Don Bryant


It's been fun, Fox

Donald W. Bryant retires at the end of this academic year. Nobody knows who that is. But everybody knows “The Fox” is giving up his den as associate athletic director at the UNL.
In a wide-ranging interview, Don (Fox) Bryant talked to Dean Will Norton Jr. and broadcasting professors Rick Alloway and Jerry Renaud about his more than three decades at UNL in various roles for the athletic department.

How have media relations progressed recently?

I think the trend had started long before two years ago. What has happened in intercollegiate athletics is a transition from a game where student athletes played the game and the fans had a good time into one giant big business operation.

A lot of things have contributed to that: Title 9, which puts some added financial burdens on athletic departments and the cost of living and all the things that rise; and education costs, where tuition goes up and the athletic department has to raise more money. All those things entered into causing a lot of problems for intercollegiate athletic programs.

It’s not just in Nebraska. It’s a national thing.

Other things that contributed to it were the Knight Commission and its reports on the problems in intercollegiate athletics and how to change them; and the advent of the president’s commission, where the college presidents took over the power and the administration of athletics from the athletic directors and the coaches within the NCAA framework.

All of those things created problems and changes in the eyes of the media. As younger media people come into it, not being familiar with how things used to be, there might be a little cynicism. There would be a little idealism, which is not all bad.

In the last couple of years, it came to fruition in the media. At the same time all those problems were building, the culture of the United States was becoming a bit shady.

Kids were having problems with the law, drugs and alcohol. All those things were playing into scenarios where it would be unrealistic and certainly naive to think that none of this would ever rub off on student athletes.

If you watch the newspapers and television week in and week out, year after year, there are student athletes in almost every school in the country getting in trouble one way or the other. It might be grades, it might be shoplifting, it might be drunken driving or it might be sexual assault.

Everybody is faced with those problems and it’s a real challenge for intercollegiate athletics.

Meanwhile, the media sits there and they’re not going to ignore those so-called role models and those people who are in the public eye. So they get those students athletes and the institutions get more publicity than the average person would get if he had a DWI.

In turn, that doesn’t set well with the coaches, athletic administrators or school officials. They don’t want to be held up as the only bandits in the world. So you have all this circulating and moving around. It’s a challenging time.

Football players’ after hours activities never were reported as much as they are now. Is that because there is a proliferation of media?

There’s been a growth in the media. Back when I started, when I was writing at a newspaper or when I started at the university, a newspaper would send one reporter to cover a football game or they might send two — a locker room person and a game story writer, for example. Now they might send four or five, with a columnist or two.

In television 30 to 45 years ago, you didn’t see 10 to 15 television stations show up at a football game, plus a network. It hadn’t grown to the extent it has now. The growth of the media has certainly had an impact.

There’s also what I’ve always called — I don’t know what educators call it — the Watergate Syndrome. After Watergate, there has been a trend in the media to spend a great deal more time trying to develop news or make some news, as opposed to reporting what actually has happened and letting it go at that. There is more in-depth research, more in-depth reporting, in the hopes that they’ll kick over rocks or find something more exciting, more readable.

A lot of that comes in how newspapers compete against television. Television is able to show something instantly, which is beating the newspapers. So the newspapers’ option is to go out and find something a little more exciting than what the television reporter has on the 6 o’clock news. All of that plays into the scenario.

The Boston Globe has been critical in its reporting of Christian Peter in a state 1,500-2,000 miles away. Why is Nebraska of such interest to Boston?

The No. 1 reason that the focus has been on Nebraska for a couple of years is that Nebraska was No. 1 in the nation for two years.

If Nebraska would have been 55th in the nation, it would have been on the fifth page in one or two paragraphs. You see a lot of stories like that every day in the newspapers. In some school, somebody got arrested for this or that or the other thing, but it’s not a big story.

But if you’re the No. 1 team in the nation, you’re just fair game; it’s open season.

Nebraska fans who are incensed about the treatment of Nebraska forget about how they wanted to read every shred of Oklahoma scandals a few years back. It was OK for Oklahoma to be in trouble and do bad. Ho ho. But when it comes to Nebraska’s turn, why it’s not as much fun.

You have to keep an even keel here; that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. You don’t like it, but you’re in that situation.

We had an unusual string at Nebraska of three or four or five kids getting in trouble in a one- or two-year period. That brought the attention down on us.

Some would say journalism’s standards have gone up, some would say they’ve gone down. How much of that is you can’t get away with what used to be good ol’ boy stuff?

In the last five years (I can’t pinpoint it to three or four), there’s been a tremendous emphasis put on gender equity, gender assaults, at the University of Nebraska, in government, the Army, the Navy, and, I suppose, the Marine Corps. A lot of things that didn’t get reported are now being brought to everybody’s attention.

What’s happened in the country is a lot of focus groups or a lot of advocacy groups have become more powerful and more vocal.

I’m sometimes puzzled. Tremendous emphasis was put on the Lawrence Phillips case by local feminist groups and women’s advocacy groups and rightly so. I don’t have any problem with that at all. It was a cause celeb.

Then they have a reported rape in a fraternity house and nobody marched, no-body picketed, the investigation was dropped and nothing’s said.

The athletic department is being investigated by outside people at the request of the groups and the faculty — fine. Is anybody investigating the greek system? Is anything on campus going on?

