Lincoln Feeling Nation’s Wrath

Perched atop a canary-yellow swivel seat at the downtown barber shop, “The Captain’s Chair,” the suspicious-looking sportswriter from Los Angeles plunked down $10 on Monday for the privilege of having his ears lowered--and then burned.

The hot topic: Nebraska football’s controversial entry pass into the Rose Bowl.

“Yes, Nebraska, There Is a Santa Claus,” blared the Page 1 headline in Monday’s Lincoln Journal Star.

In hair-cutting parlance, Nebraska’s margin of victory over Colorado was buzz-cut close.

Colorado?

“Biggest bunch of bellyachers I ever saw,” an old man grumbled from the next chair.

There was a temptation to ask my cutter, Gary Haun, if it were possible to trim one’s follicles to within .05 of an inch of one’s scalp, but the notion faded about the time Haun cinched up my neck bib and reached for his scissors.

Nebraska has been under siege; this was no time for in-house jokes.

“The country doesn’t like us, we’re used to it,” a bartender at the Zoo Room on P Street would say later that night.

This assault on Nebraska has been steady since Sunday’s announcement that the Cornhuskers had, through some miracle of concocted mathematics, finished second in the bowl championship series rankings and won a trip to Pasadena to play against Miami in the Jan. 3 national championship Rose Bowl game.

It set off a controversy because Nebraska nabbed the last Willy Wonka golden ticket by five one-hundredths of a BCS point over Colorado, which had defeated the Cornhuskers the day after Thanksgiving, 62-36.

It is a sensitive subject because Nebraska (11-1) did not win its conference title, is ranked fourth in both the writers’ and coaches’ polls--behind Miami, Oregon and Colorado--and jumped back into contention without having played a game since that thrashing by the Buffaloes.

Colorado is “bellyaching” that it should be playing in the Rose Bowl, as is the state of Oregon. Ducks’ Coach Mike Bellotti likened the BCS to a disease.

The outcry is pretty much a widespread outbreak, directed squarely at Nebraska, even though the Cornhuskers are unwitting pawns in this BCS charade.

“If we go out there and beat Miami, there will be a lot of naysayers who will think twice about what they said,” Haun the barber huffed as he worked his electric clippers around his one-time client’s ears. “All this stuff, we had nothing to do with.”

No argument there.

It took a truly astonishing series of events for Nebraska to get to the Rose Bowl.

“We needed four teams ranked in the top three to lose after we lost [to Colorado],” Dave Volk, Nebraska offensive tackle, said after Monday’s practice. “Five No. 2 teams lost. It’s just crazy. Everything we needed to have happen, happened.

“It started with the Oklahoma loss. That’s the one nobody expected.”

Sure enough, the day after Nebraska lost to Colorado, Oklahoma--playing at home--was upset by Oklahoma State. Then, in order, Texas, Florida and Tennessee all lost.

After the first weekend in December, Nebraska was No. 3 in the BCS standings, behind Miami and Tennessee, with a 1.49-point lead over No. 4 Colorado.

When Tennessee folded up shop Saturday, it figured that Nebraska would slide into the No. 2 spot and hold off Colorado, given that neither school had played over the weekend.

Sunday morning, though, the coaches inexplicably moved Colorado ahead of Nebraska in their poll, which meant the Colorado-Nebraska battle for No. 2 in the BCS rankings was going to be too close to call.

Nebraskans were enraged.

Volk called the coaches’ manipulation “unethical.” Of course, those voting coaches back in 1997 had dropped their No. 1 team, Michigan, after it won the Rose Bowl and awarded their share of the national title to Nebraska, a move perceived by many to be a present to retiring Coach Tom Osborne.

The anticipation of Sunday’s BCS announcement, televised live on ABC, nearly paralyzed Lincoln.

Keyuo Crayer couldn’t stand to watch.

“I don’t like to get caught up in the hoopla,” the Nebraska linebacker said. “I don’t like to get my hopes up. But my roommate’s girlfriend had the television blasting, and when I heard it was Miami-Neb in the Rose Bowl, I just went nuts.”

But the razor-slim margin--will they replace the N on Nebraska caps with .05?--immediately set off a backlash.

Consider that if just one of the eight BCS computers had rated Colorado ahead of Nebraska, the Buffaloes would have gone to the Rose Bowl.

What’s more, Colorado would have outpointed Nebraska, had Texas Christian lost to Southern Methodist Friday in what seemed a meaningless game.

Meaningless?

TCU’s victory gave Nebraska a .28 boost in the BCS because the Cornhuskers had defeated TCU this year.

TCU’s win turned out to be the difference in Nebraska edging Colorado.

Go figure.

Tempered Reaction

Nebraska fans aren’t quite sure how to act.

These are proud, hard-working, football-crazed people. The thought that something is being handed to them is anathema to their fabric. Picture in your mind that famous painting, “American Gothic,” and imagine that man with the pitchfork taking something that wasn’t his.

