Nebraska’s Blackshirt conversation is back, and Rob Aurich helped stir it right up.
The new defensive coordinator was always going to get asked about the tradition. That comes with the job in Lincoln. But when Aurich was pressed on when and how he would hand out the Blackshirts, he didn’t close the door on the subject - he cracked it wide open.
“TBD, man, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Aurich said when asked the question. “Let’s see how many guys develop throughout the season. Even though we have a mature starting group, we have a handful of really young players in this program that have really come a long way in a short time.”
That kind of answer guarantees the topic will hang around. It will come up again at every media availability, and fans will keep debating who has earned one and who hasn’t.
Aurich tried to frame the tradition in the strongest possible terms a day later.
“It’s one of the best traditions in college football,” Aurich said Tuesday. “It’s a beautiful experience to put those jerseys on people’s backs. And it’s something we don’t carry lightly, man.”
The problem is that the Blackshirts used to feel more like an internal football matter than a public guessing game. Under Charlie McBride, the black jerseys were a way to identify the starting defensive players in practice, and over time the tradition took on real weight inside the program. Since McBride’s retirement, every new defensive coordinator has had to decide how to handle it, and the whole thing has become one of the first questions at the opening game-week press conference.
Aurich is in a tricky spot. He’s new to Lincoln, and he’s the third defensive coordinator in the four years that Matt Rhule has been the head coach. Still, leaving the criteria and timing this vague only invites more noise.
“The hardest part of deciding is there are ‘certain guys who have met the criteria’ and a ‘whole bunch of guys that are right at that line.’”
That kind of wording does nothing to calm the discussion. If anything, it guarantees more attention when the Blackshirts are finally handed out.
For Nebraska, the cleaner play would have been to keep the mystery under wraps and let the jerseys speak for themselves when the time came. Instead, the conversation is already rolling, and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon.
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