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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."