Those are questions that you wonder about. Why is there no interest by some of those groups?

The obvious answer to me and a lot of people is, “Where are you going to get the most ink?” The most ink is going to involve the No. 1 football team in the nation, not some fraternity house.

Does it seem like putting somebody up on a pedestal naturally causes human instinct to say there has to be something wrong?

Student athletes, and particularly in a high-profile sport like football, can’t escape that they’re going to be in the spotlight. They have to be responsible for their actions because they are going to get publicity. Whether it’s a government official or a movie star, television star or radio personality, they are celebrities. Celebrities draw the spotlight of the media.

You can’t hide. Years ago, a lot of stuff was hidden. Back in the 20’s with Babe Ruth, the media were having a beer with the Babe. That went on in the 40’s and 50’s.

Those are things that have changed. It’s a much more open society. Open records and meetings have played into the media doing more reporting. Forty years ago, there were stories we didn’t write that we knew about.

We made decisions based on what good would come out of it. What would be the result of this?

You have to remember, too, in those days we in the media wanted the Nebraska football program to get better. We were winning one game a year, two games a year, three games a year. That’s not much fun, writing about stuff like that. You wanted to see some success.

Is there a difference between the 50’s, 60’s, even the 70’s, when a liberal point of view was a tolerant point of view? Athletics was a way for the down and out kid to get into the mainstream of society. The classic example was O.J. Simpson. What effect has the O.J. Simpson case had on all of this?

I don’t know. It certainly has brought more spotlight on it and it’s got more media interest in problems.

A lot of this also goes back to Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson in breaking the color line in intercollegiate athletics and bringing African American students into intercollegiate athletics.

In 1954 at the University of Nebraska, black players were not allowed to stay with the rest of the team in a hotel in Oklahoma City. They had to be placed in a black YMCA and come back in the alley to go through the kitchen and eat with the rest of the team, then go back to the YMCA with the trainer.

Thankfully, those days are gone. All of this has been an evolutionary thing. As a result of recruiting and the growth of athletics in the inner cities and the ghetto areas, you’re getting kids who sometimes have not been raised or exposed to a childhood the same as a kid growing up in a small town in Nebraska

It’s a different type of lifestyle and the media will focus on that. Sometimes some people may not understand what some of those young men or women are exposed to in life. It’s a whole new world.

A sports information director has a tough job because a coach may not say a lot, may resent the media and the media are trying to find information. What kind of a job is it now compared to when you came in?

Thirty-five years ago, 40 years ago, there was a tremendous amount of human element in sports information and in sports writing.

For example, for years, I traveled for a whole week before a Nebraska road game. If we were playing in Oklahoma, I’d be in Oklahoma City and Stillwater or Norman or Tulsa or wherever, visiting radio stations, television stations, lugging film clips and going live on television at night and giving interviews with the press, arranging interviews, personal contact with guys.

You don’t have any of that any more. Nobody advances because you have fax machines, you have satellites deliver the video and nobody ever sees anybody. You used to get to know the coaches because you’d be with them on campus for a couple of days and you might have lunch or dinner with a coach or you might watch practice with them.

I’ve had Thanksgiving dinner with Barry Switzer and the Sooner team several times on Thanksgiving Day when we were going to play on Friday

We don’t do that any more. You’re not there. Economics have precluded you taking those trips because you don’t need to.

In the old days, we were like lobbyists and we’d move from town to town like an itinerant preacher trying to sell our religion of Nebraska football.

It’s all part of a big picture. About 35 years ago, you might get three or four requests for interviews. Now you might get 35 or 40. A coach cannot spend all day returning 40 phone calls. There will be two and three people from one newspaper — a columnist and a beat reporter, maybe both — wanting to talk to him. There might be two columnists.

It’s difficult, but demands are now being put on coaches that weren’t there before.

Out of all that growth of the media pressure and the size of staffs, every television station now wants to do a separate report with the coach. They all want pre-game shows. They sell those. They want to get a coach’s interview and he’s got his own shtick going with exclusive stuff. All those things play into it.

What happened a number of years ago was you went to a mass press conference where guys could tune in and listen to what was going on and he could wrap it all up on one day, or 80 to 90 percent of it.

Now if ABC comes in on Wednesday, and this is the Tuesday press conference and they’re giving you $600,000, you take a little time to talk to them. It was forced by the growth of the media.

We used to have to put stools in a press box. You put good writers on a stool, sometimes back in the first row in the press box, because there’s no room because everybody is sending two, three or four writers.

Our press box at the University of Nebraska is way too small. In 1967, it was great, but it doesn’t even come close to meeting the demands of the media, let alone what it’s being used for — marketing and fund raising and university public relations.

That’s one of the reasons there will be a new press box in the skyboxes. The growth of the media has been phenomenal.

How much of this is tied to the fact that intercollegiate athletics today is a revenue and PR generator for campuses and administrations?

I don’t know if the University of Nebraska administration would agree with me, but the football program has certainly been a boon to its efforts for national promotion and student recruitment and financial gift giving.

It’s the same at other schools. Other schools capitalize on it the same way. It is a monumental business any more.

At the University of Nebraska, the athletic department has funded a number of things to help the general student body and the faculty: library contributions, physical education and recreation facilities. That department is part of the university and is playing a role in general support.

The skyboxes will also generate funds for use as the administration decides. It’s a total project for the institution.

