University of Nebraska: The Sea of Red

The Nebraska Legislature chartered the University of Nebraska on February fifteenth, eighteen sixty-nine, two years after Nebraska became a state, under the Morrill Act, the federal land-grant law that seeded public universities across the country by trading federal land for the promise of practical education in agriculture and the mechanical arts. The university opened its doors in eighteen seventy-one to twenty collegiate students and one hundred ten in preparatory school. Tuition was free.

The institution grew into one of the major research universities of the Great Plains. It was admitted to the Association of American Universities in nineteen oh eight, one of the early markers of graduate research standing. The campus today sits in the middle of Lincoln, its red brick towers and the dome of the state capitol a few blocks away defining the city's downtown horizon.

Memorial Stadium was built in nineteen twenty-three and dedicated to Nebraskans who served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the First World War. The original capacity was thirty-one thousand eighty. A series of expansions brought it above eighty-five thousand, and attendance regularly approaches that capacity, making game days the third-largest population concentration in Nebraska after Omaha and Lincoln themselves.

The defining fact about Memorial Stadium is a streak. On November third, nineteen sixty-two, the Cornhuskers played Missouri in a homecoming game they lost sixteen to seven. The stadium was sold out. It has been sold out every home game since. More than four hundred consecutive sellouts, the longest such streak in college football history.

The fans wear red. On game days the stadium is called the Sea of Red. Whatever the record, whatever the season, the red does not thin out.