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100 Things Nebraska Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die
The University of Nebraska–Lincoln is one of the most storied and decorated football programs in NCAA history—since its inception in 1890, the program has claimed five National Championships, all of which are explored in this essential guide, along with the personalities, events, and facts that any and every Cornhuskers fan should know. The book recalls the key moments and players from Tom Osborne’s reign on the Nebraska sidelines from the 1970s to the 1990s—an unprecedented period that included 13 conference championships and three national championships—as well as the program’s early years and recent success under head coach Bo Pelini. Author Sean Callahan also includes the unforgettable players who have worn the Scarlet and Cream, including Johnny Rodgers, Mike Rozier, Tommie Frazier, and Ndamukong Suh. More than a century of team history is distilled to capture the essential moments, highlighting the personalities, games, rivalries, and plays that have come together to make Nebraska one of college football’s legendary programs.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
2 people are currently reading
16 people want to read
About the author
Sean Callahan
2 books2 followersSean Callahan has covered Nebraska football since 1999. He currently is the publisher of HuskerOnline.com, which is a part of the Rivals.com network. In addition, he reports for KETV Channel 7 (ABC) in Omaha, Nebraska, along with Big Red Radio 1110 KFAB in Omaha. A 2003 graduate of Nebraska, Callahan also serves as a sideline reporter for NET and as a recruiting analyst for their weekly Husker show, Big Red Wrap-Up. A two-time Nebraska Sportswriter of the Year, Callahan grew up in Omaha, and he and his wife, Lisa, and daughter, Kit, currently reside in Lincoln, Nebraska.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 24, 2023
This book is a winner! IyIt comes as advertised. It is very well written and it has a level of detail that is admirable.
Because I live in Nebraska, I have been to many of the bars recommended. I highly recommend.
Because I live in Nebraska, I have been to many of the bars recommended. I highly recommend.
December 17, 2025
In the thick of college football’s endless argument about what matters – trophies, talent, tradition, television – “100 Things Nebraska Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die” keeps returning to a quieter, stubborn metric: the way a place chooses to show up.
Sean Callahan, a long-time Nebraska football reporter, structures this volume as 100 compact entries – part memory book, part media guide, part pilgrimage list – meant to be dipped into as much as read straight through. Nebraska football, as Callahan presents it, is not one clean narrative but a cabinet of reliquaries: a game, a coach, a walk-on, a ritual, a moment when the state seems to inhale at once. The prose favors momentum and access: dates arrive quickly, voices appear in tidy quotations, and the book’s most natural gesture is the one it makes in a stadium – a turn toward the crowd, asking you to remember along with it.
A few formal devices repeat. Callahan likes a brisk definition up top, a quick run of context, then a turn toward an anecdote that can live in the mouth – something you might tell a friend in the concourse. He even labels some chapters with the genial seriousness of a tour guide, offering “Fun Facts to chew on,” as if this were not only history but a meal you’re meant to share. In that sense the book is less a single argument than a set of invitations: to remember, to visit, to argue, to keep talking.
There is, too, an organizing confidence in the sequence. Callahan opens with institutional anchors – the sellout streak, then the two defining coaching figures of the modern program, Tom Osborne and Bob Devaney, before turning to a concentrated period of excellence and a handful of program-making myths. The ordering feels like a guided tour: you walk through the front doors of Memorial Stadium, you’re shown the trophies, and then you’re handed a map of the rooms where the stories live.
The opening emblem is the sellout streak, which Callahan treats not as trivia but as connective tissue. Heading into the 2013 season, he writes, Nebraska had sold out an NCAA-record 325 consecutive games at Memorial Stadium, a run dating back to November 3, 1962. He marks the milestones – 100 in 1979, 200 in 1994, 300 in 2009 – and frames the streak as “what bridges the past and the present together.” In Callahan’s hands, even a number becomes a kind of doctrine: if you keep coming, the story stays alive.
