Go Cornhuskers!!!

One of the the greatest Cornhusker offensive linemen: my cousin David Volk #58

Dave Volk

Offensive Lineman - OL

Height: 6-5 Weight: 275
Freshman

Previous Affiliations

Battle Creek

Previous Experience

Battle Creek, Neb.

 Here is an article from the New York Times in 2001 describing the Nebraska's relationship with football; it quotes my cousin, Dave Volk:

COLLEGE FOOTBALL; The Only Game in Town: Lincoln Awaits the Irish's Return
By JOE LAPOINTE

Published: Saturday, September 8, 2001

Two years ago, when he was a high school junior in this old college town, Barrett Ruud of Nebraska made an impromptu visit to Notre Dame. A star football player, he was intrigued by the tradition of the Fighting Irish and considered enrolling. The Notre Dame coaches were interested in him, too.
''It was neat,'' Ruud said. ''The campus was awesome. They are such a legendary school.''

But Ruud chose to stay in Nebraska for reasons that included football tradition and family. His father, Tom Ruud, played on a Cornhuskers team that defeated Notre Dame, 40-6, in the Orange Bowl in 1973. His great-grandfather Clarence Swanson played on a Nebraska team that played Notre Dame to a muddy 0-0 tie in 1918.
Ruud's two uncles also played here and his younger brother is considering it. Ruud's mother, Jaime Ruud, said ''Husker history was too big'' for him to move away. And her son agreed.
''I thought I'd have a little more fun down here,'' he said. ''All my friends are still down here. My family's down here. Nebraska's the only place I wanted to go.''
Ruud, a freshman linebacker, leads the Cornhuskers in tackles with 15 and is expected to play Saturday night when Nebraska plays host to Notre Dame. The Cornhuskers come into the game 2-0; it is the season opener for the Fighting Irish.

The meeting will be only the 16th in a once intense and bitter series that began in 1915. Although the two Midwestern universities are traditional powers in their sport, they have played only four times since the series was shut down in 1925. Among the reasons for the long estrangement: religion, ethnicity and the Ku Klux Klan.

Much has changed in Lincoln since 1925, when Notre Dame left in a huff. But the Fighting Irish have played here only once since then -- and that was in 1948. ''I'm glad this rivalry is back,'' said Jon Rutherford, a guard on Nebraska's offensive line. ''It's a fun game to play. I know they are respected around the country. But so are we.''

As has been true since 1962, every ticket will be sold in Memorial Stadium, which now seats 73,918. No other team in college football comes close to matching Nebraska's streak of 241 sold-out games (Notre Dame is second with 155).

Fan loyalty is a factor in recruiting, even for players like running back Dahrran Diedrick, a Jamaican-born Canadian from suburban Toronto. ''It was the fan base,'' he said, when asked what drew him to Lincoln. ''It doesn't matter who we play. They're going to be here and they are going to be strong every single week.''

Many spectators will travel great distances across the farmlands along ''Cornhusker Highway'' and down interstate highways whose road signs are decorated with drawings of covered wagons. The modern prairie schooners are the big campers and car-pulled trailers that arrive on Thursday and Friday and meet at their regular sites, year after year.

If they listen to their radios while driving at the 75-mile-an-hour state speed limit, they might hear the all-news station talk of the corn, soybean and wheat harvests or a special report on hunting safety that warns bow-and-arrow users to travel in pairs in case someone falls out of a tree and breaks a leg.

In Nebraska, football athletes are a prime crop. Of the 121 players who will be in uniform Saturday, 65 are natives of the state.

''You're born and raised in this state where we don't have any professional teams,'' said Jeremy Slechta, a defensive tackle from a suburb of Omaha. ''We don't really have much except for Nebraska football. That's what you look forward to every year. You wait for that football season to come around. As a kid, you watch it and that's the team you get used to. That's who you want to play for.''

It has a lot to do with winning. In the last 32 years, Nebraska's .842 winning percentage is the best in the nation, an average of 10 victories a year. Nebraska won national titles in 1994 and 1995 and shared another in 1997, Tom Osborne's last season as coach. In some states, when a coach retires, he spends the rest of his life attending banquets and writing his memoirs. In Nebraska, the citizens elected Osborne to the House of Representatives.

Osborne said today by telephone from Washington that he would be here for the game, although he found it difficult to relax and enjoy football as a fan after 25 years as head coach.

Osborne said fans were just as enthusiastic at places like Penn State and Alabama, but the support is not split in his state because Nebraska is the sole football power.

''Almost everyone in the state has some allegiance,'' Osborne said. ''In most states, you have divided loyalties.''

He said Nebraskans had a background suited to rugged football genes. ''It is pioneer stock; these are fairly hearty people,'' Osborne said. ''The weather is severe. To survive, they had to extend a helping hand to their neighbors.''

Solich's Shaky Start

Osborne was replaced in 1998 by Frank Solich, a former Cornhuskers fullback who served as an assistant for 19 years. Solich's first season ended with a 9-4 record. For most universities, that would be considered successful. At Nebraska, it was cause for alarm. The Cornhuskers had not lost that many games in a season since 1968.

David Volk, a 300-pound offensive tackle, was a freshman in Solich's first season and he recalled the mood. ''It was like a tragedy,'' he said. ''People were really worried about it.''
Osborne conceded there were worrisome undercurrents to a culture that depended so much on one team for its self-image. ''It does make you a little uncomfortable to know that, for a high percentage of people in the state, you pretty much carry with you whether they are going to be satisfied with their state of being and with their life,'' he said. ''A few almost derive their self-esteem from the state of a football team.''

