The Scene: ‘A lot of adrenaline’ for Air Force team that parachuted into Memorial Stadium | Football

Micah Pugh briefly played college football at Air Force. Then he found a more exciting way to get on the field.

Pugh is a member of the Air Force’s Wings of Blue, the academy’s parachute team that was a part of the pregame show Saturday.

Pugh had the “boring” job before Nebraska kicked off against Purdue. He was a part of the ground crew that helped guide the group’s six jumpers from 11,000 feet to the 50-yard line on Tom Osborne Field. That meant giving the jumpers a visual cue to help them guide themselves into the proper position, making sure they landed safely and helping gather up the giant American flag the final jumper carried with him to the field.

“It’s still skydiving, so there’s still a lot of adrenaline,” Pugh said from the sideline minutes before the Wings of Blue made their jump. “But jumping into something like this, with 90,000 people around, there’s nothing like it.”

The Wings of Blue has two teams — the demonstration team that jumped into Memorial Stadium on Saturday and performs at events around the country, and a competition team that competes against other skydiving teams.

Given the choice of what team he wanted to be on, Pugh’s decision was easy.

“I thought that coming to a college gameday would be way more fun,” he said, grinning.

Pugh has jumped out the back of an Air Force plane a startling 646 times. Through the Air Force’s unique training program, every single one of those jumps has been a solo leap into the heavens.

“You definitely get used to it,” Pugh said. “(But) it took me until jump 75 to start liking it.”

While performances like Saturday’s, which featured jumpers either carrying flags or streaming colored smoke from gear attached to their legs, the main mission of the Wings of Blue is to run the Air Force’s Basic Freefall Parachuting course. That course is known as Airmanship 490, and isn’t found in your average college curriculum.

“You get in there and you’re 11,000 feet above the ground, you look out the door and you’re like, ‘Why am I doing this? It’s not normal,'” Pugh said. “But then you keep doing it, and it turns into something you love.”

One might ask, how does a jump team practice, exactly, to jump from a moving plane, through the wind, into a massive, unfamiliar structure?

“We have a football field set up to practice landing on. We jump into our stadium at the academy, and then we build up to this and do practice jumps,” Pugh said.

The team did a practice jump into Memorial Stadium on Friday. When Saturday rolled around, Pugh and another member of the team constantly monitored wind and weather conditions and communicated with the team members in the plane, which circled over Lincoln before delivering its cargo just south of the stadium and letting the jumpers do the rest.

“Whenever people ask us to do a (demonstration), and we’re available for it, we go and jump it and we get to see all these great people,” Pugh said.