How Bill McCartney turned Colorado-Nebraska into one of college football's great rivalries
When No. 25 Colorado faces off against Nebraska Saturday at Folsom Field in Deion Sanders’ first home game as the Buffaloes’ coach, it will be surrounded by the pageantry and intense, visceral feelings that define many of the best college rivalries.
At least part of why that passion exists is because of former Buffaloes coach Bill McCartney, and a fateful decision he made more than 40 years ago.
When he was was hired as Colorado’s football coach in June 1982, he inherited no shortage of problems. The Buffaloes’ plan to bring in a big-name coach in Chuck Fairbanks, formerly of Oklahoma and the New England Patriots, had failed, with Fairbanks going 7-26 in three seasons before being fired. Ticket sales lagged and reflected a larger apathy surrounding the program. Between the struggles of its major revenue programs, Title IX expenses and the costly construction of a new arena, the athletic department was working back from what was a $1 million debt.
But to McCartney, there was something else that stood out as he evaluated all the challenges he faced in trying to build Colorado into a respectable program, capable of contending for championships: a rival. It only took him so long to find one.
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How Bill McCartney picked Nebraska as Colorado's rival
By the early 1980s, Colorado’s football program was in a rut.
The Buffaloes had a brush with success and national relevance the previous decade, going 17-7 in 1975-76 and making an Orange Bow berth, but their fortunes soon waned. Coach Bill Mallory, who had guided them to those achievements in the mid-1970s, was fired after going 6-5 in 1978. Whatever jolt school leadership hoped Colorado would get with Fairbanks never materialized, as the otherwise-decorated coach went 7-26 and just 5-16 in Big Eight Conference play in his three seasons.
Though it didn’t contribute much, if at all, to those on-field shortcomings, the Buffaloes’ lack of a true and consistent rival hurt their visibility locally and nationally, particularly when trying to generate interest in the program and fill seats at Folsom Field. For much of the 20th century, Colorado State and Utah were Colorado’s fiercest foes. But it hadn’t played the Rams since 1958, or the Utes since 1962. Air Force briefly filled that void before that series, too, went dormant after 1974.
It was a hole that McCartney quickly identified. The coach was born and raised in Michigan and was an assistant coach with the Wolverines for seven years. They have a storied and longstanding rivalry with Ohio State that is one of the biggest games nationally every season. At Colorado, he didn’t see anything close to that.
“I said ‘Who’s our rival? Who’s the team that we can’t get out of our minds?’” McCartney said in “The Gospel According to Mac,” a 2015 ESPN documentary on McCartney and his time at Colorado. “He said ‘Coach, we don’t have anything like that.’”
A look at a map was all McCartney needed to pick out who that would be.
Colorado shared a border with Nebraska, a fellow Big Eight member that was one of college football’s best programs at the time. There was history between the two programs, with 40 all-time meetings dating back to 1898. Interestingly enough, Nebraska was the first school from outside Colorado that the Buffaloes had ever played.
In a post-practice media session in Aug. 1982, only two months after arriving in Boulder, McCartney publicly proclaimed Nebraska as a rival and wrote the Cornhuskers’ name in red letters on the Buffaloes’ schedule posted in their team house. Just like that, a rivalry was born.
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At first, the decision seemed confusing
A choice that made sense to McCartney didn’t to most others.
While Colorado had devolved into a doormat, Nebraska was a two-time national champion that, along with Oklahoma, dominated the Big Eight: From 1963-84, the Cornhuskers had claimed at least a share of the conference championship 14 times.
In the process, they had dominated their series with Colorado. At the time McCartney pegged Nebraska as the Buffaloes’ rival, the Cornhuskers had won 14 consecutive matchups dating back to 1967. Those wins were often decisive, with an average margin of victory of 25.4 points per game.
“When I got up and said that at a press conference, it drew laughs,” McCartney said in the documentary. “It drew scoffs.”
That early skepticism was justified. Nebraska went on the road and beat Colorado 40-14 in McCartney’s first season in 1982 before throttling the Buffaloes 69-19 in 1983 on its way to an undefeated regular season.
Colorado languished in McCartney’s first three seasons, going 7-25-1, including a 1-10 mark in 1984. While they had publicly labeled the Cornhuskers as a target, the two programs were seemingly as far apart as ever.
“Usually, rivalries have to do with longstanding competitiveness and we didn’t pay much attention to it,” Nebraska coach Tom Osborne said in the ESPN documentary.