As athletics keep getting bigger and bigger, do you ever wonder whether somebody will say, “That’s enough,” and just pull the rug?

Oh sure, you think about those things. But I keep coming around to the viewpoint that all of this so-called building and all of this expansion haven’t cost the people who don’t care about it a nickel.

The athletic department itself is self- supporting, it never had any tax money other than the cigarette tax that we generated. The athletic department and Bob Devaney, with the help of others and some senators, got that through. That money is still being used for state building, so we can’t feel too guilty about that tax.

Other than that, we don’t get any state support for anything. We don’t get any student fees. We are in turn generating millions of dollars for the state and we’re one of the biggest donors to the University of Nebraska internally that there is — tuition, dorm fees and the library contribution.

All of that is not impacting the taxpayers.

So if a person doesn’t like football, that’s fine. But it isn’t like they are getting taxed to support those buildings.

We wouldn’t even do skyboxes if it was just to make some rich guy happy. The purpose of the skyboxes is to generate more income to do things around the athletic department, like trying to get a roof on the Bob Devaney Sports Center, trying to upgrade the stadium with more restrooms and more handicapped areas, plus help the library. The administration has bought into that because it will generate funds for the institution.

That again, is not tax money. There are a lot of people who don’t like football, but it’s not costing them anything.

You have to run just as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. Is there some cap to that? You can’t keep finding millions of new dollars in a state like Nebraska every year.

We’ve been saying that for years and years and years, and it keeps going on. People also have to understand that the University of Nebraska athletic department has no control over some of this.

If the University of Nebraska raises tuition 10 percent, the cost of the athletic department goes up 10 percent. If they raise dorm fees 8 percent, the cost to the athletic department goes up 8 percent. Those are costs that we have no control over. They may levee at some point a percentage against the athletic department to help with the main university.

If that happens, where do you go? You go to the football ticket prices. Those are things that you don’t have any control over. It isn’t that every year the athletic department sits around and says, “Let’s go out and see if we can’t raise ticket prices a whole lot so we can do this or do that.”

There are some things forced on you; the federal government, Title 9 and adding gender equity has forced athletic departments all over the country to add women’s sports to narrow the gap between men and women’s funds expended for athletics because football is counted in the equation.

There are no women’s sports that approach 85 scholarships. So you have to create new sports. We’ve done soccer, and that probably went to $300,000. We’re going to women’s bowling. That will end up with a big chunk of it. But those are laws and policies that we have no control over.

Nebraska, though it had a nationally-regarded athletic program, for years was a blue-collar program. There was not a lot of promotion to increase the budget, which has almost doubled in five years, was there?

In that perspective, it’s true. You go back 40 or 50 years ago, there were people with money who were funding the program in various ways, whether it was century clubs — under the table or on top of the table — or starting the touchdown club when we went into fund raising and to a degree the Husker award clubs and all those.

We were tapping people for funds to support the program who had an interest in football or intercollegiate athletics.

Now, the demand and the people have become affluent. If you look at the number of big houses being built — $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 and $600,000 — somebody has some money.

There would not be a University of Nebraska football program anywhere near the top 10 if or there wouldn’t be 22 or 23 sports if you relied on football tickets alone at $4, $5 or $6 a ticket. The program has been sustained and kept alive only because of contributions from people who could afford to give money. We would have been broke a long time ago.

What’s the future for gender equity issues?

The athletic department will continue to move in that direction.

Bill Byrne is a firm believer in it and is trying to do it. Whatever the law says, that’s what we’re going to do. The university’s committed to gender equity — the administration, the regents and the chancellor.

It’s amazing what’s happened in the field of women’s athletics here and around the country in the last 15 years.

We have a great women’s program, and we’re competitive in a number of areas at a national level that astounds the rest of the nation. Our whole athletic program is unbelievable. To have that many teams that are nationally competitive in a state with a million and a half people is a tremendous tribute to the people of Nebraska who have historically supported the university academically and its athletics.

That goes back to the ’40s, ’30s, ’20s and the Depression. They’ve always loved the university. I don’t know how long that will continue, but the choice is either support it or it goes.

When Tom Osborne retires, you have to pick a coach who can win as well as Osborne did to keep the income coming in. What kind of public relations problems come with the selection of the next coach?

Coaching has changed so much in the last few years. It’s been an evolutionary process. It used to be the athletic director was a former coach, a football coach, and they’d kick him upstairs to athletic director to get rid of him because he could not beat anybody or he was aging. So they would bring in somebody and move the coach to athletic director.

Now, an athletic director has to be a business man with a masters, a big masters in business from Harvard Business School or somewhere.<

The same with the football coach. You don’t get a football coach any more who isn’t smart, good appearing, great on television, can do this and do that and is media friendly. And he has to be able to graduate everybody, he has to make sure everybody is treated fairly and make sure nobody ever drives after drinking. There is more pressure put on coaches now that was unheard of 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. They are now everything from a father confessor to giving last rites to policeman. It’s a tough job.

When you pick the next head coach, is it a problem that the sports program is national in scope but doesn’t have national influence. The Northwestern program is national and has that influence. Here it is a parochial program. Does that cause problems in picking a new coach?

Any discussion of what you’re going to do after Tom Osborne is almost impossible when you don’t know any of the specifics. You don’t know how long he’s going to go, you don’t know who is going to be the athletic director if it’s five years down the road, you don’t know who is going to be the chancellor and you don’t know who is going to be on the Board of Regents.

