Memorial Stadium: Four Hundred Sellouts and Counting

Memorial Stadium in Lincoln holds a record that no other college football program in the country has come close to matching: more than four hundred consecutive sellouts. On game day, the stadium's eighty-seven-thousand-plus capacity makes it briefly the third largest city in Nebraska, outpopulating every city in the state except Omaha and Lincoln itself.

The streak began on November third, nineteen sixty-two, the first season under head coach Bob Devaney. Nebraska won that day against Missouri. They kept winning. Under Devaney, Nebraska became a national power. Under Tom Osborne, who took over in nineteen seventy-three and coached for twenty-five years, the Cornhuskers built one of the most sustained dynasties in college football history: three national championships, thirteen conference titles, and a forty-seven-game home winning streak from nineteen ninety-four through nineteen ninety-eight.

The second-longest active sellout streak in the country has about one hundred twenty-nine games. Nebraska has more than four hundred. ESPN listed the Cornhusker sellout streak among the most unbreakable records in sports.

What drives it? Nebraska has no professional sports franchise. No NFL, no NBA, no MLB team in the state. The Cornhuskers are it. The state's entire sports identity concentrates into these fall Saturdays in Lincoln. Farmers drive three hours. Families travel from towns too small to appear on most maps. The red shirts in the stands are not just fan gear. They are a declaration of belonging to something larger than any single season or any single loss.

The stadium opened in nineteen twenty-three as a memorial to Nebraska students killed in the First World War. The names are still inscribed at the entrance. On game day, over eighty-five thousand people file past them to watch football, which is perhaps as Midwestern a ritual as America produces.