[Husker] What exactly does make Nebraska unique?

[jjhnsn31 at comcast.net]

FROM Chuck Knox:

I am asking this in all seriousness, as I have respected your opinion through 
the years on this list.  What exactly does make Nebraska unique?  If not the 
consecutive winning season streak, the bowl streak, the old 9-win streak, 
coaching continuity, etc...then what?  I am sincere in my desire to know what it is that people still find unique with Nebraska?  Being stuck with a bunch of Hawkeye fans over here in Iowa, I want some ammunition to fire at them!
 
Although the question was directed to someone specifically, I'd like to take a stab at it...

1. The Nebraska fan base is unusual, if not unique in that NU has no competition from any major professional team or any other major college.  The whole state has rallies around this team for decades.  Arkansas may be the closest similarity and there may be one or two others, but Nebraska football success for over 40 years seals this point.

2. Middle-westerners, or at least the plains states folks have always had something of a Roger Dangerfield - no respect image of their collective selves.  Kansans have had to live down the Dorothy/Todo tornado jokes, Iowa has The Music Man, and we've shared in similar cultural connections.  Someone years ago expressed exactly my thoughts and those of other ex-pats by describing the experience of taking heat about being from "hick" country then on Saturday afternoon watching the Huskers beat the tar out of some team, any team. It felt so good and always made going to work on Monday morning so much more enjoyable.

3.  The style of football played by Nebraska, at least during Osborne's better years - our ground game - was not standard college football and was recognized nationally as being distinctive. But even when announcers and fans criticized the boring, can't-come-from-behind, old-fashioned, Nebraska style of offense they had to acknowledge that it was successful and eventually was good enough for a 60-3 run.  Now THAT was unique.

4.  I've lived in a few places around the country and in each place I've met avid football fans who may have never set foot in Nebraska but are Cornhusker fans.  I met a purebred life-long Californian who could name the '71 defensive line.  He went to San Jose City College games just to watch Rich Glover coach.  Another fellow related to me many times how he became a life-time Nebraska fan late in the fourth quarter of the 1984 Orange Bowl.  I could go on and on.  It's not unique for teams to have a national (or international) following but we're talking about a university in a small-population state here.

5.  Even before 1962 when Devaney, Osborne and Solich all arrived on campus (my sophomore year BTW) the Cornhusker football team was important to Nebraskans.  Even in the heart of busy corn-picking season, my Clay County farmer father always seemed to find some piece of machinery that needed some work on Saturday afternoon. We'd pull it up behind the house, point a radio out the kitchen window and spend the afternoon fine tuning that equipment while following those Bill Jennings' and earlier teams.  We also knew that the Cornhuskers had beaten the Four Horsemen in the 20's and that there was a team back there around '02 that wasn't scored on - the whole season!

And there's more: the walk-on program, All-Americans from eight-man high school programs, in-state players who toiled on scouting teams for five years only playing in mop-up fourth quarters but received some of the biggest ovations on senior day.  

And the red.
 
Jerry Johnson
Tracy, CA
via Sutton, NE