You do know the prestige of the Nebraska job, which is highly valued by the coaching fraternity as one of the plums in the country because of the fan support. And it’s the only show in town.

I go back to sitting on a couch with Bud Wilkinson in his home in the 1950’s. He said, “One of these days Nebraska will get a coach and you’ll win big.”

He said that was one of the great jobs in the country, because you didn’t have any other schools to worry about. You got your own deal; no pro teams, no nothing.

He said that was a great job. He was prophetic and it worked out that way. You would have a lot of good coaches available for interviews for this job, but you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

The turnaround that Bob Devaney put together in the ’60s probably couldn’t happen again because of a variety of economic conditions.

I don’t think that it’s comparable. It’s apples to oranges. It’s relatively new. It had only been going for 10 or 11 years and there was that tremendous excitement. Plus you had a great guy in Osborne on the staff. You don’t know who is going to still be here when Tom goes — if and when he goes. You don’t know whether the present guys will still be here.

For a program that was where Nebraska was back in the early ’60s, it would be a lot more difficult to achieve success that quickly today.

Tom Osborne found out and the next coach will find out — whomever it will be — that it will be next to impossible if not impossible to get the adoration and admiration and love that Devaney got.

Tom was at the top and kept it and built up from there. But it wasn’t dramatic. It was just there. With hard work and determination and brains and assistants and recruiting, they’ve done a magnificent job keeping the program at a high level.

Devaney took it from nothing to the top and it overwhelmed people. None of us could ever have dreamed that a program would do what he did. That generated a great deal of affection for Bob that the subsequent coaches aren’t going to be able to achieve.

If you’re winning 9, 10, ll games a year, you can maybe only go up one game a year. It’s a lot different than going from 1-9 to 9-2.

You have more than a couple of generations who have no history of what can happen to a program. Missouri was on top during the Dan Devine era, and it has been at the bottom a long time since he left.

It’s going to happen. At some point, we’re going to lose three or four games a year.

You’ve hit on something that people tend to overlook. I have a lot of people tell me, “Boy, I can remember before Devaney got here. Boy, I could get any seat I wanted in the stadium. It was always empty.”

That’s not true. If you go look at the attendance figures from 1948 on, I’m not sure if it started in ’47 or ’48, that was a 31,000-seat stadium. You could go up to 38,000 with bleachers, but basically it was a 31,000-seat stadium. From 1948 until 1962 when Bob got here, the average attendance was about 27,000 to 28,000.

The people of Nebraska supported that losing team for years, because it was there. Since the 1920’s with the Notre Dame games, the great Pittsburgh games and the Minnesota games in the 30’s — the Big 6 conference — the people went to the games. It was the thing to do. It was a social event.

The thing that worries you more than anything is the lack of student interest. Student sales and tickets have gone down dramatically here and around the country. Part of the problem here is that the department made it tougher to scalp tickets, although now they can turn them in and pay the difference and they can do whatever they want to with them.

It dropped from 18,000 to down to 8,000 when they started toughening up on that. What happened is when people like me grew up in the 30’s, we were in love with Nebraska football and you went and you wanted to go to the university and you wanted to play and they were it.

Then you went to the university and you got out of the university and it was a social deal to go. You wanted to get tickets, and everybody did that. They’re not doing that. Now you go a generation or two where the graduates don’t want to go to football games.

You have a problem down the way if you’re losing interest that way. I think we have to do a little work on getting some students.>

We’ve turned away faculty too, and staff people. The interesting thing was that prior to two years ago, a lot of faculty turned back tickets. We win two national championships and they all want their tickets back. Well, they don’t have them. They went to somebody else. So it’s a definite problem.

What was the characteristic of Bob Devaney? What was his gift that enabled him to turn this thing around so fast?

Bob was a character. Anybody who ever worked for him would die for him. You wanted to do well for Bob. I don’t care who it was — assistant coaches or managers or anything — you really wanted to be successful to help Bob.

Why? What was it about him?

He let you do your thing. The other thing he had: He was a motivator. He was good spirited, fun, needling and joking. He was just a fun guy to be around. He surrounded himself with outstanding assistant coaches. Every one of Bob’s assistants had been a successful high-school coach, a winning high-school coach, which meant they were good teachers.

They came in (they’d been together five or six years at Wyoming), and they immediately made it fun for the kids. It was a different type of thing. There weren’t long scrimmages in the dark and they just made it fun and it was kind of a good-spirited thing, and everybody started having more fun. He had great assistant coaches.

At practice, he’d see the media standing on the sidelines, he would come over and start telling stories and entertaining them.

Bob loved to perform. He was a good speaker, he loved to joke and tell stories and get laughs. He was cut out of the Duffy Daugherty school. He’d coached for Duffy, but it went back to high school. It was a fun deal.

It seems Devaney could deflect what little criticism of him there was at the time and make it into a joke and they sort of forgot about it and it went away.

He got in trouble at Iowa State that time when we had that tie and he said, “Oh boy, we reminded me of a bunch of farmers laying around at a Sunday picnic.”

All the farmers were mad. “Hey, we don’t lay around at a picnic,” they said.

“Gosh, I guess I want to apologize to the farmers,” Devaney said. “I guess I was the only guy who laid around and took a nap at a picnic. That’s why I’m so fat.”