Callahan’s best entries insist that a legendary program is made not only by greatness but by the specific ways greatness is remembered. His chapter on the 1971 “Game of the Century” opens with a statistic that now feels like folklore: a national television audience of 55 million viewers watching Nebraska beat Oklahoma 35–31 on Thanksgiving. He doesn’t stop at the bigness. He gives you the anatomy of the classic – Johnny Rodgers’ 72-yard punt return and the way individual moments became permanent infrastructure in the mind. He also lingers on the claim Nebraska likes to make about itself: that the game was played hard and played clean, with only one penalty accepted. The implication is clear. This is football at its hardest, played at its cleanest, and the purity is part of the myth Nebraska carries forward.
That myth is everywhere in the book’s recurring preoccupation with sportsmanship. Callahan quotes a line attributed to the late Beano Cook that captures Nebraska’s self-image in miniature: “The two best things to ever come out of Nebraska are Johnny Carson and sportsmanship.” It is a laugh line and a credo at once. At its worst, it risks turning the program into a bumper sticker. At its best, it becomes a standard the book keeps measuring itself against: how do traditions survive when the culture is under pressure? Callahan often answers by showing a system that tried, deliberately, to socialize values – to make decency part of the brand rather than a happy accident.
The walk-on program is Callahan’s most persuasive answer. He emphasizes the sheer scale: even in 2013, Nebraska carried nearly 60 walk-ons alongside its 85 scholarship players, and he notes that no other program approaches the number. These players pay for their own room, board, books, and tuition, a quiet financial burden that makes the word “sacrifice” less abstract. Callahan quotes Tom Osborne’s three-word summary – “Loyalty. Motivation. Willingness to sacrifice.” He also underlines the democratic edge Osborne claimed for the system: in practice, walk-ons lived by the same rules and were treated “equal,” with the chance to rise if they could. It’s easy to romanticize this, and Callahan sometimes does. But the chapter also hints at why Nebraska’s mythology has staying power: it offers a story of belonging that is not purely transactional.
If “100 Things Nebraska Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die” were only an archive of dominance, it would risk becoming a red-and-cream altar. Callahan avoids that trap, partly, by returning again and again to the human scale of the program – to the way a state invests meaning in people who are, at the end of the day, young and breakable.
The chapter on Brook Berringer is a case study in Nebraska’s affection for the unglamorous role. Callahan recounts the backup quarterback’s steadiness behind Tommie Frazier, and then the sudden rupture: on April 18, 1996, Berringer died in a plane crash outside Lincoln, two days before the spring game that became a memorial service. Callahan includes Osborne’s recollection that the death shook the team profoundly, puncturing the athletes’ feeling of being bulletproof. It is an unusually sobering entry for a book designed as a celebratory compendium, and it works precisely because Callahan doesn’t overplay the grief. He reports it plainly, letting the plainness do the moral work.
A similar ethic underlies the story of Matt Davison’s miracle catch at Missouri in 1997, a play that preserved a season’s momentum and, in hindsight, helped send Osborne out as a champion. Callahan narrates the drive and the deflection, then lets Davison describe the sensation: the ball “floating like a punt,” time seeming to stretch, and then the admission – simple, practical, and faintly cosmic – “I dived and I guess the Lord was watching over me.” Callahan understands what these moments do for a program. They become shorthand, the kind of story fans tell not to prove athleticism but to describe the feeling of fate briefly cooperating.
The book’s affection for greatness extends beyond skill to craft. In one of its more quietly revealing profiles, Callahan sketches Dave Rimington not only as an award collector but as a physical standard, quoting a former assistant’s memory that Rimington arrived “extremely strong,” already lifting seriously since seventh grade. The anecdote is typical Callahan: specific enough to feel real, short enough to keep moving. It also hints at what the book sometimes wants to say without quite saying it – that Nebraska’s dominance depended on an institutional seriousness (training, preparation, repetition) that other programs were slower to treat as culture.
