I like Nebraska and I loved the Sharkwater tailgate there back in 2011. That said, the thing that makes me question Nebraska's "Helmetosity" isn't just the recent swoon, it is the fact that they weren't consistently very good before Bob Devaney either. I noted in the more B1G-centric thread that Nebraska was mostly nationally irrelevant in the first 28 years of AP Polls (40 appearances, 16 top-10's, and no top-5's in 284 polls from 1936-1963).
My view is that a PROGRAM that is a true helmet program doesn't need a great coach to be nationally relevant. I have my doubts about Nebraska because substantially all of their success came under just two coaches: Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne.
Devaney arrived for the 1962 season and the Cornhuskers went 9-2 that year. Prior to that they hadn't finished above .500 since going 6-5 in 1954. They hadn't finished with eight or more wins since going 8-2 in 1940, and they hadn't won nine or more games since going 10-0 in 1903.
Devaney, Osborne, and Solich* coached Nebraska for 42 consecutive years during which winning "only" nine games in a season was a bad year. Outside of that a nine win season at Nebraska is REALLY good.
Schools like Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and a few others have achieved high levels of success under many different coaches.
Another way to look at it, and one that ELA typically advocates, is to look at a program's ability to recover from a major downturn. Ohio State is hard to measure on this metric because the Buckeyes are, by far, the most consistently successful program at least since WWII. Alabama and Oklahoma, however, have each faced serious and extended downturns then recovered to get right back to being football powerhouses. Alabama was basically terrible for 11 years from 1997-2007 and look at them now. Oklahoma had a similar swoon from 1989-1999 then got right back to being a NC contender.
Oklahoma was even worse than you thought, Medina. There was another swoon in there during the 1960s. Bud Wilkinson tailed off toward the end of his tenure at OU, starting in 1959. He went 7-3, 3-6-1, and 5-5, then recovered to go 8-2 and 8-3. He retired after the '63 season. For the rest of the decade, under Gomer Jones, Jim McKenzie, and Chuck Fairbanks, the Sooners went 38-28-1. So, from '59 through '69, OU's record was 69-42-2. We had a 1-12 record against Texas that overlapped that span by one year on each end. Not as bad as the '90s, but not helmet-worthy either.
For the last 17 years (2002-2018) the Cornhuskers have been, for the most part, nationally irrelevant. Here are their 2002-2018 AP stats:
- 22nd in appearances with 126 out of 278 polls (45.3%)
- 33rd (tied with Mizzou, KSU, and USCe) with 24 top-10's out of 278 polls (8.6%)
- 44th (tied with Purdue and aTm) with one top-5 out of 278 polls (0.4%).
- Never ranked higher than #5.
I'm not pointing this out to pick on Nebraska. My point is that Bama (1997-2007) and Oklahoma (1989-1999) were not much better and they recovered. My question is whether or not Nebraska can do the same thing? I'm not taking a position on whether or not they can, I'm just pointing out the question.
If Scott Frost can take them back to consistently playing high-level football that will REALLY shore up Nebraska's Helmet status because it will mean that they have four highly successful coaches (Devaney, Osborne, Solich, Frost) and that they have successfully rebounded from a protracted downturn. If he can't, then I'll be waiting to see how the next guy does.
*Solich:
I hesitated to include Solich in my list of great Nebraska coaches because he obviously didn't succeed at the Devaney/Osobrne level and got fired. That said, his winning percentage is still third best among Nebraska coaches in the last 100+ years.
What your analysis about Nebraska may be missing is that Nebraska was a very solid program prior to the polling era. Per my manual crunching of the numbers, the Huskers prior to 1938 were 270-86-28, with 23 conference championships. The great Dana X. Bible coached there for 8 years, going 50-15-7. The '40s and '50s were terrible decades for them. But by the late '60s, they were one of the best programs in the country, and were AP national champs in '70 and '71.
Thinking of Nebraska football in the '40s and '50s reminds me of a passage in the novel
MASH. The 4077th is preparing to play Gen. Hammond's team in a football game, and Hawkeye and Duke are trying to round up players. They have one guy who started for Nebraska, who is pretty good, and another guy who was 2nd team for Oklahoma, who is no good. This struck me--as an OU fan--as just a bit odd, because Bud Wilkinson had started his great run at OU, while Nebraska was in the middle of its bad run
when the novel was set, during the Korean War, probably 1951-53. OU had won its first NC in 1950.
But
MASH--written by former military surgeon Richard Hornberger and sportswriter W.C. Heinz under the name of Richard Hooker--was
published in 1968, and Nebraska had been the better program through the 1960s, winning four straight Big 8 championships from 1963 through 1966.