Boom. It’s over.

It used to be expected that a coach would show up in the taverns after a game and have a beer with people and socialize. That just endeared Devaney to the people.

He had the personality that he was just at home in a bank board room with the richest guys in the world or the president as he was with some soda jerk somewhere, like I used to be. He just had that. You just enjoyed him. There were times when he would start to tell a story at a banquet and everybody in the room started snickering because they knew what was coming. They knew he was going to be so funny. You just loved the guy.

He was a great guy, and what you saw was what you got.

Since you’ve been on top, have the goals of the sports information department changed?

What happens is you get tremendous pressure that you don’t otherwise get. We were going for three before the season and a ton of people show up for a pre-season press conference. If you were going to be ranked 15th in the nation, there wouldn’t have been anybody there but the Omaha World Herald and the Lincoln Journal and Hastings. It makes a lot of difference.

When USA TODAY and the New York Times and all those people come in, you know you’re high and you know you’re big time. The two national champions with Devaney sustained the program high until Tom won. There was interest in Nebraska all those years.

But Tom was winning nine, 10 games a year. He was the only guy in the country doing it. Tom has done it. It’s a remarkable job to stay up there 23 years and never lose more than a game or two.

My God, they average 10 games a year for 23 years. It’s amazing. I can’t say enough about what those guys have done to maintain that level of excellence.

I know how hard they work. They just totally prepare and the kids respond. It’s a remarkable thing. I don’t know how in the heck they do it.

When Bob came in, he had some great players left over from Bill Jennings, and they win four Big 8 championships.

Then they have two bad years. They’re 6-4, the Regents want him fired, they want him to fire two assistants and they’re not going to give him raises if he doesn’t.

He fights them off and changes some things and changes the offense and boom, he goes on to win. Then he quits and went on to become the athletic director. As great as Bob was, he didn’t keep it at nine or 10 wins a year all 11 years. He stumbled a couple of years.

It’s remarkable. Tom has had a bad rap, but you look through the years and he’s had some good teams. It wasn’t always year in and year out. He’s had a few toughies in there. You’re still playing all those years in one of the good conferences in the country.

To win at that level that consistently is amazing. There are one or two schools I don’t think have ever beaten him. The odds of that are infinitesimal.

The people still remember we got beat by Kansas State 12-0 at homecoming. To lose to Kansas State was the worst thing that could happen. Devaney always said that was the worst moment of his career.

The spotlight throws pressure on coaches. It is a fish bowl existence for those guys.

Tom Osborne thinks the jury is still out on him on whether he’s a decent guy because of all the questions hanging over his head. Do you?

I don’t know about that. It isn’t around Nebraska with Nebraska fans. I don’t think the jury is out on Tom.

The national media just disagreed with the handling of some of that (troubles last year). They just disagreed, and you’re not going to change them. They win.

How in the world can you ever get another coach who represents what Nebraskans are more than Osborne?

You’re not going to. I don’t think it’s realistic, any more than it was realistic before the season to think that this year’s football team was going to be as good in September as last year’s was against Florida.

It was a helluva different team. The best running back in history is gone, the best quarterback maybe in history is gone, the best center certainly who’s been around a helluva long time is gone and the offensive line was rebuilt. Yet we’re going to go for three. It’s a cinch.

Three-peat, buy a T-shirt and go for three. I’ve got guys who are saying to me, “I got my reservation in St. Louis. I got a motel room in New Orleans.” Well, you’re dumb.>

Do people take Tom Osborne for granted?

They think it’s automatic. All you’ve got to do is win three more. You get to New Orleans and you don’t win the national title, the whole season’s been a bust.

That’s the fan reaction. That’s what the guy is up against. If you would have just beaten Arizona State, we’d have been the national champions.

Tom Osborne seldom loses to a team that’s worse than his team. If it’s a better team, he often beats them.

If he has the time to prepare for somebody, a week or two, he’s tough.

How about all those years against Oklahoma when he had better talent and couldn’t beat them.

Most of those years they beat us they had better horses. I don’t know if we had better horses when we beat them in 1978, the replay year. The only reason we beat them was a fumble on the 5-yard line

Is it psychological? Is it like the Packers can’t beat the Cowboys?

Look at most of those defeats that are the most memorable and the offense went down the field and scored. We’re ahead with a minute to go.

What lost the game? Defense.

Boom. Fifty-seven seconds, they go the length of the field or kick a field goal. The defense wasn’t as good as the Oklahoma offense.

Even in the 1981-1983 years, the defense wasn’t as good. Why did it take so long for this school to decide to pay attention to defense?

They were playing that monster defense, five-man front, with a middle guard. Finally, when they got in those bowl games with the Florida schools and Miami and saw what speed did on defense, then they went to speed.

When they signed Tommie Frazier, that was the year when things began to change.

Osborne went away from the drop-back passer type. Remember, we had Homm and then Faragamo and they were not mobile guys. Quick defenses were throwing them for losses. Then they had some quarterbacks who could throw and run.

Finally, Oklahoma was killing them with those quick athletes who could run like heck and could run that triple option. Those guys were good. They were quick, so that’s when they started recruiting those type of athletes to beat a quarterback.

Tom is smart enough to adapt to what is happening and he did it.

Devaney did it. They had those big lumbering linemen and they were running that fullhouse backfield with an unbalanced line.

