It’s not entirely Rob Aurich’s fault. It’s an annual rite of passage for Nebraska defensive coordinators to be asked every year how they’ll handle handing out Blackshirts. Unfortunately, the newest DC fed the mystery, and it’s getting staler than the yearly talk about the sellout streak.
The Blackshirts started as a way for famed Nebraska defensive coordinator Charlie McBride to show his team who the starting defensive players were by wearing black jerseys in practice rather than the traditional red or white. Since McBride’s retirement, every new defensive coordinator has felt obligated to continue the tradition, and most have put their own spin on it. That’s made it one of the first questions at their first game-week press conference: “When and how will you hand out the Blackshirts?”
“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.”
And that’s how this tradition once again becomes an annoying topic that will come up over and over again. There will be questions every time Aurich meets the media. Fans will also openly question how it’s done and whether one Blackshirt player or another “earned” it.
Nebraska football's Rob Aurich leaves Blackshirt criteria and timing unresolved
“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.”
He’s not wrong that it was a great tradition, but part of what made it great was that it was an actual tradition that seemed more important among the players than it did to the fans and media. Once a guy earned his blackshirt, there weren’t endless debates about whether those players should keep it.
There also wasn’t this tease about how many Blackshirts the Nebraska defensive coordinator was planning on handing out. One of the great things about the Charlie McBride era is that while there was interest in who McBride would award the honored practice jersey, there wasn’t the detective work that’s done every year since.
Aurich is definitely between a rock and a hard place. He’s brand new to Lincoln and the third DC in the four years that Matt Rhule has been the head coach. Fans and the media don’t know Aurich from Adam yet. It would have been hard to come in and answer the first question about this kind of thing: “I’ll address it when I’m ready to.”
Still, it would have been better than this: “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.’”
All that kind of answer does is open the door to even more scrutiny when the Blackshirts are handed out.
If Rob Aurich hadn’t played into the mystery of who would or wouldn’t get one of those famous jerseys, it would have worked better for Nebraska in the long run because everyone could have focused on what’s in front of them and dealt with the Blackshirts only when it was time.
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