Ways football has changed.....

[Huskerthom]

Outland and Lombardi Trophy winner nose guard Rich Glover would likely make today's game as linebacker ... maybe ... safeties in today's game are bigger than Glover is/was ... 6'1" 234lbs

Yep at that size he may not even make NG as a High school kid.

 

[EastOfEden]

Players are way way bigger, stronger and much more athletic than they were in the glory years of Husker football. They hit even harder than they did at that time, but they don't hit with the helmet, they don't hit when the player is defenseless, there are no clotheslining or piling on or horse collaring, etc. but legitimate hits are harder than they used to be.

And athletic? Have you seen some of the catches being made by receivers?, or the speed and shiftiness of some of these big backs, including even QBs

Different kinds of athletes are playing the game now.

Add to that the rules are now designed to create more offense (TV viewers like offense) and it is quite a different game.

Even kickers and punters are better. Kickoffs routinely go into the end zones even though they have moved the sot of the kickoff back five yards from where it used to be.

Bigger stronger faster and more skilled players with more imaginative coaches.

 

[Greatest Fan of All]

Let's face it, the game stinks nowadays. If it wasn't for my Huskers, I'd only watch one game a year, the NC game.

 

[KleinTxHusker]

This imo has effected Nebraska a ton. One of their huge recruiting tools was the fact that they were on tv 2-3 times a year. Players would come to be on tv. Now everyone is on tv. I think it has hurt recruiting a lot. I think it has hindered are getting back to some relevance. Not the only thing hindering it. But it doesn’t help.

Almost all the advantages that Nebraska used to have are gone. The only real advantages Nebraska has right now are a rabid fan base and lots of money.

It also likely had some negative impact on money. That may sound weird, but hear me out. The TV money I think was always shared at the conference level, so DONU didn't make any more money than the worst Big-8 teams. But obviously the TV was a huge recruiting advantage. But after OU (and Georgia IIRC) won the anti-Trust case against the NCAA, you had so many teams / conferences, etc. chasing TV deals that the amounts per game dropped immensely and the total pie didn't grow near as much as people think. Now you have TV for almost every game which really threatens or limits the live gate. Live gate is the real difference maker now; but HDTV is starting to hurt that in even high interest programs.

I guess one of reasons that I think my argument on money is right, is I have never been too impressed by the quoted TV values of Conference Championship games. The numbers are always in between $1 & $2 million. Not really a big number considering the caliber those games should be.

Some of the reasons for the far higher numbers out of the conference networks and TV in general is that the larger mass market engendered by limited TV options have been blown up as cable has expanded from fifty channels with nothing on to five hundred channels with nothing on. And then the Internet... The choices vs. leisure time available have changed dramatically over the past fifty years. So live athletics is one of the few programming options that can still aggregate fairly large audiences that advertisers care to reach.