More Than Winning: The Story of Tom Osborne »

Tom Osborne was head coach of the University of Nebraska football team for twenty-five years, during which time the Huskers won three national championships. After he retired from coaching in 1997, Osborne served Nebraska’s third district in the House of Representatives for six years. He now works as the athletic director at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

John E. Roberts is the executive director of the Michigan High School Athletic Association and has also served as the executive vice president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

At age twenty-eight, when Tom Osborne agreed to join Bob Devaney’s full-time coaching staff at the University of Nebraska, he resolved to be a head coach by the time he reached age thirty-five. Little did he know that this goal would chart his course toward becoming one of the nation’s premier football coaches. Six years later in 1972, Devaney named Osborne as head coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

In high school and college, Osborne had been an outstanding athlete in his own right. He went on to play professional football and to earn his master’s and doctorate degrees in educational psychology. Throughout all these years in sports and academics, he was developing his unusual and inspiring philosophy of coaching, which above all emphasizes the process of athletics.

In More Than Winning, Osborne gives an in-depth personal account of his life—the forces that shaped his values, his own accomplishments in sports, and his experiences as a coach at Nebraska. He describes his philosophy of coaching, shares personal perspectives on football greats, and gives his view of key Nebraska games up through the 1984 Orange Bowl.

Introduction v

Foreword xv

Preface xvii

Prologue: Coming Up Short Again 9

1 The Effect of Fine Persons 13

2 Growing Up 23

3 Discovered in the Mineral Water Bowl 31

4 Survival 37

5 Getting off the Fence 45

6 Following a Legend 53

7 Silencing the Critics (a Little) 57

8 Getting the Monkey off our Back... and on It Again 63

9 Staying Put 69

10 The Quarterbacks 73

11 The Ideal Athlete 81

12 The Linemen 85

13 The Heisman Trophy Winners 89

14 The Booker Brown Affair 99

15 Slowing Down 109

16 More Than One Person 117

17 A Crash Course in Flying 125

18 National Championships and Other Vagaries 129

19 The Nebraska Cycle 135

20 More Than Winning 143

21 A Difficult Road to Walk 153

Epilogue: Honoring Him 159