Alabama’s quickness in a bowl game was just killing them. So they start getting faster guys and they went to that speed and they changed the offense and the I-formation and boom, boom, boom, they changed that whole thing around and away they went to two national championships.

This year Osborne hasn’t passed much. Last year, he passed a lot. You don’t hear criticism any more, do you?

No, not too much. What they’re saying, what I’ve heard more this year, is that if some of those receivers would have hung onto the ball, Scott Frost’s record would look a little better.

Does Osborne want to pass?

He’s called a lot of pass plays. But if you’re running the option and you call a pass play and something else happens, maybe a kid comes up and he sees that the pass play is not going to work because here comes a blitz here, then he checks out of the pass play. He’s taught to do that, so you never know how many pass plays Osborne has called.

The guy knows the weakness of the other team and puts our strength against their weakness. He knows what is going to happen and he warns everybody, doesn’t he?

He’s always been that way. The guy always warns them. I’ve heard it a thousand times. The night we played Michigan State up there and come back and Lawrence Phillips gets in trouble. We taxi out at the airport and Tom gets on the intercom:

“Fellows, nice job again. And remember, 9:30 in the morning is treatment for anybody who’s banged up.

“Don’t forget the rules and don’t go out and celebrate too much and don’t get in trouble. Remember your responsibilities and don’t get in trouble tonight.”

We’re taxiing in from the last game on the road, and he said, “Remember our rules on drinking tonight and don’t get in trouble.”

I hear somebody in back of me say, “That’s the same thing he said the night of the Michigan State game.”

He tells them what to do.

Same with Devaney: We’re playing in the Sugar Bowl, 1964. Alabama had a helluva team and Ken Stabler is their quarterback and Ray Perkins is a split end.

The last thing in the locker room, Bob calls them out, calls them back, and says, “Hey guys, whatever you do, watch for the bomb on the first play. They can throw early, they can throw deep. Watch them throwing deep early because they’re going to try to burn you deep.”

Now everybody goes out on the field, and the second play of the ball game, Stabler hits Perkins about 50 yards downfield.

The defensive back comes off the field, and Bob asks, “What the hell happened?”

He says, “I wasn’t expecting it, Coach."

What do you do? You got to be something to be a coach. Like we’ve said, the football season would be a lot of fun if it weren’t for the games.

There’s such a change today. When you guys started, you didn’t have Internet chat groups and list serves that analyze every play of the game. Does that make any difference in the publicists job?

I would think so. Probably the worst thing that’s happened to coaches and perhaps intercollegiate athletics, football and basketball particularly, has been the advent of the television analysts and talk radio.

When guys get on there and they rip a coach for doing this or doing that, they analyze and second-guess a coach from a studio somewhere and television and talk radio lets any idiot in the world call in and say whatever the guy wants to say, and there’s no refuting it.

What are you going to do?

It’s out over the air. It’s cruel to have a coach exposed to that sort of thing or an institution. I’ve heard stuff on there that’s absolutely false. There is no rhyme or reason to where they come up with that, and it’s out over the air that this is a fact. The hosts sometimes are so dumb, they don’t know the difference and they let it go and they agree with the guy.

A coach can’t win on those deals. It’s amazing.

How did you get started?

I don’t know what year it was, 1934 or 1935, and I got a Swiss Set printing press for Christmas where we could do a hand crank and set type rubber type, and a neighbor kid and I started a little neighborhood newspaper.

I suppose I was about 7 or 8. A barber bought an ad for 2 cents but I don’t know why. That’s the earliest newspaper job I ever had.

At Lincoln High, I was sports editor of the Lincoln High Advocate. So I got a little experience that way and had a great teacher and got an interest in it.>

I was in the service after the war at Port Chicago Naval Ammunition Depot north of San Francisco in the boondocks up there underneath the mountains where they had all this ammunition stored and ships would come in and get or unload ammo. Anyway, they had a base newspaper, and I started writing a gossip column under a pseudonym.

Then I came back to the university and took journalism, played freshman football. When I had gone into the service, I’d run track at Lincoln High so I promised Coach Ed Weir that I would come back and run at the university.

I went out for track after I’d been playing football, but when the coach had last seen me I weighed 150 pounds, and when he saw me now I was 185 pounds. It was tough circling the old indoor track. I didn’t look as frisky as I once had. Ed was not impressed.

I was in a Spanish class with Norris Anderson, who was sports editor of the Lincoln Star, and he’d been a Marine correspondent. He said, “Fox, you’re too small, you’re too slow and you’re not worth a hoot as an athlete.

“Why don’t you come to work for me as a sports writer?”

So I went to work at the Lincoln Star as a sports writer and did that, and went to school until September of 1950. I got called back into the Marines for Korea, and then I came back and finished up in the summer of 1954.

I was on the news side at the Lincoln Star, and was assistant city editor. I ran the slot a couple of nights a week, and the rest of the time worked on the rim. Then Norrie went to Florida, the Miami News, the summer of 1954, and I became the sports editor. I did that until after Devaney’s first year and then John Bentley retired here at the university. So I came up here as sports information director. The rest is history.

What is the role of an editor?

I never have bought into you’ve got to print everything you know. You’ve got to decide if it’s for the public good or whatever.

Where do you decide what you’re going to report and what you’re not going to report? Everybody has to make that decision himself.

