LINCOLN, Neb. -- They came with paper, wood and two decades of angst. Maybe 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 the kibosh on any burning of jerseys, footballs or pretty much anything synthetic, so they wrote down all their bad memories on slips of paper and blocks of wood and tossed them into a burning barrel.
It was Aug. 25, two days before the start of Nebraska's football season, and a group of diehards who couldn't afford a trip to Ireland to watch their team take on Northwestern assembled in the concourse of Nebraska's baseball stadium for a "Break the Curse" event.