Huskers and Midwestern Life

Outside work Brent O’Mara hunts, fishes and plays golf, and he is a devoted Nebraska Cornhuskers fan. The entries in this subject are about the Nebraska behind those interests: the football program and its stadium, the volleyball team, the open country and the state fair, written as general education from the published record.

The name came before the titles. Huskers.com recounts that Nebraska’s teams were the Bugeaters through the 1890s until a Lincoln sportswriter, tired of the term, borrowed Cornhuskers from a name Iowa had sometimes used; the 1900 team was the first to carry it, and it later became the state’s own nickname.¹ The same site lists five national championships in football: 1970, 1971, 1994, 1995 and 1997, each settled in a bowl game.²

The stadium has a story of its own. The University of Nebraska Lincoln marked the centennial of Memorial Stadium in 2023, recalling that it was built as a memorial to Nebraskans lost in the First World War, hosted its first game on October 13, 1923 with 31,000 seats, and grew through expansions in the 1960s, 2006 and 2013 to hold roughly 85,000; on game days it holds more people than any Nebraska city but two.³ The Omaha World Herald traced the home sellout streak to a homecoming crowd of 38,000 against Missouri on November 3, 1962, counted 347 consecutive sellouts entering 2016, and weighed the ticket prices and television habits that have tested it since.⁵ On August 30, 2023 the field became a court: The Washington Post reported that more than 92,000 people watched Nebraska play Omaha in volleyball there, a world attendance record for a women’s sporting event.⁴

The fair is older than the state. Nebraska Public Media recounts that the first fair was held in Nebraska City in 1859, eight years before statehood, that it moved among towns before resting in Lincoln from 1901 to 2009 and then in Grand Island, and that it was skipped only twice, in 1898 for Omaha’s exposition and in 1945 by wartime order.⁶

The entries in this subject are Nebraska Cornhuskers Football History, Memorial Stadium and the Sellout Streak, Husker Volleyball, Hunting and Fishing in Nebraska, Golf in Nebraska, The Nebraska State Fair and Fall Saturdays in Nebraska.