They mass along the Nebraska sideline at Memorial Stadium, a breathtaking, kinetic red sea of 120 or so scholarship players and scout-team scrubs that serve as visual proof of the enormity of the Cornhusker football program. It is a self-imposed limit.

	The blur of red that trails Cornhuskers quarterback Eric Crouch is not only a product of the Heisman winner's speed, but his many teammates along Nebraska's sidelines.

To glimpse the totality of the operation, one must see it from the inside. For longtime assistant coach Dan Young, it's most obvious on the first day of school. That's when the NCAA lifts the limit on 105 players that can practice, and the rest of the team can report.

The players gather in an auditorium at the South end of the stadium. They pack in arm-to-arm, burly farm boys and Heisman hopefuls, until there's no place left for anyone to sit. But through the meeting room doors, they keep coming, and coming.

The player count often reaches 200, an ungodly number in the era of Title IX.

"There's not enough chairs so they just sit all over the place," said Young, who handles Nebraska's walk-on program. "That's when the head coach usually says, 'You sure we need this many?' "

That makes people like Donna Lopiano ask the same question.

"Considering the fact that a football team typically plays 45 players per game, this is rather excessive," said Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation, a non-profit whose mission is to improve athletic opportunities for females.

In an era when athletics departments across the country are under pressure to meet gender-equity requirements, Nebraska football is a throwback to an earlier, more indulgent time when rosters went largely unchecked. Coaches back then were regarded as campus generals, and they signed up just about any walk-on willing to volunteer for service, as if the biggest army made the best army.

The 'Big' in the Big 12

Nebraska sets the pace in college football but other Big 12 Conference schools also have some of its largest teams, according to an ESPN.com review of the most recent Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act forms. Kansas (152 players), Iowa State (151), Kansas State and Texas A&M (both with 125) were each among the heavyweights last year, in terms of squad size. Even Notre Dame, which spawned the movie "Rudy" about walk-on glory, only had 111 team members. The emphasis on football has put the squeeze on other men’s sports. At Iowa State this year, citing budget and Title IX reasons, the Cyclones dropped baseball and men's swimming -- the fourth men's sports to be killed since 1994. This year, Kansas dropped men’s swimming and men's tennis. Those two schools, along with Kansas State, now offer the bare minimum of men's sports -- seven -- required by the NCAA. And even that figure is an exaggeration, since indoor and outdoor track and field count as separate sports. "We probably aren't as broad-based as some of the other big conferences," Big 12 commissioner Kevin Weiberg said. "Having worked for the Big Ten, I'd like to see more opportunities" for male athletes beyond football. The Big Ten requires its schools to achieve at least a 60-40 ratio of male-to-female athletes in its programs. As a result, there's been a push not only to add women's teams but to greater scrutinize the need for football walk-ons. Even at Ohio State, football players make up just one-fourth of all male athletes at the school. At several Big 12 schools, football players consist of about half of all male athletes. -- Tom Farrey

Most coaches have been forced to abandon that thinking. Even powerhouses like Florida, Florida State, Oklahoma, Michigan and Ohio State typically use no more than 120 players, only 85 of which can be on scholarship. In its most recent filings with the U.S. Department of Education, Miami, Nebraska's opponent in the upcoming Rose Bowl that will determine at least a share of the national championship, claimed a total of 107 players were on the team during the 2000 season.

Nebraska, literally, is nearly twice the team that Miami is -- claiming 202 players in its most recent filing. That form, which schools are required to file with the federal government each year to comply with the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, offers a reflection of the team size for the first game of the 2000 season. The school has yet to declare its figure for the current season, but school officials say the team hasn't been downsized since then.

They have no plans to do so, either.

"I don't feel like a throwback," Nebraska's athletics director Bill Byrne said. "I think we're being progressive. I don't think that offering (athletic) opportunities is anything to be ashamed of."

Besides, they argue, their excess breeds success. Nebraska has won three of the past seven national championships, although the last was in 1997.

"If we didn't have as many players we would practice like many other teams, where first-team guys on offense and defense would serve as scout-team players," Nebraska head coach Frank Solich said. "We like the system we have in place because the depth we have keeps us from having to do that."

Many of its players never suit up for games, nor get mentioned in the media guide.

