Nebraska's historic sellout streak dates back to 1962 and has gone 375 straight games.
As we close in on the 2021 football season, the streak is in jeopardy of continuing at this point, but new Athletic Director Trev Alberts remains very optimistic about where things are at.
“We don't have any announcements yet to make about the sellout streak, but we're feeling really good about it,” Alberts said during a speech to the Lincoln Chamber on Tuesday. “It's very obvious to me and important to me that we continue the sellout streak."
As far as how close they are, Albert would not share those numbers on Tuesday.
He did say that two of the seven games on the schedule have been a tougher sell, and you can presume that would be NU's out of conference games against Buffalo and Fordham.
“I don’t know we have a game plan to give the numbers to the fans, but we certainly have a game plan internally,” Alberts said. “We met again this morning, and we are continuing to sell tickets, which is really good. I’m really confident we are going to be sold out.
"We are very close, we just had a couple of games where we weren’t quite where we needed them to be. You can probably guess what those are. I’m really proud of our team and the effort they put in, and quite frankly really proud of the response our fans have given with how important the sellout streak is to them. I feel like we are going to be in really good shape there.”
Another thing Alberts feels good about today is the football program's overall vaccination rate.
Things have come quite a long way over the last month.
"I’m really proud of Scott (Frost) and our coaches for how hard they have worked to get our student-athletes vaccinated," Alberts said. "We are in a really good position today. I can’t honestly say that a month ago. But today I feel really, really strong about where we are. We are in good shape.”
Something Alberts added is how important this is for the entire athletic department. If a football team can't play a game because of too many positive cases, they are on the hook for the lost revenue or payouts potentially involved in that game.
Something like that even trickles down to the entire Lincoln local economy if a game were canceled.
"You can imagine the revenue hit that is to our athletic department," Alberts said.
NU is still awaiting word from the Big Ten Conference on the official league testing protocols, but as of now, they continue to operate under the local campus and Lancaster County Health Department guidelines.
"Right now we have not been given that final definition (from the Big Ten),” Alberts said. “We are completely abiding by the University of Nebraska policies and the Lancaster County Health Department. We will be working through the NCAA’s resocialization plan. A little bit like last year, everybody is submitting a saliva test, including yours truly, which was an interesting experience. We got through it ok. There’s just a lot of nuances to it.
"What if you had a health department in another state that said – so the Big Ten could announce it’s an institutional decision that you have the autonomy to handle your own decisions as you want, but if we don’t know is if some local health department said ‘if you don’t have mandated this or that, then you can’t come into our county.’ That’s an extreme example. I don’t think we are going to head there."
Another thing Alberts hit on was potential alcohol sales at Memorial Stadium.
“If you are going to go down that path, I think there are some infrastructure needs that would have to be put in place,” Alberts said. “It’s not something you turn around and announce the next day. We’ll see where it goes. We have other sports as well. We were just happy to get through the Garth Brooks concert and have a great evening for Nebraskans and to do it in a safe way.”
