At Misty's Steakhouse & Brewery less than half an hour after the Husker defeat,  Husker fans watching the TV newscast about the pummeling couldn't take it anymore.

So they turned on cartoons.

"This is what you need after a good beating: ‘Futurama,'" said Rosie Demma, an off-duty waitress at the restaurant at 11th and P streets.

And really, what else is there to do when a college football juggernaut, a cultural and economic cornerstone of your city, a team you have seen win three national championships in the past 11 years gets its helmet handed to it by a team it has never lost to before?

The 70-10 shellacking of the Nebraska Cornhuskers by the Texas Tech Red Raiders Saturday night left football fans in some downtown bars stunned, but vowing to weather the hard times with their team.

"What  my heart wants to say is give Callahan two to three years," said Joyce Tienken, who watched the game at the bar of the Embassy Suites. "He'll use his recruits and build the program up."

The Huskers lost, said Tienken, 43, of Scribner, because they are mostly made up of players recruited by former coach Frank Solich, who played a different style of game than Callahan demands.

"They're like high school freshmen in college, learning a college offense," she said.

Her husband, Gary, 46, agreed. "It's a learning process," he said. "They just showed they are trying to learn the offense. They're not going to overwhelm anyone yet."

Down the street at BW-3, Brody Bowman, 22, of Lincoln also blamed an inexperienced offense.

"We don't have the personnel to carry out the West Coast offense," he said. "I think it'll be better in a few years. Right now we're just going off Solich's recruits."

Back at Misty's, Jason Sandblom, 23, was simply stunned by the defeat.

"I'm a huge Husker fan,"  Sandblom said as he stared at the television screen. "But about halfway through the third quarter, I couldn't do much but laugh."

But a defeat, even a crushing one, won't change everything. Everybody interviewed said they would remain loyal to Big Red.

And even a defeat couldn't keep football off the TV screens in Misty's. Minutes after changing to "Futurama," the channel had been changed back to the Missouri-Baylor game.

Reach Andrew Nelson at 473-7395 or anelson@journalstar.com.