Nebraska players admitted it. Seeing the College GameDay crew laugh at the subject of them being top-10 worthy riled them up.

Some said that was the extra fire they needed to take care of business at Indiana that day. It created the “us against the world” element that every team searches for.

But not so fast.

In an in-depth story with Kirk Herbstreit, the Omaha World-Herald’s Dirk Chatelain got to the root of that incident.

According to Herbstreit, the laughter wasn’t because of any disrespect. Over the years, Herbstreit developed a long-standing love-hate relationship with Nebraska fans. In the mid-1990s, he was nicknamed “Little Red” because of how much love he gave Tom Osborne’s Huskers.

But in their years since then, Herbstreit called it like he saw it. He had back-and-forth exchanges with Nebraska fans on Twitter, and he even admittedly slighted some of Nebraska’s all-time teams at the request of one of his producers during an all-time college football team debate show.

Herbstreit believes that Nebraska and Baylor fans are the two most-sensitive fan-bases and that whenever he picks against their team, his notifications blow up.

RELATED: Kirk Herbstreit discusses Nebraska via Twitter

So when Herbstreit actually defended Nebraska’s top-10 ranking on the GameDay show before the Indiana game, his fellow analysts knew the irony of it.

“We wouldn’t laugh at any team, are you kidding me?” Herbstreit told the World-Herald. “The guys were laughing at me because they know that Nebraska fans hate me and so when I was trying to give compliments to Nebraska, they were laughing at me …

“I sometimes share some of the things that people say to me from Nebraska. So it’s kinda become a little bit of an inside joke on our set with how Nebraska fans are toward me. The giggling and laughing was more of them laughing at me. Most definitely not laughing at Nebraska.”

Watch it again with that in mind:

Fans obviously don’t know all the inside jokes between on-air talent. That, based on Herbstreit’s comments, looked to be exactly what he said it was.

But hey, it’s college football. Who isn’t a little sensitive these days?