Even in the modern era, when college football can feel like a machine for producing brands, Callahan keeps circling the question of what Nebraska chooses to admire. He makes generosity part of the legend, noting Ndamukong Suh’s $2.6 million donation to the university in April 2010, with $2 million directed to the football program and $600,000 for the College of Engineering. The detail reads like one of Callahan’s core arguments in miniature: the best Nebraska figures, in the program’s preferred self-portrait, are those who give something back to the institution that formed them.
Nowhere is Callahan’s affection more vivid than in his attention to ritual, the choreography of devotion. The Tunnel Walk, now so embedded in Nebraska home Saturdays that it can feel inevitable, is presented as an invented tradition – a made thing that became real because it created a feeling. Callahan traces it to 1994 and explains how the creators wanted to bring fans “to a place they can’t go,” into the tunnel itself, capturing the team coming through and slapping the lucky horseshoe on the way out. By the time Callahan gets to the late-stage polish – the music, the timing, the way the moment is engineered to lift the crowd – the ritual feels less like pageantry than like a program’s self-definition, a mix of sincerity and showmanship.
What the list format does especially well is honor the way fandom actually works. Devotion rarely arrives as a lecture. It arrives as a sequence of stories you overhear, absorb, repeat, and revise. Callahan’s entries mimic that social rhythm. You can open to any number and feel the familiar acceleration: a name, a year, a tiny detail that clicks a larger memory into place. Read cover to cover, the book becomes a panorama of the program’s self-conception. Read in small doses, it behaves like a pocket archive – something you carry, not something you finish.
These chapters show the book at its best: honoring the mechanics of memory. Callahan writes as someone who believes that a program’s greatness is not an abstract claim but a series of lived scenes, and he wants to hand those scenes to you intact, as if passing down keepsakes. He is warm without being gushy; proud without being fully blind. He is also unusually attentive to the way Nebraska’s story depends on the interplay between spectacle and character – the roar in the stadium and the ethic that is supposed to outlast a bad season.
Still, the book’s virtues are also its limitations. The “100 Things” format invites breadth more than depth, and the tone – affable, protective, eager to celebrate – can feel like it steers around the messier corners of program history. Callahan is excellent at building pride through detail, less interested in sitting with contradiction. The chapters often function as affirmations: Nebraska was special, Nebraska behaved a certain way, Nebraska built something unlike anywhere else. One can hear the editor in that choice, the careful avoidance of sourness. For a reader looking for a more skeptical interrogation of the institution – the pressures, the compromises, the ways mythology can shade into self-excuse – the book will sometimes feel like it is politely changing the subject.
There is, too, the inevitable problem of dating. Callahan’s present tense, in a book published in 2013, is part of its charm – you can feel the season looming behind the sentences – but it can also read like a time capsule. His projection that Nebraska was “on target to hit 400 consecutive sellouts some time in 2024” is both confidence and artifact. Devotion books age differently than histories; they preserve not only what happened, but what people believed would keep happening.
And yet the book’s central wager remains persuasive. Nebraska fandom, as Callahan frames it, does not require novelty. It requires recognition. That is why so many chapters function as acts of naming: here is the thing you remember, here is the thing you should know, here is the thing you should do. The book does not pretend every entry is equally essential. It trusts the reader to bring their own hierarchy – to circle what matters, to argue with the choices, to feel the jolt of personal memory when a name or a date lands with unexpected force.
For readers outside Husker Nation, the book’s appeal is less the scoreboard than the sociology. Nebraska football has long functioned as a public square in a state that is geographically wide and demographically small. Callahan writes from inside that reality, so he does not overexplain it; he assumes it. But the assumption is instructive. Again and again, the chapters suggest that the program’s most important accomplishment is not simply winning, but building a shared language: a ritual you can point to, a story you can recognize, a story that tells strangers they belong in the same room.
