Nebraska football is coming off yet another one possession loss against USC. With a 5-5 record, Nebraska must win at least one of its final two games to earn its first bowl berth since 2016. They will attempt to do so in Lincoln this Saturday against the 5-5 Wisconsin Badgers.
After its first losing season ever in 1899, Nebraska hired Princeton graduate Walter C. Booth as its head coach for the 1900 season. Booth played Center and won the National Championship in 1898. He immediately turned Nebraska around finishing 6-1-1. Nebraska’s first-ever game against the Wisconsin Badgers came in his second season.
Nebraska came into the game against Wisconsin with a 4-1 record with its only loss coming against Minnesota. It would drop to 4-2 after losing to Wisconsin in Milwaukee 18-0. Nebraska would go on to rebound to finish the season with three straight wins. In fact, they would reel off 24 straight wins which set a record at the time.
During his seven seasons at the helm, Coach Booth turned Nebraska into an independent football powerhouse. To this day, he has the second highest winning percentage of all coaches at .845 only surpassed by Edwald O. Stiehm’s .913. While Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne coached considerably more games than those two, they hold lower winning percentages at .829 and .836 respectively.
When he retired to practice law in 1905, he was making more than any professor on campus at $2,000.
The two teams would have to wait 64 years to play again. Nebraska returned the favor 37-0 during the 1965 game in Lincoln. The two teams would go on to play once more in the 60s and twice in the 70s. After Nebraska joined the Big Ten Conference, they would play annually with the exception of the 2013 and 2020 seasons. Wisconsin leads the series 13-4 with the Badgers reeling off 10 straight wins. Nebraska’s last win was in 2012.
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