Former Nebraska football head coach Tom Osborne wants to ‘protect’ Husker players but his ideas on how to protect them are quite outdated.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Tom Osborne is an absolute legend. He is the reason I got to go through the greatest era of Nebraska football history. He is the man that made the Cornhuskers a national power in the 1980s and 1990s. He’s the man who took what Bob Devaney built and made it bigger, faster, stronger and better. Cornhusker fans owe the man a debt of gratitude.
The irony of Nebraska football fans and their connection to Tom Osborne is that Cornhusker fans are often accused of living in the past. Of not being able to move on and accept the reality of the program’s stature and standing in 2023. When it comes to topics like sports gambling, Tom Osborne’s opinions seem to be rooted in ideals he formed in the 1970s, 1980s and maaaaybe the 1990s. What’s clear is that his particular views on topics like sports gambling, or selling beer at games or even medical marijuana have not been updated in decades.
Nebraska football fans who listened to the letter he submitted to the Nebraska Legislature this week should understand that his views on sports gambling are quite outdated. No, not because he needs to get with the times and learn to love sports gambling, but because the things he claims he wants to protect Nebraska football players from are things they are already exposed to. In fact, have been for decades.
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Osborne’s letter was in opposition to a bill that would remove the restriction against people in Nebraska betting on Nebraska sports. His view, as was the view of former State Senator Patty Pansing Brooks was that if Husker fans would exert undue influence on Nebraska football players. It seems like Osborne and those who think like him have a bad mob movie playing in their heads where somebody named Bugsy is threating to break Casey Thompson’s kneecaps if the quarterback doesn’t shave a few points off next week’s game.
Nebraska football coach is behind the times by decades
The problem of course, is that Osborne, the law that is currently in place and people who think like him, is that they don’t seem to understand this kind of influence is already out there to be had. Just because people inside the state of Nebraska can’t bet on the Huskers doesn’t mean the rest of the country can’t. Living in Omaha, I can drive 20 minutes to Council Bluffs and bet on the Huskers right now.
It’s a “protection” that isn’t actually any kind of protection. It’s a safeguard that might have had some sort of effect before the internet and smartphones. Or even just before sports gambling was legal anywhere outside of Las Vegas. There was a time these kinds of restrictions could make sense. It’s years if not decades too late.
Putting these kinds of “safeguards” in place does very little to help. What it does do is rob the state of what income might come from sports gambling on Nebraska football and other Nebraska sports from “inside the house.”
Most notably, it cast the state in a regressive light. You might remember when Stanford offensive lineman Walter Rouse briefly committed to the Huskers, he made comments about how he thought Lincoln would be a bunch of cornfields.
If leaders in Nebraska want to shed the label of being a bunch of podunks who just heard about electricity, they need to stop embracing ideas better suited for Tom Osborne’s glory days, decades ago.