The cumulative effect is a kind of controlled sentiment. Each chapter is modest on its own – a few pages, a small arc – but the accumulation starts to feel like a portrait of how a community maintains itself. Callahan is not pretending to be a novelist, and he rarely reaches for metaphor; his gift is closer to curation. He chooses scenes that can survive retelling, and he presents them with the clean confidence of someone who has watched the same memories move through generations. When the chapters are strongest, they do what good sports writing often does: locate the key fact, find the human voice, move on before the moment curdles into sermon.
As literature, “100 Things Nebraska Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die” is not trying to be a comprehensive history or a critical biography of a program. It is trying to be a mirror that flatters without entirely lying – a book that recognizes Nebraska’s grandeur while keeping one eye on the vulnerability that comes with having something so central to a state’s identity. That modesty of ambition is, in the end, part of its success. I’d put it at an 81 out of 100: sturdy, affectionate, and often surprisingly vivid about why sports, at their best, become a form of communal memory.
Sean Callahan, a long-time Nebraska football reporter, structures this volume as 100 compact entries – part memory book, part media guide, part pilgrimage list – meant to be dipped into as much as read straight through. Nebraska football, as Callahan presents it, is not one clean narrative but a cabinet of reliquaries: a game, a coach, a walk-on, a ritual, a moment when the state seems to inhale at once. The prose favors momentum and access: dates arrive quickly, voices appear in tidy quotations, and the book’s most natural gesture is the one it makes in a stadium – a turn toward the crowd, asking you to remember along with it.
A few formal devices repeat. Callahan likes a brisk definition up top, a quick run of context, then a turn toward an anecdote that can live in the mouth – something you might tell a friend in the concourse. He even labels some chapters with the genial seriousness of a tour guide, offering “Fun Facts to chew on,” as if this were not only history but a meal you’re meant to share. In that sense the book is less a single argument than a set of invitations: to remember, to visit, to argue, to keep talking.
There is, too, an organizing confidence in the sequence. Callahan opens with institutional anchors – the sellout streak, then the two defining coaching figures of the modern program, Tom Osborne and Bob Devaney, before turning to a concentrated period of excellence and a handful of program-making myths. The ordering feels like a guided tour: you walk through the front doors of Memorial Stadium, you’re shown the trophies, and then you’re handed a map of the rooms where the stories live.
The opening emblem is the sellout streak, which Callahan treats not as trivia but as connective tissue. Heading into the 2013 season, he writes, Nebraska had sold out an NCAA-record 325 consecutive games at Memorial Stadium, a run dating back to November 3, 1962. He marks the milestones – 100 in 1979, 200 in 1994, 300 in 2009 – and frames the streak as “what bridges the past and the present together.” In Callahan’s hands, even a number becomes a kind of doctrine: if you keep coming, the story stays alive.
Callahan’s best entries insist that a legendary program is made not only by greatness but by the specific ways greatness is remembered. His chapter on the 1971 “Game of the Century” opens with a statistic that now feels like folklore: a national television audience of 55 million viewers watching Nebraska beat Oklahoma 35–31 on Thanksgiving. He doesn’t stop at the bigness. He gives you the anatomy of the classic – Johnny Rodgers’ 72-yard punt return and the way individual moments became permanent infrastructure in the mind. He also lingers on the claim Nebraska likes to make about itself: that the game was played hard and played clean, with only one penalty accepted. The implication is clear. This is football at its hardest, played at its cleanest, and the purity is part of the myth Nebraska carries forward.
That myth is everywhere in the book’s recurring preoccupation with sportsmanship. Callahan quotes a line attributed to the late Beano Cook that captures Nebraska’s self-image in miniature: “The two best things to ever come out of Nebraska are Johnny Carson and sportsmanship.” It is a laugh line and a credo at once. At its worst, it risks turning the program into a bumper sticker. At its best, it becomes a standard the book keeps measuring itself against: how do traditions survive when the culture is under pressure? Callahan often answers by showing a system that tried, deliberately, to socialize values – to make decency part of the brand rather than a happy accident.
