Earning Their Colors

Dion Booker will never forget the day he became ordained.

It was during a Nebraska practice in 1999. Coaches stopped drills and players formed a circle around Booker, a sophomore safety.

In a rite that is almost as old as corn, a coach tossed Booker a black practice jersey, symbolic of his being named to the first defensive unit.

“You get to take off your yellow shirt you had on before,” Booker recalled this week. “The rest of the day you’re on Cloud Nine.”

Jeremy Slechta, a senior defensive tackle, received his “Blackshirt” before the 2000 season, during a defensive meeting.

Slechta still gets chills recalling when the coach said: you’re a Blackshirt, here’s your jersey.

“It stays with you where ever you go,” Slechta said. “You’ll always be a Blackshirt.”

Only when you consider this context can you understand the depths of Nebraska’s 62-36 loss to Colorado on Nov. 23. It was more than a loss; it’s the reason Cornhusker defenders see Thursday’s national title game against Miami in the Rose Bowl as the ultimate chance at redemption.

To Blackshirts past and present, the Colorado loss was an abomination--the equivalent of a football court marshal. The 62 points were the most allowed by a Nebraska defense. As much as the final score was an affront, so was the manner in which Colorado imposed its will, the Buffalo offensive line forging massive gaps in the Nebraska defense.

“One of our biggest defensive goals is to have 10 or less breakdowns during a game,” defensive end Chris Kelsay said. “There’d be times in the Colorado game where we’d have two or three breakdowns on a single play.”

Colorado amassed 582 total yards, 380 on the ground. Buffalo tailback Chris Brown, a reserve, gained 198 yards in 24 carries and scored on runs of 12, one, 36, one, 13 and eight yards.

The Colorado offense gained an average of 8.6 yards per play.

“It was depressing, a horrible feeling,” Nebraska cornerback Keyou Craver said. “To see a team run up and down the field on the Blackshirts like that.

“It’s just a bad, bitter taste that we have in our mouth right now, and what better way to get it out than to beat the No. 1 team in the land.”

At the time, the Colorado defeat had all but wrecked Nebraska’s national title hopes. Traditionally, a wipeout loss that late in the season would have doomed the Cornhuskers, yet an extraordinary string of upsets allowed Nebraska to rise in the bowl championship series standings and claim the national title game berth by five one-hundredths of a point over Colorado in the final BCS standings.

This bit of serendipity has given the Blackshirts a chance to redeem their name on a national stage.

“I don’t think most people on this team can really get over the Colorado loss until after this game,” Craver said.

Becoming a starter on the Nebraska defense is more than a promotion; it’s an initiation into a fraternal order.

The tradition of the Blackshirts began innocently enough and, somewhat ironically, was hatched by two Notre Dame graduates, George Kelly and Mike Corgan.

In the early 1960s, Kelly and Corgan were assistant coaches on Nebraska coach Bob Devaney’s staff. One day, Corgan and Kelly went to a local sporting goods store to purchase practice jerseys for the defense.

The shop owner said he could unload some black jerseys real cheap. Kelly and Corgan figured black would be a nice contrast color and bought the jerseys.

And so a tradition began.

“They deemed the first team would be the ‘Blackshirts,”’ George Darlington, a Nebraska assistant coach for 29 years, said. “The second unit was the ‘Goldshirts’ and the ‘Green Weenies’ were the third team, they wore green shirts.”

Darlington said the Blackshirts started taking on mythical status in Nebraska lore during the school’s national championship seasons of 1970 and 1971.

Seven defensive players off the 1971 team were named to the Big Eight Conference’s first team, while four earned consensus All-American honors in their careers.

Those national title squads boasted two Outland Trophy winners in Rich Glover and Larry Jacobson.

“They were a dominant defensive football team,” Darlington said. “They played in the ‘Game of the Century’ against Oklahoma and that’s where the Blackshirts really took off from the standpoint that this is a group of men that are very special.”

Darlington said the team is very selective in awarding the special jerseys. He said most years there are only 13 or 14 handed out.

“On the very rare occasion that one is ever taken away, it’s a very traumatic thing,” he said. “Because that means you’ve not played well or not given very good effort. You would lose your Blackshirt if you really screwed up as far as effort and performance.”

While there are only 11 starters on defense, the team uses some discretion in awarding Blackshirts because some reserves end up playing as much or more as some starters.

In another tradition, all senior defensive players receive Blackshirts on the first day of practice at the site of Nebraska’s bowl game.

This year, six Nebraska reserves received their shirts in Los Angeles before the team began preparations for the Rose Bowl.

Yet, this year’s Blackshirts are aware they have sullied their jerseys and know that beating Miami is the only way to win back honor.

“It is a fraternity,” Kelsay said. “It is an elite group of guys who have been the very best defensive players who’ve come to Nebraska. You earn your Blackshirt, it isn’t given to you, and it’s something that’s with you the rest of your life.”

And that’s why “62” is the loneliest number.

“That was the most points put up against any Nebraska defense,” Kelsay said. “To be a part of that is disappointing and embarrassing to some extent. We have guys all over the nation watching every game we play. We let them down, we let ourselves down, it’s a huge disappointment.”

Kelsay said returning to Lincoln after the Colorado game was the low point of his career. Not only did he have to sit through a film session of the debacle, Kelsay quickly found out he was no longer a big man on campus.

People looked at him differently.

“That’s one of the biggest things I noticed right away,” he said. “You see your friends, and you have to show your face in class after being on top all the time.”

Kelsay said there is really nothing the Blackshirts can do except take the loss like men.

At Sunday’s media day, Nebraska defenders faced wave after wave of questions about the Colorado defeat.

“It’s kind of overwhelming to be bombarded with questions about Colorado,” he said, “but that’s the price you pay when you get beat like that.”

Darlington says the breakdowns on defense against Colorado were complete.

“It was just about everything,” he said. “We were dominated at the line of scrimmage. We overran things tremendously. We could say we had a great scheme and our players just stunk. At the same time, we can’t say that the players didn’t get hammered pretty good, too.”

Darlington says the approach for Miami has been to “shore up and get quality reps against things that can hurt us in the running game.”

Nebraska players can’t imagine getting hammered again the way they did in Boulder.

The memory haunts and inspires them.

“Right now, we’ve got a lot to prove to the nation,” Kelsay said. “We’ve got to show them the type of team we really have. This is the real Nebraska team. These are the real Blackshirts. That’s our big motivation.”