From Bugeaters to Billion-Dollar Brands
How Midwestern Football Schools Lost Their Educational Souls to the Altar of Commerce
“Nebraska occupies a unique position in western football. Too strong to find fearful competitors, the Cornhuskers can almost weep with Alexander the Great because they have no more teams to conquer.” — Nebraska newspaper, 1903
Before the Cornhuskers existed, there were the Bugeaters. The name derived from the bull bats that hovered over Nebraska’s plains, devouring insects, but it also carried a darker resonance: during the droughts of the 1870s, when crops failed and desperation spread across the territory, some Nebraskans reportedly resorted to eating bugs for sustenance. The name stuck because it captured something essential about the people who had chosen to make their lives on the unforgiving prairie. They were survivors, accustomed to hardship, unashamed of what necessity demanded.
When the University of Nebraska fielded its first football team in 1890, the students who took the field wore gold and black and called themselves the Old Gold Knights. The colors changed to scarlet and cream by 1892. The names proliferated: Rattlesnake Boys, Tree-planters, Antelopes. By the mid-1890s, the Bugeaters had emerged as the most popular designation, embraced by a populace that understood that survival on the Great Plains required a certain toughness that more genteel nicknames could never convey. Then came 1899, a losing season, and a sportswriter named Cy Sherman, tired of the unglamorous moniker, began calling them Cornhuskers. By 1900, the name had taken hold, connecting the football team to the agricultural economy that sustained the entire state.
This progression from Bugeaters to Cornhuskers tells us something important about what these early football programs were meant to accomplish. They were not entertainment ventures. They were not revenue generators. They were institutions designed to represent, embody, and celebrate the communities that had built the universities in the first place. The University of Nebraska was a land-grant institution, created under the Morrill Act of 1862, charged with teaching agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts to the children of working-class families. Football, when it arrived, was understood as an extension of this educational mission.
The Purpose of the Game
The founding of Midwestern football programs in the 1890s coincided with the ascendance of a peculiar ideology that historians have labeled “Muscular Christianity.” Originating in Victorian England, this movement sought to counter what its proponents perceived as the feminization of the church and the softening of young men in an increasingly industrialized society. Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, the principal theorists of the movement, argued that physical vigor and athletic competition were essential components of Christian character. Sport was not merely recreation; it was moral training.
The philosophy arrived in America at precisely the moment when land-grant universities were struggling to define themselves. These were not Harvard or Yale, ancient institutions with established traditions and aristocratic student bodies. These were new schools, built from federal land sales, populated by the sons and daughters of farmers, charged with practical education rather than classical learning. Football offered these institutions something invaluable: a means of forging identity, building community, and demonstrating that the young men of the prairie possessed the same vigor, the same discipline, the same competitive spirit as their Eastern counterparts.