The walk-on program is Callahan’s most persuasive answer. He emphasizes the sheer scale: even in 2013, Nebraska carried nearly 60 walk-ons alongside its 85 scholarship players, and he notes that no other program approaches the number. These players pay for their own room, board, books, and tuition, a quiet financial burden that makes the word “sacrifice” less abstract. Callahan quotes Tom Osborne’s three-word summary – “Loyalty. Motivation. Willingness to sacrifice.” He also underlines the democratic edge Osborne claimed for the system: in practice, walk-ons lived by the same rules and were treated “equal,” with the chance to rise if they could. It’s easy to romanticize this, and Callahan sometimes does. But the chapter also hints at why Nebraska’s mythology has staying power: it offers a story of belonging that is not purely transactional.
If “100 Things Nebraska Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die” were only an archive of dominance, it would risk becoming a red-and-cream altar. Callahan avoids that trap, partly, by returning again and again to the human scale of the program – to the way a state invests meaning in people who are, at the end of the day, young and breakable.
The chapter on Brook Berringer is a case study in Nebraska’s affection for the unglamorous role. Callahan recounts the backup quarterback’s steadiness behind Tommie Frazier, and then the sudden rupture: on April 18, 1996, Berringer died in a plane crash outside Lincoln, two days before the spring game that became a memorial service. Callahan includes Osborne’s recollection that the death shook the team profoundly, puncturing the athletes’ feeling of being bulletproof. It is an unusually sobering entry for a book designed as a celebratory compendium, and it works precisely because Callahan doesn’t overplay the grief. He reports it plainly, letting the plainness do the moral work.
A similar ethic underlies the story of Matt Davison’s miracle catch at Missouri in 1997, a play that preserved a season’s momentum and, in hindsight, helped send Osborne out as a champion. Callahan narrates the drive and the deflection, then lets Davison describe the sensation: the ball “floating like a punt,” time seeming to stretch, and then the admission – simple, practical, and faintly cosmic – “I dived and I guess the Lord was watching over me.” Callahan understands what these moments do for a program. They become shorthand, the kind of story fans tell not to prove athleticism but to describe the feeling of fate briefly cooperating.
The book’s affection for greatness extends beyond skill to craft. In one of its more quietly revealing profiles, Callahan sketches Dave Rimington not only as an award collector but as a physical standard, quoting a former assistant’s memory that Rimington arrived “extremely strong,” already lifting seriously since seventh grade. The anecdote is typical Callahan: specific enough to feel real, short enough to keep moving. It also hints at what the book sometimes wants to say without quite saying it – that Nebraska’s dominance depended on an institutional seriousness (training, preparation, repetition) that other programs were slower to treat as culture.
Even in the modern era, when college football can feel like a machine for producing brands, Callahan keeps circling the question of what Nebraska chooses to admire. He makes generosity part of the legend, noting Ndamukong Suh’s $2.6 million donation to the university in April 2010, with $2 million directed to the football program and $600,000 for the College of Engineering. The detail reads like one of Callahan’s core arguments in miniature: the best Nebraska figures, in the program’s preferred self-portrait, are those who give something back to the institution that formed them.
Nowhere is Callahan’s affection more vivid than in his attention to ritual, the choreography of devotion. The Tunnel Walk, now so embedded in Nebraska home Saturdays that it can feel inevitable, is presented as an invented tradition – a made thing that became real because it created a feeling. Callahan traces it to 1994 and explains how the creators wanted to bring fans “to a place they can’t go,” into the tunnel itself, capturing the team coming through and slapping the lucky horseshoe on the way out. By the time Callahan gets to the late-stage polish – the music, the timing, the way the moment is engineered to lift the crowd – the ritual feels less like pageantry than like a program’s self-definition, a mix of sincerity and showmanship.
