UNL’s new AD said the athletic department learned from the Garth Brooks concert over the weekend, but said it didn’t necessarily have to do with the future sale of alcohol inside Memorial Stadium for Husker game. Alberts said his department is close to selling out football tickets at Memorial Stadium.

The 2020 Presidential Elections may be over, but there’s still concerns about the voting results, like the GOP-led review of the 2020 general election in Arizona’s largest county. Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity company, is preparing its findings soon. But one of the largest voter technology manufacturers in the country said the elections were the most secure in history -- and they’re a Nebraska based company in Omaha.

The lightning-fast fall of Afghanistan back to Taliban control that culminated with the fall of Kabul (KAH-bull) over the weekend has come as a shock to Nebraskans who have spent time there. As Jack Williams of Nebraska Public Media News reports, the future of the country is murky and there are questions about how the U.S. let it happen.

Clean-up continues after the huge Garth Brooks concert at Memorial Stadium over the weekend. Matt Davidson is an Associate Athletic Director for UNL and former Husker football player. He said there was no major damage to the stadium following the concert but there was more trash to cleanup compared to a typical football Saturday.

Critics suggest "feel good" programs don't accomplish much; leadership lacks diversity

Nearly a quarter of Nebraskans are people of color, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census.

In 2010, 82 percent of Nebraskans identified as White, and in 2020 that number drops to 76 percent. Much of the growth comes from the Hispanic population, as well as people who say they belong to more than one racial group.

The changes are due to a number of factors including an aging white population, immigration trends over the past decade as well as cultural changes to how people define their own race.

Kansas and Iowa saw similar trends with growth among the Hispanic and Black categories. On the whole, Nebraska’s racial makeup is fairly similar to Kansas.

Across the Great Plains and the Midwest, people are leaving -- or possibly dying -- in rural areas; as most of the population growth is found in urban centers.

Nebraska now has a new least populous county -- it’s McPherson with just 399 people. In 2010 Arthur County had that distinction with just 434 people. Missouri also had two counties that lost more than 20 percent of their population in this census -- Oregon and Ripley in the Ozarks along the Arkansas border.

The only counties in our region with double-digit growth are urban ones. Dallas County, Iowa -- part of the Des Moines metro area -- grew by more than 50 percent; outclassing Sarpy County’s growth of just 20 percent.

Greg Bay lost his four-year old son, Tyler, to a rare form of brain cancer in 1999. Now, Bay works for Bristol-Myers Squibb, which leads a biking fundraiser called ‘Coast 2 Coast 4 Cancer,’ which benefits the ‘V Foundation.’

In late July, Bruce Rasmussen announced he would retire as Creighton University’s Athletic Director after 27 years. He’s worked for the university in various roles prior to his stint as the athletic director and spent 41 total years working for the school. Today is his final day on the job.

Garth talked with the Nebraska media a couple of hours ago about playing in Lincoln, country music fans in this state, and what those fans can expect to see Saturday night.

The United States is becoming a much more diverse nation, as many more Americans are identifying as “some other race” than in years prior.

The 2020 Census used two questions to collect data on race. One for Hispanic or Latino origin, and another for race. The White population remains the largest group in the U.S., but the white alone population has decreased by 8 point 6 percent since 2010. That’s as the Latino population grew by 23 percent

The two-or-more category has changed significantly, growing from 9 million people to 33.8.
This might be because of the way the race question was asked, as well as changing attitudes to how people self-identify.

As a state, Nebraska grew by a little more than 7 percent, with most of that growth in urban counties. Only Nebraka’s three most populous counties saw population growth in the double-digits: Sarpy, Douglas and Lancaster. Only 24 of the state’s 93 counties grew at all, those counties tended to follow Interstate 80 or in Eastern Nebraska.

For the Omaha metro area -- which includes counties in both Nebraska and Iowa -- a milestone may be reached. Here’s David DROOZ-d, research coordinator at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Public Affairs Research:

DROZD: “We will be expecting to hit the million mark in 2024. Which is quite a threshold there are a lot of employers who will only look at metros with a million population when theyr’e looking to put an office or a plant in a particular area” (19s)






Urban growth and rural declines were a theme nationwide.

The 2020 Census was plagued by problems caused by both politics and the pandemic. Former President Donald Trump stalled some policy changes that would have improved some racial and ethnic categories, and his attempt to add a citizenship question was feared to have caused a chilling effect among some minorities.

The pandemic delayed the usual doorknocking process of the census, as well as created a series of delays that will complicate state legislatures redistricting plans.

We won’t know exactly how off the counts were until sometime next year, but historically the Census has struggled to count minorities.