Editor’s note: This is part of The Athletic’s Tales from Bowl Season series exploring some of the best and quirkiest stories from past bowl games.
LINCOLN, Neb. — Ten years after he took over for Bob Devaney and still another 11 before his conquering victory at the same stadium, Tom Osborne went for two and Nebraska failed, sending Miami to its first national championship victory. Fans who were not yet born know the moment, among the most famous in the history of college football.
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“We just weren’t good enough to get the job done,” Osborne said last week, reminiscing about the 1984 Orange Bowl, a 31-30 victory for the Hurricanes on their home field against the No. 1-ranked Huskers.
For the 84-year-old former coach, who won 255 games and three titles in his 25 seasons, Nebraska’s third consecutive bowl trip to Miami at the end of that 1983 season represented a defining moment.
The first of six bowl games against Miami or Florida State over a decade, all Nebraska defeats, led Osborne to modernize his schemes and upgrade personnel. The Huskers snapped the streak with an Orange Bowl win against Miami to cap the 1994 season, producing the first championship for Osborne in a 60-3 run over five years to close his career on the sideline.
The 1984 Orange Bowl also proved transformative for Nebraska in shaping the way Osborne approached the postseason. He moved after that loss to take the Huskers south in December for longer than the traditional one week of preparation on site. And Osborne pushed for the construction of an indoor practice facility, rare in college football at the time.
Why? Well, the explanation dates to Nov. 26, 1983. Nebraska beat Oklahoma 28-21 in Norman to improve to 12-0, Osborne’s first unbeaten regular season. Dubbed the “Scoring Explosion,” Nebraska featured Heisman Trophy-winning I-back Mike Rozier and stars in quarterback Turner Gill and wingback Irving Fryar, a No. 1 NFL Draft pick.
The Huskers in 1983 led the nation in scoring average at 52 points and rushed for 401.7 yards per game, still a school record.
They were almost unstoppable — but still no match for a thick coating of ice.
As Osborne’s team flew home from Oklahoma on the night after Thanksgiving, Upper Midwestern rain turned to freezing rain. In the two days after the Huskers’ regular-season finale, Lincoln officially received 1.48 inches of precipitation. The storm ended by dumping 7 inches of snow on the city, plunging it into an early-winter deep freeze.
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From Nov. 29 until the end of the year, the low temperature on 25 days fell below 10 degrees. The high rose above freezing once, to 36 degrees on Dec. 8.
It was the coldest December, with an average temperature of 8.1 degrees, and the third-coldest month on record in Lincoln.
Not ideal preparation for Miami, the destination and the football team.
“I remember coming back (from Oklahoma), and the field was covered in 2 or 3 inches of ice,” said Jerry Weber, who began work on the training staff at Nebraska in 1977 and serves now as the head athletic trainer and associate director of athletic medicine. “You just looked at it and said, ‘There’s no way.’”
In the afternoon sun of early December, ice on the northern half of the AstroTurf field at Memorial Stadium melted to the point that groundskeeper Bill Shepard and his staff chipped away the remnants. But because of the cold and the angle of the sunlight blocked by the south end zone seating, they had no shot at the southern 50 yards.
Osborne said he recalled that the grounds crew poured hot water on the ice in an attempt to clear the field.
“The water froze,” he said.
The grass fields north of the stadium were in worse shape than the artificial surface.
From the time Nebraska resumed practice on Dec. 13 after a break for final exams until the team left for Miami on Dec. 23, it practiced outside in the stadium for one hour.
“I just remember it being painfully cold all the time,” said Jim Skow, a defensive lineman from Omaha who played from 1981 to 1985 before seven seasons in the NFL. “We tried to get out in the stadium, but it just didn’t work. We turned into cows on ice.”
The situation created more than an inconvenience. It was a major problem.
“We were used to the cold,” Weber said. “Cold never affected anybody, especially Coach Osborne. He didn’t think there was any reason to feel the cold at all.”
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Without a suitable indoor facility, the Huskers crowded into the Schulte Field House. Connected to the stadium’s north side and built in 1946, Schulte measured about 50 yards long by 20 yards wide. Long since demolished, it was ideal for linemen to work but offered nothing to help the Huskers with their kicking game and in other areas.
“We had no ability to throw the ball or simulate deep passing (on defense),” Osborne said.
(Courtesy of Nebraska Athletics)Nebraska had been set to leave Lincoln on Christmas Day, but chancellor Martin Massengale allowed the team to go two days early at the appeal of Osborne. In the five days before the Huskers departed, the highest-recorded temperature in Lincoln was minus-2.
The low dipped to minus-27 on Dec. 22.
Their flight, scheduled to leave at 8 a.m. on Dec. 23, was delayed by two hours because of a frozen power unit used to start the jet’s engine.
“I was scared to death,” Osborne said upon landing in Miami, where the temperature on arrival sat at 82 degrees. “They were afraid the oil would freeze and the fuel line would be clogged.”
Needless to say, the Huskers were excited to get away from the Arctic conditions.
“I had three alarms set,” split end Scott Kimball said at the time, according to the Omaha World-Herald. “I wasn’t about to miss the plane.”
Said guard Anthony Thomas, on the ground in Miami: “It’s nice to be outside again. All you can do in Lincoln is stay in the house.”
The Huskers brought some of the cold along to South Florida. A rare frost warning was issued on Christmas as the temperature dropped below 50 degrees.
“If I see a snowflake,” monster back Dan Casterline told reporters, “I’m going to die.” Still, the Miami heat and humidity further disrupted the Huskers’ work. Several players fell ill, Weber said, a normal occurrence in bowl season because of seasonal allergies previously deactivated by the freeze at home.
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Osborne-coached teams made 11 appearances in the Orange Bowl, five in the Fiesta Bowl in Phoenix and three in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
“It seemed like it would have been fair to play half of our bowl games up here someplace,” Osborne said.
Miami, coached by Howard Schnellenberger, perhaps sensed the Huskers’ issues with preparedness. The Hurricanes jumped to a 17-0 lead in the first quarter on two touchdown throws by freshman Bernie Kosar.
“Their offense came out and just started chucking the ball,” Skow said. “And Bernie Kosar was one of those guys who could do it.”
Without Rozier, who suffered an ankle injury in the second quarter, Nebraska caught its breath and rallied to tie the score at 17 early in the second half. But Miami answered with a pair of touchdowns. Backup I-back Jeff Smith scored for the Huskers with seven minutes left and again with 48 seconds to play on a 24-yard run.
Then came the decision. Osborne put the ball in the hands of Gill, whose throw toward Smith in the end zone was knocked away by Miami’s Ken Calhoun.
Kosar threw for 300 yards in the win for Miami, which entered the Jan. 2 game as an 11-point underdog
“We were ill-prepared in the passing game,” Osborne said, looking back. “We can’t use it as an excuse, but there was no way to simulate the heat and humidity. It was always difficult to prepare, but that year was worse. I still thought we’d score a lot of points. We finally did get to 30, but I think we could have done a lot better.”
The coach, not long after returning home as Lincoln thawed, reached out to his friend Dan Cook, a prominent Nebraska supporter. In 1987, the athletic department, in partnership with campus recreation, opened the Cook Pavilion, a full-sized indoor practice field built at a cost of $3.9 million.
In 2006, Nebraska opened the Hawks Championship Center, an updated indoor facility. Long before, it made a habit of the pre-Christmas departures for the bowl site. All of it — and more — can be traced to one frozen month 38 years ago that not even Nebraska’s scoring explosion could warm.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo: John Raoux / AP)
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