I don’t know that every barfly in the world needs to know every little secret on a football team, but maybe they do. Maybe that’s their role. There are some things that I don’t think everybody needs to know.

Nobody ever said I was a good journalist, but the one thing I did was operate as a football writer.

I tried to operate as a football journalist and a writer rather than as a flack. We didn’t have a bunch of hooey stuff trying to con guys or coming up with some goofy thing to fool people into voting for somebody. The guys knew that. I knew that if I did something phony or acted like I was trying to con those guys, they’d ask, “Has Fox lost his mind?”

That would defeat the whole purpose of it. We didn’t get into a lot of that, and we still don’t. It wouldn’t have fit. Devaney didn’t want it and Osborne certainly wouldn’t want it. It was the wrong way to go about it.

Is the national media tougher on Tom Osborne than the local media? Are local sportswriters boosters, rather than reporters?

I don’t know if either one of those points are valid. I think the guys here have a difficult time. You have a closed society. You’re seeing the same guy every day, asking the same guy every question. You’re not talking to him once a week and then talking to the pro basketball coach the next day and the coach of the state university out here the next day. You’re living with that guy, and your boss, the Omaha World Herald or the Lincoln Journal, they want you to get everything you can get. It’s tougher than hell.

There’s pressure to find a new story?

To get something from the same guy who has said it and it’s been on TV, or he’s said it on Tuesday, what are you going to say?

He comes up, we have a noon press conference on Tuesday, and he talks for 30 minutes, and there are 10 guys meeting him after practice Tuesday afternoon as he walks off the field and want him to get them a story. What the hell is he going to say that’s happened in an hour unless somebody broke a leg?

Is this a situation where Nebraska is more likely to take criticism from national media who don’t have to go talk to Osborne the next day?

Yes. Somebody who’s only going to talk to him once a year at a bowl game is going to take a lot more shots than some guy who’s got to live with him every day. That’s human nature.

There’s a difference in honest reporting or ethical reporting. The guy who came in with that TV and broadsided Osborne over there, that was a setup (referring to Bernard Goldberg of CBS last year).

The guy wanted to provoke Osborne so on TV he would look like he was mad so he would have a story. To me, that is not right. Tom had a right to be mad at that guy.

That guy could have called Tom Osborne or gone out in the hall. To blindside a guy at a press conference with an infuriating type question deliberately not to get an answer but to make him look angry so it would help the show that night, I don’t buy that.

To me, that’s dirty pool in reporting, but it’s a great technique. Everybody’s done it. It’s a technique that’s used. That’s why athletic departments give courses to kids on pitfalls with the media and how to respond to things and be careful what you say, and all of that.

A kid says things in the heat of battle, too. That’s why the NCAA and everybody has gone to that cooling off period after a football game.

The writer has to weigh that with the emotion of the moment of the frustration and defeat, and say, “Well, I’m not sure if I want to use that quote. He might not say the same thing on Monday.”

Those are things that schools work on with kids to try to get them to learn how to handle themselves with the media.

Where is the dividing line between a person’s public persona and a person’s private persona?

There have been a lot of changes in the law and in law enforcement. Years ago, the police might have driven the kid home or got somebody to drive him home and let it go. Now there is so much pressure on law and order. There’s so much pressure on public officials and judges and everybody else— and the media scrutiny and focus groups and advocacy groups — that you don’t excuse people for mistakes any more or they’re going to get it. Everybody has to know that.

I don’t know that a celebrity has a private life. It’s tough. It’s hard to hide. Anybody with an ounce of brains in an office with personnel, doesn’t make jokes or tell stories with women around. It’s changed. People now know that’s offensive.

What are the traits you respect in a good journalist?

Integrity is the No. 1 thing. A good journalist has to have integrity.

You have to be fair and you have to be somewhat familiar with human frailties. There’s a human side to everything. You have to have a feeling for people.

A good journalist working with athletes knows there’s a heck of a lot of difference between a 17-, 18-, 19-year old kid in college who’s away from home for the first time as opposed to a 45-year-old politician who is running for his fifth office and has been around the block a few times.

There has to be some distinguishing fairness or sense of emotion.

A newspaper was serious in asking me to let its photographer in the operating room to shoot pictures of Tom Osborne’s open heart surgery.

Now that’s gross. That’s one of the dumbest requests I ever had.

Then when I said that and wouldn’t let them do it, they wanted a letter guaranteeing that no other media would be allowed to film his heart. That’s absolutely ludicrous in my book.

You have to have some understanding that there are young people or there are people who have human problems and have a little feeling for your fellow man or woman. You just can’t be callous and cynical and not have any feeling of emotion for people and be a great journalist.

The good old sports writers who did the best stories about athletics, for example, got to know the guys and wrote feeling about a kid or his situation. They got into the real nuts and bolts of a person rather than just a cynical viewpoint that they approached the story with and tried to get somebody.

Is it possible in sports information today to be a journalist first, or are they being forced into being a flack?

It depends I guess where you are. If you’re at the University of Nebraska or you’re at Notre Dame or you’re at Penn State or you’re at Tennessee or somewhere like that, you’re going to be on television. If you’re on television, your job is a lot easier because people see your kids.

If you’re at New Mexico State or West Tallahassee College where you’re never on television and nobody knows you, nobody covers you, you may have to do something hokey to get attention.