"I've never seen anything like a Nebraska practice," said Charlie Partridge, director of football operations for Iowa State. He was invited to witness the spectacle four years ago when he was on staff at Drake University. "There are literally four scrimmages going on at the same time. Their second team gets just as many reps as its first team.

"There's no way we could do that."

At Nebraska, the first-team offense goes up against its own scout team. So does the first-team defense. And the second-team offense. And the second-team defense. With all those scout teams running the opponent's plays, the Cornhuskers are typically one of the best-prepared teams in the country. It's hard to surprise them.

Another advantage that Nebraska has over a less robust team like Miami: injured players are replaced more easily because of the experience and preparation of their backups.

"In the long run it builds depth for a program," Solich said.

About 20 of the players that Nebraska must list with the federal government as football "participants" do not play for medical reasons. Still, the team has so many healthy players that it has an eighth-string tight end. So many players that some never are evaluated by their position coach because they're so deep on the roster. So many players, Young concedes, that "some coaches don't know all of their names." (Like all NCAA teams, Nebraska is limited to 11 assistant coaches.)

Nebraska officials consider the walk-on program their secret sauce, and they have gone to extremes to preserve its abundance. To counter the gender imbalance in athletic opportunities at Nebraska created in part by football, the school added women's bowling as a scholarship sport in 1997. So few schools sponsor that sport that there's no NCAA championship, just the equivalent of a national club meet.

The next year, the Cornhuskers added women's rifle -- again without a men's team or any Big 12 competition. The search for worthy rivals will take the team in January to the frozen interior of the nation’s northernmost state, where they will shoot against the co-ed, four-time NCAA champion Nanooks of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

	How BCS teams measure up
	Miami had half as many football players, and half as many male athletes in other sports, as Nebraska. The total number of football players on each BCS team, compared to male athletes in other sports at each school:
	School	Bowl	Football	Other
	Nebraska	Rose	202	226
	Miami	Rose	107	106
	Oregon	Fiesta	127	109
	Colorado	Fiesta	120	81
	LSU	Sugar	152	175
	Illinois	Sugar	106	198
	Florida	Orange	104	141
	Maryland	Orange	N/A	N/A
	Sources: 2001 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act reports.

"We offer every sport in the Midwest (for women), and then some," Byrne said.

Byrne said that fact alone should protect Nebraska from any Title IX complaint that might arise. But even with a whopping 13 women's sports, just 35.7 percent of its athletes were female last year. That's far from reflective of the student body at Nebraska, where 47.2 percent of undergraduates are female.

Nebraska could cut that gap in half by simply using no more football walk-ons than, say, Miami. But Byrne said he considers roster management, as the practice has become known around the country, as a "feminist euphemism for cuts."

"I feel very strongly that students paying their way to school should have the opportunity to try out for a team, just like they should have the opportunity to take botany," he said.

Some teams are created a little more equally than others. In March, opportunities for 35 male swimmers were eliminated when Nebraska disbanded the 80-year-old team. Success wasn't the problem; the team placed 13th at the NCAAs the previous season. Instead, Byrne cited budget and Title IX pressures, as well as an NCAA investigation into alleged rules violations in the program.

Emotions ran deep among the affected. At a meeting with school officials, one swimmer wore a T-shirt with the printed message, "I've been downsized by Bill Byrne."

Yet, it was a poignant sign that few if any in the Big Red nation suggested shrinking the outsize walk-on program. Only the best 25 or so usually see any playing time in a season, Young said. But the popularity of the program runs so deep in Nebraska, where state prospects have been known to pass up scholarship offers to other Division I-A schools in order to try out for the Cornhuskers, that sentiment runs strong against telling walk-ons to take a walk.

And on occasion, walk-ons actually step up. This year, three of them earned starting roles -- linebacker Scott Shanle, wingback Troy Hassebroek and punter Kyle Larson. By contrast, Miami has just one former walk-on currently in a starting role, All-America offensive tackle Joaquin Gonzalez.

"If you take the right 105 players, you probably don't need as many walk-ons," said Young, whose team is bringing 85 walk-ons, and 170 players in all, to the Rose Bowl. "But out here, we don't have the population base that a school like Miami or UCLA has. Since we're recruiting from a smaller area, we have to do things that other schools don't."

Like turning back the hands of time, to an otherwise bygone era in college football.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer with ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn.com.