad that I cannot follow my once-beloved Huskers to new territory.

I apologize for seeing college football as the farce it is, modern-day slavery. I cannot continue to support something that makes millions off of college students that are supposed to be "Student-Athletes."