Football is as fundamental to Nebraskans as oxygen, and folks feel they’ve earned every breath they’ve inhaled.

“You could be in Florida or Maine,” Haun said in between snips, “but if you see a Nebraska license plate, the first thing you think of is Nebraska football. It’s the binder of the state. Where else would you see young guys, when they get married, check the football schedule first before they set the date?”

Fact is, though, most schools win national title bids on the field. If the title game is the Fiesta Bowl, fans toss tortillas in celebration.

Rest assured, on Nov. 23, in Boulder, there was no Rose Bowl rep passing out flowers in the wake of Nebraska’s loss.

The locker room was funereal. Coach Frank Solich played it straight with his boys, told them many of the goals the team had set had been lost.

“We thought our shot was gone,” Craver said. “That we had a good run but it didn’t work out. It’s just crazy how it ended up.”

The Colorado defeat was a stomach punch.

“It was like the end of the world for Nebraskans,” Steven Sipple, Nebraska beat writer for the Lincoln Journal Star, said. “It was a horrible day, a dark, dreary thing--horrific. At that point, no way anyone could have envisioned this. But now I think Nebraska has become the poster child for all that’s bad about the system.”

As a result, Lincoln reaction leans more toward utter amazement than euphoria.

Cornhusker players seem genuinely stunned and humbled.

“We really can’t ask for anything more,” tailback Dahrran Diedrick said. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime. A lot of the guys on this team thought we were out of it. This must be fate. Everything that had to happen, happened. It’s unreal. People said it was impossible, that not everyone was going to lose.

“We also knew someone was going to be mad in this scenario.”

Justice for Some?

At the steps of the Nebraska state capitol, a likeness of Abraham Lincoln stares down solemnly, hands clasped. Behind the marble statue are engraved the words of his Gettysburg address.

If justice was going to be found, or sorted out, this figured to be the spot.

The unique thing about Lincoln, the town, is, you can stop anyone on the street and become fully engaged in a conversation about Nebraska football.

They know their players, their place in football history and the intricacies of the BCS. If you had a napkin, they could probably scrawl for you a few of the Cornhuskers’ signature plays.

Cornhusker fans also know how to travel.

Last year, 30,000 Nebraska fans stormed their way into Notre Dame Stadium, that hallowed house, paying whatever price it took to turn the stadium into a sea of red.

In the press box, a very disgusted Paul Hornung said he’d never seen anything like it.

The school’s allotment of 20,000 Rose Bowl tickets is already sold out. There is talk that as many as 60,000 fans will end up in the Rose Bowl.

“The rest of the nation can stomp and scream about this,” Omaha World-Herald columnist Tom Shatel wrote, “but Nebraskans are moving full-steam ahead. Almost every flight from Nebraska to L.A. the last week of December was gone on Sunday.”

As a visitor waited Monday on the capitol steps, beneath the twilight shadow of Abe Lincoln, a 21-year-old Nebraska student named Brady Hubbard walked up. He was heading into the statehouse to collect on a liability claim, but he had no problem subjecting himself to a mini-inquiry.

Question: Do you feel guilty that Nebraska is going to the Rose Bowl?

Answer: Guilty? Why should I feel guilty? Yeah, we got lucky, but I’m very happy.

Q: Didn’t you lose to Colorado?

A: Why should a team go with a worse rating than we had? I don’t think the BCS is the best system, but it worked out for us completely. People are upset with us, but I don’t think that’s necessarily right. We’ll see in the Rose Bowl game. We can defend our pride there.

Q: But Colorado scored 62 points on you guys.

A: Colorado lost more games than we did. Why should they go? People will always find something to gripe about. Right now, we’re an easy target.

At the Zoo

Many Nebraska football fans genuinely think the nation conspires against them. It probably started in 1995, when the legendary Osborne elected to start troubled tailback Lawrence Phillips in the national title game against Florida.

The national press roasted Osborne, and fans haven’t forgotten.

Monday evening at the Zoo Room, co-owner and bartender Pete Watters continued the defense.

“If he was guilty of anything, he was guilty of being Father Flanagan,” Watter said of Osborne, who retired after winning a share of the national title and later won landslide election to Congress.

Watters says he doesn’t understand the attack on his team and his state.

He says Nebraska had nothing to do with this ruckus.

“Guilt?” Watters asked. “I have none. This is a stupid system playing out stupidly. Anyone with half a brain could have figured out there’d be years like this.”

Don’t blame Nebraska for the BCS, he says.

“I think they’re ruining college football with this,” Watter said. “This is a slap in the face. Oregon, Colorado, Nebraska should all be in a playoff.”

Chico Trevino, a Zoo regular, took a sip of his beer and offered his two red cents’ worth.

“It’s their rules,” he said of the BCS, “and now they’ve got the country against Nebraska, and that’s not right. But we don’t feel we’ve been made fun of. We know what we are. All the rest is BS.”

Or, in this case, BCS.