Tom Shatel
Tom Shatel is a long-tenured sports columnist at the Omaha World-Herald whose work treats Nebraska football and college sports as long-running stories rather than isolated games. His columns stand out for combining on-the-field detail with history, governance and the shifting landscape of conferences and championships.
Nebraska football as a continuing narrative
Shatel’s primary subject is Nebraska football, and he writes about the program as an evolving narrative more than a weekly scoreboard. Recent columns frame the current team in emotional and experiential terms, describing a season as “like recess” and focusing on why the group is fun “for the best reasons” rather than only breaking down schemes.
He contrasts Nebraska’s relative anonymity with the drama surrounding other Big Ten and SEC members, arguing that consistency and identity matter more than chasing headline-grabbing chaos.
His coverage regularly engages with head coach Matt Rhule’s comments and decisions, using them as entry points into broader questions about what the program needs to become and how it should respond to conference pressures. Even when he writes about specific games, such as early-season matchups against Northern Illinois or Colorado, he centers the long-term implications for the team’s trajectory instead of treating them as standalone events.
College sports across conferences and championships
Shatel’s portfolio extends across college sports, with decades of work on national championship games, bowl games, conference tournaments and major golf and basketball events. He has covered more than 30 college football national championship games, numerous bowl games and Final Fours, as well as major golf tournaments like the Masters and the British Open, and professional events including the Super Bowl.
His writing tracks the transformation from the Big Eight to the Big 12 and then the Big Ten, using those shifts to explain how power structures in college sports affect teams, fans and local institutions. In basketball, his columns have focused on the growth of Nebraska’s program in the Big Ten and the rise of Creighton in the Big East, positioning both within the national hierarchy rather than treating them as purely regional stories.
He brings the same long-view approach to the College World Series, engaging with tournament expansion, the business side of college baseball and even details like aluminum bats, showing how small choices reflect larger trends in the sport.
Columns where sports meet leadership and institutions
Shatel often uses sports to examine leadership, governance and academic culture, turning administrative decisions into part of the sports story.
In recent work, he has written about interim NU president Chris Kabourek and compared recruiting high academic performers to pursuing five-star athletes, treating admissions policies and academic standards as a form of competitive strategy. He writes about the “professionalism” of college sports, the expansion of tournaments and the emergence of power conferences, highlighting how these structural changes test his enduring affection for the college game.
His coverage of Nebraska football regularly touches on university decision-makers, boards and conference offices, pulling their choices into the same frame as coaching hires and play-calling. This institutional angle distinguishes his columns from straightforward game coverage and makes them useful for understanding how policy and leadership shape the athletic product.
A recognized voice shaped by decades in the press box
Shatel’s authority on college sports is reinforced by a long career and peer recognition that filters into how he writes. He has worked as a sports journalist since the late 1970s and has served as a lead columnist at the Omaha World-Herald since 1991, giving him continuity across coaching eras, conference realignment and multiple generations of athletes. His peers describe him as a “sports voice” whose columns have been central to coverage of Nebraska football and college sports more broadly for more than three decades.
He has held leadership roles in national writers’ associations and received honors such as the Bert McGrane Award, as well as recognition in a basketball writers’ hall of fame, underscoring his status within the press corps covering college football and basketball. He appears on podcasts and interviews to discuss his background and stories from the Big Eight era onward, giving context to his columns and reinforcing that his current work draws on a long memory of how the games and institutions have changed.
Across formats, he maintains a columnist’s voice: conversational, grounded in reporting, and focused on connecting today’s events to the larger arc of college sports.
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