Thoughts on Rivalry

Husker-hater AJ has many, many issues, but he hit upon something the other day that I thought merited some thought. I know a little of how he feels (he is a Mizzou fan but has lived in Ohaha for 20 years or so) having lived in Ohio for three years before escaping home.

"So WHO IS Nebraska's rival? The answer? Nobody. That is your whole problem. You people have absolutely nobody to tell you how much you suck...how much they dispise you...how much you resemble a steaming pile of dog shit...OTHER than me. You have no other opposing team red-marking your rifle team's visit just so they can scream you down."

In response, I would say that for starters, one reason is that the Big 12 robbed us of our one true rival, OU; even if OU-UT is bigger to them, it was ALWAYS the biggest game to us. The biggest reason we don't have a rival is that we've been spoiled having been so good for so long that no one can compete, at least not in football. We're one of only 4 schools with 800 victories (801-321-40, for a .706 winnning percentage) and we have losing records against only 2 conference schools (OU, 37-42-3 & UT, 4-7). In order to be rivals, you have to get beaten once in a while by the competition.

Big 12 North? We're 353-104-12 (.765, if you split the ties in the W/L column) all time against the North schools, and 48-12 (.800) against them since the Big 12 merger, while being only 22-14 (.611) vs the South, thanks mostly to a 1-6 record vs UT. (We'd be .724 if you threw out the record vs. UT). We're 102-58-4 vs the South schools all-time, good for a .634 percentage. So even though we've been down a bit recently, we've actually been better against the North than our historical average, and pretty close to historical against the South.

I have to give some props to K-St though; we're only 6-5 against them since the merger, so I guess if we have to have a rival, they might be it. We're 7-3 against CU over the same period, and 13-6-1 over the last 20 (1986 is the year the broke through and finally beat us after 20+ years of futility). All I know is that everyone (in the North, anyway) guns for NU and tears down the goalposts if they beat us, so by that measure, anyway, we're everyone's rival, we NU fans just don't notice.