They came with paper and wood. It's possible that the 200 or so people who showed up had watched too much "Ted Lasso" and thought everything that plagued Nebraska football could be fixed with a symbolic burning of things they held dear. The Lincoln fire department put kibosh on any burning of jerseys, footballs or synthetics, so they wrote down all their bad memories on slips of paper and blocks of wood and threw them into a burning barrel.
Two days before the start of Nebraska's football season, a group of fans who couldn't afford a trip to Ireland to watch the team play in Ireland gathered in the concourse of Nebraska's baseball stadium for an event called "Break the Curse."
Things got a bit strange. They used some salt from a website to make a cleansing water. A radio intern cracked an egg on his head as a band played in the evening.
Jack Mitchell knew it wasn't enough when he stood and watched. The most important participant was not delivered by him.
The Curse of Frank Solich is as real as a cutworm on a cornstalk in some parts of Nebraska, and if you believe in such things, it won't go away until you get your money back.
It has been 18 years, 9 months and 16 days since Nebraska fired Solich. The Cornhuskers, who won five national titles in a four-decade span from the early '60s to the 2003 season, have lost at least eight games in each of the last eight years. Since Solich's last team went on to win its bowl game in his absence, the Cornhuskers have failed to finish better than they did, and four coaches have been hired and fired.
Mitchell knew it was a longshot that Solich would show up. He wanted to get him to speak on the video board and say that he's sorry.
Solich graciously declined through an middleman. After six years as the head coach at Nebraska, Solich had spent more than half of his life in the state. He hasn't been near Memorial Stadium since he was dismissed.
Less than a week after Scott Frost was fired by Nebraska, the Cornhuskers will play Oklahoma. The school that was once the model of coaching continuity, with just three coaching changes in four decades from the 1960s through the early 2000s, will rest its hopes in the hands of Mickey Joseph.
It was a few years ago that Frost was the most obvious hire. One of the hottest names in the coaching carousel was Scott Frost, a former quarterback at Nebraska who led the program to its last national title in 1997. He finished 16-31 at Nebraska, the first team in the history of major college football to lose seven straight games by a single-digit margin, and he gambled on an onside kick in the opening game of the 2020 season.
It didn't work out.
It feels like there is some debt that needs to be paid because of the cruel nature of it all. The fan base has been in collections for 20 years and you don't know how to get out of it, the interest rate is 50%.
I almost feel like I didn't succeed. Heading into Oklahoma, if I had delivered Frank, we would be 2-0.
There are many reasons to believe in the curse.
Multiple candidates turned down the chance to be Solich's replacement.
The extra second added to the game clock denied the Cornhuskers their first and only conference title after Solich.
Bo Pelini wore a hat and lost seven games in a row to Iowa. The Zips kicked the opening kick. The game was canceled after a two hour and 40 minute delay because of lightning.
I asked Lippman if he believed in curses while he was sitting outside in a coffee shop near the University of Nebraska.
Lippman said he believed in luck. Bad actions can make you have bad luck.
A young woman told about 90 people in one of Lippman's classes that she was a descendant of Solich. She claimed that her mother cursed at Nebraska football. Matt Reynoldson was a student in that class.
Reynoldson is a sports anchor in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but he doesn't remember much. He remembers that the woman said that until Nebraska makes things right with Frank, they will never win a game.
Lippman doesn't want to reveal the young woman's name because she told him years ago that the family had been the recipients of threats and she didn't want to experience that.
She was asked to speak to his class because he wanted his students to think about the importance of athletics. Lippman doesn't really follow the football team, refers to the former football coach as Jack Frost, and doesn't seem to put much stock in the curse.
He says that the way he heard the story was thatlich did his job well, but he was not Tom Osborne. You're still a firefighter if you say you're not Superman.
I believe football is a religion from an ancient Greek point of view.
Do you imagine succeeding Tom? Imagine being 53 years old when you're given the keys to your dream job and trying to live up to a man who won 255 games and never lost more than three games in a season. He's still the guy who reporters call to gauge his reaction whenever there's a big event.
