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"I didn't know very much about Nebraska," reflects this joyful Irishman from Michigan who restored the Cornhuskers' glory. "For instance, how pretty the city of Lincoln really is. Scenery is not exactly a coach's priority. Duffy Daugherty [who coached Michigan State for 19 years] told me the people loved football and supported the team irregardless of the record. 'Of course,' Duffy said, 'they're more friendly when you win.' " Devaney won immediately and spectacularly. After a 3-6-1 season in 1961, the Cornhuskers took nine of eleven games in Devaney's first year and triumphed 36-34 in the Gotham Bowl, over Miami, incidentally. Nebraska won the national championship in 1970 and repeated in 1971. The latter edition is commonly thought of as the best college football team of all (a panel of coaches so voted last year), and it is the mark by which the current group is being measured.
Johnny Rodgers, the Heisman Trophy-winning flanker of that time, considers this team better. "They're faster than we were," he says. "The Big Eight was the toughest conference in the world in 1971 [Oklahoma and Colorado finished second and third in the Associated Press poll], but some teams are too good to be measured just by opponents. I think our team was, and this team is. We probably had a better defense, with guys like Larry Jacobson, Rich Glover and Willie Harper. Heck, John Button [three-time All-Pro Defensive Tackle for the Dallas Cowboys] played behind Jacobson, but it's hard to be intense defensively in a 60-point game. Osborne was a brilliant offensive assistant when I was there. I think they're even better because he's even better."
Succeeding Devaney in 1973 was not an instant pleasure for Osborne, who has a Ph.D. in educational psychology, the minimum degree of learning required for understanding college football fans. Maintaining a successful football program is less romantic work than constructing one, though no less hazardous. It took ten years, but now Devaney and Osborne each own 100 victories and are coming to be regarded as equal treasures. "I'm just glad to have survived," Osborne says. "We had some 9-3 seasons that were looked at around here as pretty average." It took him a considerable while to beat Oklahoma, but now he has done it three years in a row.
Osborne is amused to hear the players say he has mellowed over the past two or three seasons. This recurring report always delights him. By the time they are seniors, the players discover to their astonishment that Osborne is not the distant man who chilled them as freshmen. A few weeks ago, before the annual game between the freshmen and the redshirts (a task force, sophomores mostly, being held out a year), the varsity formed a funnel onto the field to usher in the next generation; the pure numbers of Nebraska football players collected all in one place brought to mind both the late movie director Cecil B. De Mille and the Red Sea.