I know some guys who say they’re in the western time zone and never get anything into the eastern press on Sunday. They may send out a poster of some guy sitting backwards on a jackass or something. They have to do something to attract attention.

There’s an awful lot of stuff done still today that’s faxed. A lot of people get faxed. People have gone away from mailing. You look at the Monday mailings — there are four or five or six pages of mailings and its good stuff.

We had the national mailing list of every state because we knew there were voters and all that sort of thing. They got the information. It was straight, this is what happened and the little notes that would be of value to TV or radio. That’s what most of them do. The brochures are self perpetuating. But it’s again difficult. A lot of papers have space problems. It depends on where you are. There are few newspapers around the country that run as much about one football program as the Lincoln and Omaha newspapers. That’s all they have.

If they had two pro teams and three major Division 1 colleges in the state, they wouldn’t be spending that much time on the University of Nebraska.

When you stopped being sports information director, was it still as much fun?

Anywhere you go in intercollegiate athletics today, people will tell you it is not as much fun as it used to be. That’s administrators, athletic directors and coaches. It’s so much more pressure- packed because of economics. It has become so important to raise money, to generate money and the growth of it is just phenomenal.

Departments have grown and the jobs have grown. Where you used to have 50 people in an athletic department, you might have 200 now. You’ve got this department and that department; you may not know everybody, you probably don’t know everybody.

All that human thing where once you knew everybody plus their families, their wives, their kids, you don’t have those kind of relationships any more.

A part of the not having much fun, candidly, is as you get older you don’t have as much fun. You don’t do the things, fortunately, that you did when you were young. I just think it’s the pressure of big business.

What was the best thing about it all for you?

The people. One of the things that I miss the most since I quit being an active sports information director is the relationships with athletes. I’d go to football practice, I’d travel with basketball or I’d go to track practice. You got to know the athletes. I miss that.

There are a lot of our athletes who walk by and I don’t know them. I could not name them if I had to.

I used to type everybody’s name and I knew their mothers and their fathers and their home towns and numbers. I see a kid walk in now from 30 years ago, and it’s, “Oh, No. 27, I remember you.”

I see a kid on this year’s team and I don’t know him. That’s troublesome to me. I miss that. But the people, there was great camaraderie in the media of the Big 7, Big 8 conference years ago. You just knew everybody. You were together in the Skywriters Tour that came after I came to the university.

Before that, we would all meet in Kansas City with the coaches. So you would have that weekend. You would go out and have dinner with guys and have a drink with them and it was fun. You got the other guy’s perspective. You’d help them, you’d arrange interviews or you’d go live on television at 10 o’clock at night with a 20-second film clip and 20-second interview.

Everything changes, and I probably couldn’t hack going on the road for a whole week any more. I don’t even want to. But it was an interesting time, it really was.

It was a fun ride for you, wasn’t it?

It was. I was lucky, very lucky. I never had a moment’s regret or a day that I didn’t enjoy going to work. It led to a lot of experiences at the national and world level that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. There have been some great relationships in the university family outside of the athletic department. So it’s been fun, and it’s been rewarding in a lot of areas.

People say that the Nebraska program has been a clean program but its image is that it’s even cleaner than it is because of Don Bryant. Its athletes go to school, and it’s what an educational athletic program ought to be.

There never, ever has been a time when I didn’t think we weren’t part of the university and that we had a mission to stress the student athlete. I never consciously did anything to generate that; it just happened.

You had some good student athletes who projected some doggone good images. And you have coaches who stressed that. We reflected much the philosophy of Devaney and Osborne. I tried to when I was there.

The only two years that we didn’t have any All Americans while I was there, I went to Bob and asked, “Who do you want me to push for All America this year?”

He said, “We don’t have one.”

I said, “Well, the guys are going to be calling.”

He said, “Tell them we don’t have one. We haven’t got that good of a team. There’s no All America on the team.”

So that’s what I told people: We didn’t have any.

The same thing happened when we didn’t have one with Osborne.

He said, “I don’t think we ought to push. I just don’t know that we have anybody who is that qualified.”

We told that to people. When you did tell them you had somebody, then they tended to believe you.

There were times I was requested by the media to pose guys on mules and I wouldn’t do it.

I said, “That’s ridiculous. Just because a guy did it at Notre Dame in 1924, I’m not going to do it in Lincoln.”

The last thing in the world I wanted to do personally was have guys think I was a damned phony, trying to lie to them about some guy to get All America. I didn’t want to do that. They were friends. They were good, quality writers and I didn’t want to be a part of conning them. I just wouldn’t do that. And they wouldn’t do it to me.

When you summarize the job you had, what would you call yourself - a journalist, a writer or a publicist?

An ambassador to the media and an ambassador to the coaches, the fans and the boosters. They come in the office or they call you and they want to visit.>

It’s just not me and it’s just not the University of Nebraska. That’s the role of the sports information director at any school in the country. People don’t realize it, but the first person who anybody from outside contacts about athletics at an institution is the sports information director. That’s the first image that’s projected.

They don’t all call the head coach, they don’t call the athletic director. People call for something and they get the operator who always switches them to the sports information director. So you’re always the point guard. You’re either directing them to the coach or you’re trying to get the coach together with the media or the media together with the coach or keep them apart.

You have to be some sort of ambassador in the job. If there is one word to describe it, that might be it.