STEVE SMITH / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 6:00 pm
Happy Thanksgiving, football fans. You know what that means. It’s time for some National Football League action. Today you’ve got Lions-Falcons up in the Motor City and Cowboys-Broncos down in Big D. Oh, baby. Are you ready for some NFL football? No? Me neither.
I’ll probably watch some of the games, perhaps during commercial breaks in the “A Christmas Story” marathon. But as with any NFL broadcast, I’ll merely be looking on with academic curiosity. It’s just pro football, after all — cold, mechanical pro football, with its homogenous styles of play and its angry, belligerent fans. It could never stir the soul in the way college ball can.
That’s a typical sentiment from a Nebraskan who grew up understanding “real” football is played on Saturdays, not Sundays. And that’s why (sorry, Buff fans) we Cornhuskers will never see Colorado as our biggest rival.
Here’s a big surprise. The college game has always been more important in small states, which are hours (and, often, worlds) away from major-league cities and, therefore, the major-league mind-set. If you want to test that theory, ask 10 Nebraskans on the street who the Huskers’ big rival is. Eleven will say Oklahoma.
That’s partly a result of all those cataclysmic NU-OU showdowns over the years. But it’s also because we can recognize and understand the Sooners and their fans. Like Nebraska, OU represents a small state and has a passionate border-to-border following that only college football can cultivate. We can grasp Kansas State and its backers in that manner, too, though to a lesser degree. That, in our estimation, is how good college football rivalries are born.
Tomorrow’s opponent? We play ’em every year and have for years, but we don’t really get ’em. They’re tucked away in the Denver metroplex, and, like the Miami Hurricanes, they attract a breed of follower cut from that acerbic NFL mold. For a decent-sized chunk of CU backers, the biggest game of the week is today in Dallas, not Friday in Boulder.
I’m not suggesting hard-core Buff fans somehow don’t “get” college football. And I’ll spare the nauseating broad-stroke claim that Nebraskans are better football fans than Colorado fans. I experienced the third quarter of the K-State game at Memorial Stadium; I know what ugliness my red-clad brethren are capable of.
But when it comes down to it, Nebraska-Colorado is a clash of two football cultures — each foreign to the other — and little else. That makes for interesting media-generated storylines, pre-game jawboning by fans and a pair of fan bases hoping their schools can somehow live up to their trash talk.
From a Husker fan perspective, NU-CU is a lot like Philly-Dallas or K.C.-Oakland. That is, it’s the stuff of a good “hate game.” But it’s not the stuff of a rivalry.
Online Editor Steve Smith is the author of “Forever Red: Confessions of a Cornhusker Football Fan” and blogs at Life In The Red, a staff Weblog at HuskerExtra.com.