Please indulge me for a short thread on *gasp* Nebraska.

So Spencer's right. Nebraska revolutionized S&C in 1969 and promptly won national championships in 1970 and 1971.

At the time, there were 8 games per week on national television. https://twitter.com/edsbs/status/1381940017078140930

That run of success in the 1970s and early 1980s made Nebraska a TV team on a nearly-weekly basis in a time where there weren't many teams that were allowed on TV. That allowed Nebraska a national recruiting presence, and national recruiting, in a time of unlimited scholarships.

In 1973, due to Title IX, the NCAA started limiting the number of scholarships for football, first 105 in 1972, then 95 in 1978.

That probably only helped Nebraska, at least initially, because in-state kids were desperate to walk on and out-of-state kids could still have mom and dad watch on TV every week in a time before cheap, accessible air travel allowed parents to easily just fly to games.

Other teams could duplicate Nebraska's S&C program. But they couldn't duplicate the walk-on program, or (most importantly) the TV presence.

That is, until Nebraska was done in by its historic rival: The Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma.

OU sued the NCAA in antitrust to remove the TV restrictions, and won at the Supreme Court in 1984. ESPN began showing games two months later. The cartel was broken, and suddenly anyone could be on TV so long as there was a camera and satellite space.

Nebraska hung on based on tradition, Tom Osborne, and recruiting ties into the South and California for a generation. Tradition dies hard in college football. But it's no coincidence that Nebraska played its last game of national relevance exactly 18 years after BOR was decided.

That run of success in the 1970s (after revolutionizing S&C training) was the wellspring for an unprecedented competitive advantage built on Devaney's coaching and the NCAA TV monopoly. 30 years after the monopoly was ended, the advantages gained from it are all gone.

Nothing sums up the change more than Osborne coming, hat in hand, to Jim Delany and asking to get some of that filthy BTN lucre. The once-mighty beneficiary of a TV monopoly now asking for a cut of the proceeds from that monopoly's disintegration.

And now it's just another program in a small state with a small recruiting base, without any real resonance outside the area, losing some in-state recruits to other schools, grabbing at whatever the Next Hot Thing is to bring back an historical dominance that can never be rebuilt

Happy Scott Frost Day, everyone.

fin