What the list format does especially well is honor the way fandom actually works. Devotion rarely arrives as a lecture. It arrives as a sequence of stories you overhear, absorb, repeat, and revise. Callahan’s entries mimic that social rhythm. You can open to any number and feel the familiar acceleration: a name, a year, a tiny detail that clicks a larger memory into place. Read cover to cover, the book becomes a panorama of the program’s self-conception. Read in small doses, it behaves like a pocket archive – something you carry, not something you finish.
These chapters show the book at its best: honoring the mechanics of memory. Callahan writes as someone who believes that a program’s greatness is not an abstract claim but a series of lived scenes, and he wants to hand those scenes to you intact, as if passing down keepsakes. He is warm without being gushy; proud without being fully blind. He is also unusually attentive to the way Nebraska’s story depends on the interplay between spectacle and character – the roar in the stadium and the ethic that is supposed to outlast a bad season.
Still, the book’s virtues are also its limitations. The “100 Things” format invites breadth more than depth, and the tone – affable, protective, eager to celebrate – can feel like it steers around the messier corners of program history. Callahan is excellent at building pride through detail, less interested in sitting with contradiction. The chapters often function as affirmations: Nebraska was special, Nebraska behaved a certain way, Nebraska built something unlike anywhere else. One can hear the editor in that choice, the careful avoidance of sourness. For a reader looking for a more skeptical interrogation of the institution – the pressures, the compromises, the ways mythology can shade into self-excuse – the book will sometimes feel like it is politely changing the subject.
There is, too, the inevitable problem of dating. Callahan’s present tense, in a book published in 2013, is part of its charm – you can feel the season looming behind the sentences – but it can also read like a time capsule. His projection that Nebraska was “on target to hit 400 consecutive sellouts some time in 2024” is both confidence and artifact. Devotion books age differently than histories; they preserve not only what happened, but what people believed would keep happening.
And yet the book’s central wager remains persuasive. Nebraska fandom, as Callahan frames it, does not require novelty. It requires recognition. That is why so many chapters function as acts of naming: here is the thing you remember, here is the thing you should know, here is the thing you should do. The book does not pretend every entry is equally essential. It trusts the reader to bring their own hierarchy – to circle what matters, to argue with the choices, to feel the jolt of personal memory when a name or a date lands with unexpected force.
For readers outside Husker Nation, the book’s appeal is less the scoreboard than the sociology. Nebraska football has long functioned as a public square in a state that is geographically wide and demographically small. Callahan writes from inside that reality, so he does not overexplain it; he assumes it. But the assumption is instructive. Again and again, the chapters suggest that the program’s most important accomplishment is not simply winning, but building a shared language: a ritual you can point to, a story you can recognize, a story that tells strangers they belong in the same room.
The cumulative effect is a kind of controlled sentiment. Each chapter is modest on its own – a few pages, a small arc – but the accumulation starts to feel like a portrait of how a community maintains itself. Callahan is not pretending to be a novelist, and he rarely reaches for metaphor; his gift is closer to curation. He chooses scenes that can survive retelling, and he presents them with the clean confidence of someone who has watched the same memories move through generations. When the chapters are strongest, they do what good sports writing often does: locate the key fact, find the human voice, move on before the moment curdles into sermon.
As literature, “100 Things Nebraska Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die” is not trying to be a comprehensive history or a critical biography of a program. It is trying to be a mirror that flatters without entirely lying – a book that recognizes Nebraska’s grandeur while keeping one eye on the vulnerability that comes with having something so central to a state’s identity. That modesty of ambition is, in the end, part of its success. I’d put it at an 81 out of 100: sturdy, affectionate, and often surprisingly vivid about why sports, at their best, become a form of communal memory.
May 29, 2014
Sean Callahan's 100 Things Nebraska Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die is a fun primer for not only Husker football history but everything else from favorite spots to check out at home and on the road to famous fans of the school. Most die-hard fans will know nearly all of these but it's fun to read more about them and the book would be an excellent read for those just discovering the program. I know I'll be giving it to some newbie fan friends of mine.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews