This is what Nebraska Week means. It’s 1989 along Stadium Drive, a crisp morning just after Halloween. The CU Buffs’ football assistants, sitting around a conference table, watch as coach Bill McCartney enters the room with cartoon smoke bellowing from each ear, his face twisted into a gargoyle’s scowl.
Before a word is spoken, he scans the room with a death stare.
“Whose car is it?”
Silence. The staff members look at each other. What the heck is he talking about? What car?
The Buffs coach asks again, louder this time.
“WHOSE … RED … CAR … IS … IT?”
More silence. After a few seconds, one staffer, slowly, meekly, raises his arm in shameful acknowledgement.
His car.
“Get rid of it,” McCartney snarls.
By noon, the red car is gone.
* * *
This is what Nebraska Week means. It’s the summer of 1982, a few weeks after McCartney is hired away from Bo Schembechler’s staff at Michigan, having been chosen to drag the Buffs — 7-26 over the previous three seasons — out of the darkness.
“Of course, a new coach is going around town, meeting people, and he would often ask fans that he ran into, ‘Who’s our rival?’” Mike McCartney, Bill’s son, recalls. “And every one of them said, ‘We want to beat Nebraska.’
“He would’ve thought it was Oklahoma as well, but it was pretty unanimous that Nebraska was the team. And the big part of it was that they take over the stadium.”
Some things never change. The Sea of Red is back in Boulder County for the first time since 2009 when the Buffs (1-0) host the No. 25 Huskers (1-0) Saturday, a matchup that brings back all kinds of warm fuzzies — especially if you’re over 35.
Especially if you remember the glory days, when Bill McCartney had the schedules around the CU football offices and the weight room and meeting rooms with the words NEBRASKA in red letters. When he declared that the Buffs would not have made it as a program, as a force, until they could beat the Big Red.
“Anytime you say Nebraska and the color red, I still get riled up,” laughs former Buffs wideout Michael Westbrook, who went 0-3-1 against the Huskers from 1991-94. “Coach Mac drove that home for us.”
The rivalry as we now know it is largely Mac’s creation, a fight he picked with the biggest bully on the Big Eight block, banning the color red from his sight. From 1962-81, the Huskers had beaten CU 19 out of 20 times. A dozen of those victories were by 17 points or more. From 1962-81, Nebraska won or shared 11 Big Eight titles; the Buffs, just one, in 1976. The Bugeaters were the windshield, CU was the bug, and Nebraskans invaded Boulder by the thousands every other fall, dancing the night away.
“Our coach, Bill McCartney, was absolutely awesome in creating this,” Westbrook says. “He was like Muhammad Ali. He was like, ‘This is the best team in our division, that’s our division rival.’ I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? We can’t even win five games.’ But to be the best, you’ve got to beat the best. And shooting at Nebraska, everybody else became easy.”
Like vines of ivy, the festering grew. From 1986-90, the Buffs won three out of five. During a 10-year stretch, from 1987-96, both teams went into the game ranked nine different times. When the Big 12 launched in 1996, Colorado replaced Oklahoma as the Huskers’ Black Friday dance partner.
In 1990, CU (11-1-1) was voted No. 1 in the final Associated Press poll after defeating Notre Dame 10-9 in the Orange Bowl. Georgia Tech (11-0-1) was declared national champions by the coaches’ UPI poll — with one of those No. 1 votes coming from then-Huskers coach Tom Osborne, whose Big Red lost to both the Buffs and Jackets that season.
Turnabout was fair play: In 1997 at Folsom Field, when unbeaten Nebraska was chasing unbeaten Michigan to win hearts and minds of voters — that’s how it worked before the playoffs, kids — for the right to be No. 1, every time the Huskers scored, the CU Band played “Hail to the Victors,” the Wolverines’ fight song.
“For a guy under 25, to try to explain to them what that (game) means,” Westbrook muses, “they have no clue. And no sense of why we felt the way we felt. Trying to explain that, it’s like trying to learn a foreign language in one day.”
***
This is what Nebraska Week means. It’s Labor Day Eve, last Sunday, and Buffs safety Mikial Onu, a graduate transfer who notched a pair of acrobatic interceptions against Colorado State, heads into treatment wearing a red, white and blue shirt.
“I didn’t know red was forbidden,” Onu recalls. “So I came to the training room like I do every day. And I walk in and everyone’s giving me this death stare. I look around, like, ‘What did I do?’
“It’s red,” someone barks.
“So? It’s one of the colors in red, white and blue.”
“It’s Nebraska Week.”
Onu heads out to grab a bite at Le Peep. When he walks in, everyone sort of stops, like something out of a movie.
Same death stare.
“All the red shirts and shorts,” Onu laughs, “have been put away.”
***
This is what Nebraska Week means. It’s November 1990, and Mike McCartney is on Mack Brown’s coaching staff at North Carolina, head-to-toe in Tar Heel blue, at the Oconee County Regional Airport after a 20-3 loss at Clemson.
This is a different era, a different reality, decades before Facebook, Twitter or Periscope, before you could watch the entire world, sporting or otherwise, play out in real time on your phone.
McCartney is half a country away, getting ready to board a flight, and he’s wondering what the devil’s going on in Lincoln, where his father’s 1-loss Buffs are taking on the Big Red.
“So I call my mother at the airport and she holds the radio up to the phone,” McCartney recalls. “I ask, ‘What’s going on?’ And she says, ‘The weather’s terrible and they’re always fumbling.’”
A while later, McCartney, from the plane, inserts a credit card into the slot in front of him, and phones Mom from the air.
“She says, ‘There’s less than a minute to go, (Eric) Bienemy scored four touchdowns and we’re going to beat them!’”
“And I’m going crazy, and I’m on this plane and we’ve got UNC gear on,” McCartney laughs. “Those were unbelievable years. Anytime we beat Nebraska, it’s special.”