Thankfully for Colorado and McCartney, that much-needed ingredient to establishing a rivalry was right around the corner.
How Colorado made a lopsided series a rivalry
Even as the Buffaloes floundered in the early days of McCartney’s tenure, they were seeing some progress against the Cornhuskers.
Colorado led Nebraska 7-3 heading into the fourth quarter of its 1984 matchup — the first time it was up on the Cornhuskers entering the final period since 1967 — before Osborne’s team pulled away for a 24-7 win. Though they lost to Nebraska 17-7 for their 18th-consecutive defeat in the series, the Buffaloes made significant strides in 1985 after switching to the wishbone offense, going 7-5 and making their first bowl game in nine years.
The following year, a long-awaited breakthrough came. Colorado held the nation’s top scoring offense to no points in the game’s first 44 minutes on it way to a 20-10 upset of the then-No. 3 Cornhuskers in Boulder.
“This is a moment in our program we’ll always cherish,” McCartney said after the game. “It indicates we can beat a great team. And up to this point, I don’t think we had beaten a great team.”
Though it went 6-6 overall, Colorado finished 6-1 in Big Eight play, putting it ahead of Nebraska in the league standings that season.
“I think that’s when we kind of got their attention,” David Plati, a longtime sports information director at Colorado who worked at the school during McCartney’s tenure, told USA TODAY.
With that win, Colorado-Nebraska went from a comically one-sided series into something much more competitive. Beginning with the 1986 victory, the Buffaloes went 3-5-1 in their next nine games against the Cornhuskers. Four meetings between 1988-93 were decided by seven points or fewer. From 1988-95, either Colorado or Nebraska claimed at least a share of the Big Eight championship every season. In 1990 and 1994, the winner of the matchup went on to be crowned national champions.
Along the way, a certain animosity developed between the two schools and, especially, their fans. It led to a ban of anything red inside Colorado’s facility, a move prompted by a 1982 game in Boulder when McCartney saw nearly half the crowd at Folsom Field wearing Nebraska’s primary color.
Despite what the rivalry became, it was rooted in respect. Part of the reason McCartney had selected Nebraska, Plati said, was because of his admiration not just for the Cornhuskers’ accomplishments on the field, but also the way they went about doing it. McCartney told the Lincoln Journal-Star in 1983 that “No one can look over Nebraska’s shoulder and see deceit.”
By highlighting that game on the Buffaloes’ schedule, he hoped his players would work to tirelessly chase after Nebraska. As he saw it, the Cornhuskers weren’t an enemy, but a model for what he wanted Colorado to become.
But like so many rivalries, the relationship between the two conference foes became contentious.
“That’s the $64,000 question,” Plati said. “[McCartney] never insulted them along the way. [Nebraska] hadn’t done anything wrong.”
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Where the Colorado vs. Nebraska rivalry stands today
In the years that followed, a series of factors diluted the rivalry and its national importance.
McCartney retired after the 1994 season and Osborne did the same after Nebraska won a share of the national championship in 1997. Without those coaches at the helm, both programs have failed to regain the glory they once enjoyed. When both programs left the Big 12 Conference after the 2010 season — Nebraska to the Big Ten and Colorado to the Pac-12 — they were no longer guaranteed an annual matchup. Since those departures, they’ve played just twice: in 2018 and 2019, with the Buffaloes winning both contests.
That time apart has done little to dilute the resentment between Colorado and Nebraska. Between that and the hype around Sanders, Saturday’s game was declared a sellout in July. After Colorado’s stunning 45-42 victory against defending national runner-up TCU in Week 1, the cheapest tickets available are listed at more than $260, per SeatGeek.
Even for players who weren’t alive for the rivalry’s heyday, those hard feelings between the two programs haven’t subsided. Buffaloes quarterback Shedeur Sanders, Deion Sanders’ son, said earlier this week that red isn’t allowed in the team’s facility and that he was planning on removing any red items from SS2, the online clothing store he operates (as of Thursday, they were still up).
“At Colorado, we don’t like Nebraska,” he said. “Simple as that.”
While just nine months into his stay at Colorado, Deion Sanders feels that same passion.
It only took him so long to realize what McCartney did 40 years earlier — Nebraska represents something different.
“I’ve learned the severity, the serious nature of this rivalry and I’m embracing it 100 percent,” he said. “This is personal.”
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How Bill McCartney created the Colorado vs. Nebraska football rivalry
