Credit Bobby Mersed, a Nebraska fan, in 1994.
Every Saturday in the fall, fans across the nation watch college football on ESPN, and College GameDay is the network’s popular lead-in. Analysts make game predictions, and local fans make up the background with signs in hand, many comical, some provocative, and others quizzical.
How did the tradition start? The year was 1994, and GameDay was in Nebraska to cover the game between the Cornhuskers and UCLA Bruins. It wasn’t the first time ESPN had traveled to Lincoln, but it was the first time that Bobby Mersed, a huge Huskers fan, attended GameDay with a sign in hand.
The sign that Mersed carried on that day didn’t have anything to do with the game per se. The sign, Hi, Kay and Art from Fairfax, Virginia!, referred to Husker fans that Merced had met two weeks earlier when the three met at the 1994 Kickoff Classic. #4 Nebraska played #24 West Virginia that day in the Meadowlands, NJ.
The three kept in touch, and Mersed told them to watch for him on GameDay because he’d be holding a sign with their names etched on it.
What we now come to expect at GameDay–many fans holding signs–was a no-no back then, and campus police quickly approached Mersed, yelling, “Hey, no signs!” Merced had a choice: police would grab the sign from him, or he could dispose of it himself. Concluding that discretion was the better part of valor, here’s what he told KETV Omaha. “So I go, ‘OK, no problem,’ and I rolled it up, put it in the nearest trash can, and I went into the game,” Mersed said. “And that was it.”
That was then, but it started a tradition that is as wonderful as the games that follow, each week, every fall, year after year.
(By the way, the Huskers won that 1994 game vs. UCLA, 49-21. Nebraska finished the regular season undefeated, beat Miami in the Orange Bowl, and won college football’s national championship.)
1 of a kind,
Me in 1971 Norman and another game to attend, away. Thanks Cliff for making it happen and to “The FOX” handing me my press box credential with the broad cast crew for KFOR. Dick and Jim welcomed me into the booth to sit between. I did call out some names and #’s that they used but i was not on air.