“First down play, and it’s Seiler keeping, trying to turn the corner, he does, he pops through at the 30! He’s to the 40, to midfield, to the 45! To the 30! To the 25! To the 15, to the 10, to the 3-yard line! Marvin Seiler almost breaks it all the way, 77 yards to the Nebraska 3!”
Video at cyclones.com: Seiler’s fourth-quarter run set up a touchdown.
The New York Times/AP: “Nebraska is whirled by a Cyclone”
Sports Illustrated: “Seiler’s Side”
Miraculous Marv Stuns Huskers (via HuskerMax; 2004; PDF)
The Cyclone defense held the Cornhuskers not just to their lowest point total of the season, but the fewest points Nebraska would score in a game until a 19-0 loss at Arizona State on Sept. 21, 1996, and then a 40-7 loss to Penn State Sept. 14, 2002. (In fact, since the 1992 ISU game, Nebraska has ended with 10 points on the board only three times — twice to Texas Tech and once to USC — and scored 10 or fewer 15 times total. How’s that for an odd pair of stats?)
According to one source, it is one of the biggest the fifth-biggest upsets* in college football history by the point spread (29) (ISU-OSU 2011 was 27½). It’s one of the 150 moments that defined Cyclone athletics. It was also one of three ISU wins over ranked teams in the Jim Walden era and the only victory against Nebraska between 1977 and 2002.
A Nebraska fan who was there adds these statistics: “Iowa State’s ’92 victory over Nebraska was the only loss that Tom Osborne suffered against a team with a losing record. It was the first time since 1978 that Nebraska has lost to another Big Eight team besides Oklahoma or Colorado. It was the only Big Eight loss for Nebraska quarterback Tommie Frazier, the greatest quarterback in college history. After the Iowa State loss, Nebraska didn’t lose a regular season game for another six years.”
Over the next nine years, NU would outscore ISU 464-133, an average of 51.5-14.7, with more than 70 points in two of those games and more than 40 in all except one. NU would also win 2½ national championships.
In 2002, Iowa State had risen and Nebraska had fallen (in relative terms). They met as equals in Ames, and the Cyclones won 36-14 — the second-most points ever scored by ISU against Nebraska.
There will be few markings or citations of either the 1992 or 2002 games this year. We got all that out of our system when Benedict Herbie fled to the Big Ten. (That failed two-point conversion pass is still, still hanging in the air.) In ’72, ’82, ’92, and ’02, ISU was 2-1-1 against NU. There will be no ’12.
Iowa State 19, Nebraska 10: five simple words that have been part of every Cyclone fan’s DNA for 20 years.
*UPDATE 11/15: That page was apparently from the mid-2000s. Bigger wins against the spread now include Stanford over USC, 2007 (34½) and Texas State over Houston, 2012 (34). So ISU-Nebraska 1992 is now no higher than seventh.