Solich wouldn't be that person. The college football landscape was changing when he arrived. Nebraska was no longer able to boast about being one of the top teams with TV exposure or having a fancy weight room. Nebraska could compete in the Big 12 arms race if the school committed to facilities improvements. He wasn't able to make it that far.
The last game of the 2003 regular season was on the Friday after Thanksgiving at Colorado, where Nebraska was humiliated two years before, in a 62-36 loss. There was a feeling that Solich's job would be safe if the Huskers won in Boulder.
After Nebraska defeated the Buffaloes 31-22, the postgame scene was emotional.
The players on the '03 team went to bed thinking coach Solich was okay. When we beat Colorado, we thought we'd save the coach's job.
Solich wasn't there that Saturday. Nebraska's athletic director Steve Pederson promised during a news conference that he would not allow Nebraska's program to be mediocre. Fans of the Husker team would kill for the team to go 9-3.
Some of the comments made by former players during the game were not suitable for family audiences. If Solich hadn't been fired, where would the program be now?
I think Solich and Pelini were done wrong. When was 9-3 not good? Look at us, now.
The native son of Bill Moos was hesitant to return to Nebraska after Solich was fired.
Moos says that he didn't think that Nebraska was Nebraska and that it was gone from the tradition and legacy. He was referring to the period of Pederson and Perlman.
I convinced him that I had a track record of being a coaches' AD and I was going to have his back.
Moos told reporters at the Big Ten media day that he was hoping for six wins for the Nebraska football team. He said the news media made him feel bad. Moos told them that if they won six games, they would get to a bowl game. Moos is unsure if Nebraska went to a bowl game because of a curse.
Moos is a bit superstitious. I'm not sure if the curse is as big a part of it as bad decisions along the way. It's possible that the curse caused bad decisions. There were many of those. I hope I don't end up like them. We did some amazing things to make sure that curse wouldn't come back. There's a lot of parity in the industry compared to the 1990s.
Moos was hoping that the school could make up for their mistake. Solich traveled to Omaha to accept the award. He hadn't made a public appearance in the state in over a decade.
Solich smiled and posed for a picture with Moos and Frost, and Moos felt as if there had been no hard feelings.
He flourished after leaving Nebraska. The Mid-American Conference's all-time winningest coach went to Ohio University. He was very popular with the Bobcat's fan base. Ohio's football field will be named after Solich, who was unavailable for this story.
At first, Solich was not comfortable with the name of the field. He doesn't want attention. He believed that it was more than just honoring him, it was honoring all of the players he'd coached.
They became friends in Ohio after Solich's graduate assistant in the early 2000s, who was also Joe's father, was killed in a car crash. He's thankful that Solich allowed him to drive to his son's high school games on Friday nights. As a father, you can't put value on those things.
Everything went well for Frank Solich. He's beloved by a fan base and yearned for someone else. After Alberts became Nebraska's athletic director last year, he and Burrow sent each other text messages about a possible Solich return to Lincoln. It is a work in progress.
The way it ended at Nebraska remains the same. He has had chances to go back. He's had the chance to be the face of a spring clinic. He just didn't want to do it. I'm certain that at some point, Trev will push for that to happen.
Over the past four weeks, employees at KLIN and most likely the co-sponsor, Omaha's 1620 the Zone, have received their share of sarcastic comments, since the Break the Curse event in Lincoln didn't work.
Jack Mitchell was a high school student in Lincoln in the '90s and he's been perplexed by the Cornhuskers' struggles. He wondered if there was anything else that could have messed with Nebraska.
Oren "Buck" Beltzer was a two-sport star who captained Nebraska's football and baseball teams in 1909. Buck Beltzer Field was converted to an outdoor practice field for the football team after the baseball team moved to a new location.
Mitchell came up with the idea that Buck Beltzer was controlling Nebraska athletics from the grave after his field was torn down. The year Beltzer died was 1959 and the unranked Nebraska team upset the 19th ranked Oklahoma 25-21 on Halloween.
The crowd at the Break the Curse event didn't seem to care about Mitchell's Beltzer spiel. The Solich curse and 19 autumns of misery were the focus of most of the crowd.
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