After an eight-year postseason drought, bowl-bound Nebraska has plenty to be thankful for

Matt Rhule has turned around every college football program he has coached, leading Temple and Baylor to bowl games in his second season. But changing the trajectory of blueblood like Nebraska? That took a bit more work.

“It’s the same arc and trajectory, but this one weighs a little heavier on you because of the history of it,” Rhule told CBS Sports this week.

After eight years, four athletic directors, three head coaches, and enough frustrating close losses to fill a lifetime (a 7-29 in one-score games over the last five seasons), Nebraska finally has reason to celebrate. The Huskers (6-5) ended the nation’s longest bowl drought among Power Five teams with a 44-25 win last week against Wisconsin, but not without some trepidation.

“Everybody felt it was inevitable, but there’s so much PTSD built up over the last seven years, people were beginning to question i — even during the game — until that interception at the very end,” Nebraska athletic director Troy Dannen said. “People were used to waiting for bad things to happen.”

In a suite filled with friends and National Guardsmen, comedian, actor and lifelong Nebraska fan Dan “Larry the Cable Guy” Whitney watched as fans stormed the field — something he couldn’t have imagined happening in the 1990s, when Tom Osborne was winning conference and national titles.

“It was the coolest thing,” said Whitney, perhaps the most famous Nebraska fan on the planet. “It was almost like we won the national championship. I know that’s sad, especially for people like me in my age group that started at probably four or five years old. … My first 42 years of Nebraska, we won nine, 10, 12 games a year and went to a New Year’s bowl game almost every year. It was expected. I mean, you lost two games (and) you were devastated.”

Times have changed. A generation of Husker fans has never celebrated a conference title. For the younger crowd, looking to celebrate anything, Saturday finally delivered an opportunity.

‘You’ve got to start small’

It was a gigantic moment for a program with the resources needed to achieve so much more, even if those outside the small state do not understand “GBR.” While fans across the country spend this Thanksgiving debating College Football Playoff seeding and national rankings, Nebraska fans are ecstatic just to have the basics.

Take linebacker John Bullock, a sixth-year senior and Nebraska native who began his career as a walk-on. Imagine the emotions running through his body when the Huskers, a program he lived and breathed as a child, finally reached bowl eligibility in the second-to-last week of the season. He was told to temper expectations for years, only to be teased with success before repeatedly falling short. Twice, he had fallen one game shy of a bowl game. As a freshman in 2019, Iowa players blew the Huskers kisses after a game-winning field goal inside Memorial Stadium ended their bowl hopes in the season finale.

“You’ve got to start somewhere, and you’ve got to start small,” Bullock said. “You can’t just go from being one of the worst Power Four teams in college football to being one of the best. It just takes time. And over time, I think eventually we’ll get there, and I know we’ll get there.”

Conveying Nebraska’s importance to the sport is difficult, especially as other blue bloods maintained dominance while the Huskers stumbled in the dark for 25 years. Nebraska’s immense collection of trophies and banners are visual reminders, but many weren’t alive to witness the Huskers win five national championships and 46 conference titles under greats like Osborne, Bob Devaney and Frank Solich.

“I tell everybody that I never get star struck,” Whitney said. “I meet all kinds of famous people and work with them, and it’s no big deal. But, man, one time I had to go talk to the Nebraska football team and do a couple jokes. I was so stinkin’ nervous. It’s the Huskers! Are you kidding me?”

Lincoln, Nebraska, has always been a football mecca. The championship DNA instilled by Osborne vanished after the 1990s – a decade when he won three national titles in his final four seasons. He left as college football’s winningest active coach in 1997.

“Nebraska’s done it as much as anybody over the course of time, but sometimes you get a little spoiled and you forget to appreciate what it means,” Dannen said. “It was a way of life for a lot of people, and now they get to go back and grab a part of what they remember.”

Winning streaks, like Nebraska’s bowl drought, are destined to end someday. Nothing lasts forever.

“Those things start to obviously weigh on you, and you feel a responsibility to get it done,” Rhule said. “We’re kind of on track. The guys are getting better, and it’s kind of what we’ve done at previous spots.”

‘Everything happens when it’s supposed to happen’

Consider the strife within the fan base when Nebraska lost four straight games after starting 5-1 this season. Déjà vu loomed large. Was Nebraska going to stumble and miss a bowl game again?

“Everything happens when it’s supposed to happen,” Rhule said. “Going through that losing streak, as much as it sucked, it also made us better. Our guys were chasing and pushing and working harder and harder and harder to get to this point.”

There was the 56-7 blowout at Indiana, then a fourth-quarter lead at Ohio State that the Huskers couldn’t hold. Then came a devastating one-possession loss at home to UCLA and another on the road at USC. Meanwhile, fans continued to show up at Memorial Stadium, stretching the school’s record streak of sellouts to 403 games.

“It’s pretty remarkable to consider how loyal the fan base has been because there’s so many things that the program has done that would turn off a fan base, but people keep coming back, and they’re going to stay,” said Gary Sharp, a longtime sports talk radio host in Nebraska.

Rhule knows what’s next: higher expectations. The baseline for Nebraska moving forward is six wins. The Huskers can surpass that Friday against rival Iowa on the road.

“We hope that at some point we make the College Football Playoff, but with where we are right now and what the last eight years have been like, this was a huge moment,” Rhule said. 

Freshman quarterback Dylan Raiola was less shy about his goals next year. 

“Playoffs next year,” he blurted out Saturday at a press conference. “Simple as that.”

Rhule grew emotional after the game, fighting back tears as he discussed his longtime seniors finally qualifying for a bowl game. Later, he walked his dog downtown and saw people still partying in the streets late Saturday night. It all seemed surreal, he admitted.

They hope the postseason becomes routine for Nebraska, even if it took nearly a decade to get back in the habit.

“We don’t even really have a bowl handbook,” Dannen laughed. “There’ve been four ADs since the last time we were in a bowl game. Recreating procedures and operations for traveling and everything else, it’s almost like starting from scratch.”

It’s a start.