Since Solich's first season, he has soothed the populace with records of 12-1 and 10-2. His devotion to his job may strike some people as a little extreme. Last week, the day before a 42-14 victory over Troy State, Solich learned of the death of his father in Pennsylvania. He still has not returned home for the funeral, but he will leave on Sunday for services that have been scheduled to take place after the Notre Dame game.

Solich stood near the goal posts in Memorial Stadium earlier this week, talking after practice. During the drills, the sound of crowd noise could be heard echoing from the stadium across the campus. There were no fans in the stands, but Solich had ordered his staff to play recorded cheers to acclimate his players to a big crowd. ''It can bounce around pretty good,'' Solich said of the recorded noise. ''We hear calls from professors every now and then about it. So we try to back off -- at times.''

When real fans attend home games, they are usually acknowledged as sophisticated about the game and gracious to visitors. Many Nebraska fans, and some visiting football coaches, mention the standing ovation that is routinely given to a visiting team as it leaves the field.

But such graciousness was not always the norm, at least in the series with Notre Dame, especially when the series was at its most intense in the first quarter of the 20th century.

No one is certain of all the details of the rift between the universities from 1915 to 1925, when 9 of their 11 games were played here. Coach Knute Rockne's Notre Dame teams were a major road show then, as Coach Bob Davie's teams are now, and the large crowds Notre Dame drew in Lincoln were profitable for both sides.

But Lincoln was a big Klan town, with many citizens openly hostile toward Catholics and some ethnic groups. After Nebraska defeated Notre Dame in Lincoln in 1917, a local newspaper began its report this way: ''Cornhusker outbattled Catholic yesterday afternoon.''

Rockne's celebrated Four Horsemen teams lost only two games in their three seasons -- both of them to Nebraska, in Lincoln.

Notre Dame defeated Nebraska in 1924 in South Bend, Ind., in the final season for the Four Horsemen. The teams met again in Lincoln on Thanksgiving Day in 1925. At halftime of a 17-0 Nebraska victory, a student group performed a skit with hobby horses that mocked the Four Horsemen as common laborers and hired hands. For reasons never fully explained, Notre Dame announced the following month that the series was canceled.

John Carter, a folklorist and a special projects coordinator at the Nebraska State Historical Society, has studied the politics of football at that time and its cultural context. ''There were racial and religious epithets,'' he said. ''There was a celebration riot after the game.''

Speaking in general of the atmosphere in the town, Carter said, ''The 1920's was a very odd time in America and an odd time in Lincoln.''

He said 4,000 people were registered in Lincoln's town ''Klavern.''

Insulted and Defeated

Ernest Bearg, the Nebraska coach in 1925, visited Notre Dame the month after the game and told The Lincoln Star, ''The Notre Dame faculty heads told me their race and religion had been insulted at Nebraska.''

Many Nebraskans, then and now, said tales of bigotry were exaggerated and that the Fighting Irish used them to get out of a series against one of the few teams that could defeat them.

Osborne, the retired coach, spoke diplomatically of the past. ''It depends on which side of the fence you are on,'' he said, regarding the abrupt termination of the series in the middle of the Roaring Twenties. ''Nebraska had become a difficult opponent.''

He stressed that Nebraska football now encourages gracious hospitality. ''We've worked pretty hard at creating an atmosphere that isn't terribly hostile or negative,'' Osborne said. ''We never try to whip fans up and say negative things about opponents and create an us-against-them mentality.''

Notre Dame and Nebraska resumed the series with two games in 1947 and 1948, one at each campus, but they have played only twice since then: in the Orange Bowl at the end of the 1972 season and last fall in South Bend, when Nebraska defeated Notre Dame, 27-24, in overtime in one of the best games of the season.
Saturday's game here is the last of a two-game revival. A Notre Dame spokesman said that a schedule space has been filled by the return of Michigan and that a game with Nebraska could not be added again until 2013 at the earliest.

But scenes from some of those early games live on in film, and at least one Cornhusker enjoys the historical perspective. DeJuan Groce, a right cornerback who grew up in Cleveland and was recruited intensely by Notre Dame, recently watched a video featuring film clips of games played between the two universities in the 1920's.

Groce was taken with the leather helmets and small shoulder pads. Asked if he could decipher the plays, Groce smiled and shook his head.

''I just saw a lot of running,'' he said.

Referring to Saturday's rematch, he said: ''Oh, yeah. It's a real big deal.''

A version of this article appeared in print on Saturday, September 8, 2001, on section D page 1 of the New York edition.More Articles in Sports >

Memorial Stadium

Brief History of Nebraska Football from HuskerSpot.com

"The University of Nebraska's football team is known as the Nebraska Cornhuskers. The football program has become somewhat of a perennial powerhouse, but has seen some decline in the recent years. With the hiring of Bill Callahan, the Huskers traditional 9 win seasons became a thing of the past. Nonetheless, Nebraska ranks fourth in the all-time victories category. After the 2007 season, the Cornhuskers hold an all-time record of 805-324-40 (.713). Another milestone that the Huskers reached was on October 14, 2006. Nebraska reigned victorious over the Kansas State Wildcats to become on of only four programs in NCAA Division I-A history to win 800 games. Over the past 50 years, Nebraska is the winningest college football program in the nation by winning percentage and number of total victories.

Over the past 25 years, the Nebraska Cornhuskers have won three national championships. This is the second most of any Division I-A school. Miami (Florida) has five championships and ranks first in this category. Nebraska has five national championships all time. These were in 1970, 1971, 1994, 1995, and 1997" (HuskerSpot.com)