Welcome to Nebraska

If you’ve ever been to Lincoln, Nebraska, you’ll notice that most of our citizens share a command thread: appreciation of the Nebraska Cornhuskers football team. Each Saturday during the game season, our wonderful stadium becomes the third largest ‘city’ in the state, with a general population near 80,000 people. Usually it’s hard enough to engineer roads and infrastructure to accommodate that many people when they’re spread out amongst miles of land, but when you condense an entire community into one ball field, things might get intense when the game is won and the community chooses to migrate elsewhere. Surprisingly, the University of Nebraska Lincoln did an excellent job building the stadium exits to allow everyone to get their move on in a timely fashion, without much worry.

Now the appreciation toward the team itself is not baseless; indeed, over the past 25 years or so we have had countless players turn intelligent practice into national championships, making a name for not only themselves, but for the State of Nebraska on a very national level. Some players have become famous during their collegiate run, but most have not extended that success into a professional football career. Most notably, Eric Crouch and Tommy Frazier have become local heroes, but their national celebrity quickly faded. It will be interesting to see what happens with Ndamukong Suh, however, as he was just named the national AP choice of the year, which will mean lots of professional football teams will be fighting for his skills to strengthen their defense lineup. In fact, Suh is so locally famous here that many fans have took to the web and created a Ndamukong Suh FaceBook fan page. I wish I knew more about the game itself to be able to expand on those three players, but unfortunately the rules and logic of football (and all other sports, save for PSF – Professional Snowball Fighting) escape my intelligence and leave me confused, but usually entertained.