An article making the rounds says Nebraska still has roughly 10,000 tickets left for its home games against Indiana and Ohio State, and the reaction has been familiar: plenty of people are ready for the sellout streak to end.
That argument deserves a serious hearing. The problem is that the obvious rejoinder never quite adds up.
Nobody should pretend every seat is truly full. That hasn’t been the case for a while.
The scan data the Omaha World-Herald began tracking years ago told the story in plain terms. In 2022, late in the Scott Frost era, there was a Thursday bulk purchase of 70 tickets.
The same thing happened against Minnesota and Illinois. Nebraska had three bulk buys in one season.
A donor also bought 21,000 tickets for the Wisconsin game at ten dollars apiece - 85% off face value - and sent them into resale.
That’s real. It’s documented. And anyone insisting the streak is some purely organic, seat-by-seat sellout hasn’t been paying attention.
Dave Feit has probably followed this more closely than anyone, and the criticism he’s gathered is hard to dismiss on its face. The streak “limps on,” the tickets are devalued, it’s a Weekend at Bernie’s façade, it’s not an attendance streak, it’s a tickets-sold streak, believing in it is like believing in Santa Claus.
Fair enough. But then what?
That’s where the anti-streak case gets fuzzy. The usual pitch is that if the streak dies, people will finally pay attention. Stop going to games and something changes, the argument goes.
But changes what?
Nebraska’s biggest problems over the last 20 years haven’t been ticket revenue or the move from the Big 12 to the Big Ten or losing the Texas recruiting pipeline. They’ve been personnel decisions.
Coaching hires. Staff hires.
The wrong guy at the wrong time, repeatedly. Bill Moos hiring Scott Frost would have set the place on fire, and Frost still ended up costing the program five years.
An empty stadium doesn’t correct a bad hire. It just leaves you with a bad hire and less leverage.
That’s why the sellout streak still matters as a sales tool. It may be the best one the athletic department has left.
When that number pops on a national broadcast graphic, it’s free branding Nebraska can’t buy. It tells a recruit who’s never been to Lincoln that this place is different.
College athletics has seen a lot worse marketing ideas.
There’s also the money side, which matters now more than ever. A donor buying 21,000 tickets isn’t burning cash for no reason. That money goes into the athletic department, and Nebraska needs every dollar it can get as revenue sharing looms and the gap becomes one of the program’s biggest near-term concerns.
The comparison with Ohio State is instructive, even if people don’t like it. Ohio State lives in a different financial world, helped by an institutional budget boosted by its medical system and medical college.
It graduates many more students than Nebraska, which means more alumni, more donors and more money available for athletics. Nebraska is a small-state school at the low end of that curve.
It has to work much harder to raise the same dollar, and that reality doesn’t change whether the streak is at 400-something or at zero.
There’s another part of this that feels unavoidable: if the streak ends this year, it will instantly become ammunition against Troy Dannen. The same people who say they don’t care about the streak will turn it into the headline number in every “fire the AD” discussion.
You can’t really have it both ways. If it’s a meaningless vanity stat, then its death shouldn’t matter. If its death matters, then keeping it alive matters too.
For what it’s worth, Dannen seems to be doing a pretty good job everywhere except football. Hoiberg has basketball moving.
Softball, baseball and volleyball are in good shape. Football is the outlier, and 7-6 is not the standard.
Nebraska isn’t at the bottom, but it’s not where it should be either, and year four for Matt Rhule needs to show something.
At the same time, the department has done something smart with Memorial Stadium: it has turned a building that used to be used six days a year into a venue for concerts and other events, with that revenue helping athletes. That’s the kind of adaptation Nebraska needs.
The standard being applied to the streak is also a little wild. In the concert world, 90% sold counts as a sellout.
Nobody fights about it. Nebraska has been stricter with its own streak than the live entertainment business is with its own numbers.
And yes, Nebraska is going to have to start actually selling tickets. The old season-ticket waiting list used to be long.
Apparently, it isn’t anymore. There are $50-for-two promotions for Bowling Green.
That is what selling looks like.
The streak has been alive my entire adult life. It began on November 3, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It lasted through two coaches when Nebraska was great and seven more when it wasn’t. It connects the best version of this program to whatever it is now, and it has endured because Nebraska fans kept showing up for a product that has, by any honest measure, been a pretty rough ride for two decades.
That isn’t a lie. It’s a testament.
If Nebraska wants to fix the problem, the answer isn’t to kill the streak. It’s to stop being bad at football.
So if you’re rooting for the streak to end, the real question is simple: what changes the day after?
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