LaunchCode

Every Monday morning you could tell when our HS assistant football coaches pulled into the school parking lot by the sound of empty beer cans rattling around in the back of their truck as they drover over the parking lot speed bumps. A big rattle meant they went home Friday not happy and we were going to be doing some "extra" running that night. A really really big rattle meant they went home Friday night ready to party and no extra running at Monday's practice.

Starting a season with two road games against good (maybe better than good) Power 5 opponents is not an ideal way for a new staff to blastoff. Defense is playing with some fire and intensity. A for effort and really what more can we ask for (reasonably) other than a high level effort? 8 sacks is a solar type bright spot and something to build off of Averaged 5.4 Yrds per carry Managed 341 yards offense in spite 4 turnovers. It seems there's a positive lesson here if not for the "in spite" of part what might the total have been. Winning means so much because it's not easy.

I will try to answer and then I am ready to look to the future and not backwards. As I recall things, the fanbase was fairly divided by the Riley hire from day one. Partly because he wasn't flashy enough, or they weren't convinced by his prior record, etc... and others were not happy Bo was let go and took it out on the new guy. The same could be said for the locker room. It was filled with a lot of players who felt betrayed the coach who recruited them had been fired and were not ready/willing to embrace the next coach and maybe no matter who the new coach was. I can understand those who felt that way even if it didn't help their own cause. The most disconcerting thing to me was, the discovery there was tinkering by people in the AD with recruiting, and assistant fires/hires. My point being, there were a lot of people pulling in different directions for different reasons. Some may have even been deliberately working to undermine success. You're right, I didn't mention Frost, but my take would be this. Even though I think he carried huge support coming in and had a generous amount of latitude, I'm not sure he actually appreciated how much latitude he had and felt some self imposed pressure to do things a certain way, due to history/tradition,. and trying to that didn't necessarily suit his strengths or that of his assistants and players. It may have also distracted him early on from doing things his own way at the risk of turning over the apple cart. This is conjecture on my part and based on my reading of his body language, statements, and press conferences along with how things played out on hte field.

Maybe the silver lining in wake of the SF era will be, the unrealistic expectation things will and should turnaround overnight have been buried, peed on, and buried again. The most important thing Rhule mentioned a couple times during the unveiling yesterday, paraphrasing: if you want to see something fail have a bunch of people standing around watching and criticizing the few doing the work. If you want to see something succeed have every single person from fans, boosters, coaches, students, athletes, and people inside the AD all pulling in the same direction even when they may not agree with some of the details. That hit the nail on the head as I see one of our biggest obstacles to progress. It was painfully apparent during the MR era. A lot of people pulling the wrong direction. Look where that got us. Let's all grab ahold of the rope and pull together without questioning the direction the man in charge says we need to go.

You'll need a lead blocker. I'm in.

Hope?

Apparently some folks at LSU thought he was offensive enough to let go.

Looking at Pac 12 QB picture, I don't know what if any eligibility remains or what that even means anymore but Cal and UCLA had senior QBs and Oregon a grad transfer. Everyone else looks to have a returning starter for next season with the two exceptions below. UW has a new coach and a young 5 star QB already on roster and the Freson State QB is following his coach, so not a likely landing spot. USC, new coach with an injured veteran and young highly rated, out of hs, QB on roster. Might he want another option? If he goes to Pac 12, UCLA seems like the most likely landing spot .

You make several good points and I agree no single player/coach is going to be a magic fix, but you do build talent one player at a time and I'm not seeing much in the pipeline currently so if the TP can prove more productive than the recruiting trail, then I'm for giving it a good all out effort. Got to start somewhere and honestly at this point, landing a "name" provides the fans with some hope in the near term. It may prove to be false hope in the long run, but we are in the buy some time mode as far as I'm concerned.

Spencler Raddler won 9 games as a freshman on 28 td' passes to 7 int's. Can you imagine those numbers here? Why wouldn't we go after him if he's shopping around? At our current pace it will take 3 seasons to win 9 games, and our TD to INT ratio at nearly 1 : 1 is a big part of why that is. So not understanding the "we don't want him" posts in this thread. That's like a guy saying he doesn't want a backyard bbq'd, fresh pure beef, hand pressed, one inch thick burger with all the best toppings around while he's choking down a dry, foil wrapped heat lamp burger from a truck stop.

Who are we picking up from transfer portal? Since we play OU next year, maybe Spencler Raddler would consider us and a chance to go beat Williams/OU? Not sure what happened between last year and this year, but the freshman version of Raddler was good enough to earn hiesman front runner hype going into this season.

I think Gene Chizik was fired a couple seasons after Auburn won the national championship.

Yes to bolded part. Illinois went 4-3 in final seven games of season and notched 2 road wins over ranked Penn State and Minnesota. They started season with a win over Frost's Huskers. In one season Bielma improved the win total, most major O and D stats, and won road games vs top 25 teams in gritty and gutty performances. He's a first year coach at ILLINOIS!!! Ill-a-freak'n-noy beat us again with a first year coach. Bielma did a very impressive job this season and his team showed some unusual mental toughness under a new coach to go 7, 8, 9 OT"s on the road vs a ranked team and come out on top. To see that kind of a win in a coaches first season, suggests he figured out rather quickly which buttons needed pressing and pressed them at all the right times. I see Illini under Bielma only growing more difficult to beat. Where/what can be pointed to anywhere to suggest we are making up ground? .

Not much to elaborate on the particular point you zeroed in on. It was me being generous to Frost by providing a small excuse to him. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence over his tenure however to suggest at least some of his time and energy has gone towards connecting to the past rather than expending that energy on building the here, now, and future.

Maybe some folks are starting to finally get it. The past is the past. Enjoy it for what it was, but it's long past time we stop trying to revive it by looking for anyone who was somehow tied to it. We seem to keep wanting to rebuild on a foundation that has long deteriorated and that's not a structure capable of handling adversity. The truth seems to be this for many, the top priority isn't actually winning even though they say and think that's what they want. If that were true then things like this should not matter to them: Where the coach is from What system he must implement An arbitrary 500 mile recruiting radius (coaches need to be free to recruit to their strengths. personal connections, and relationships not some imaginary line on a map) Ties to past success On offensive identity that "looks like the old Nebraska" etc.......... If you really want to win, at some point you throw all that other sentimental stuff out the window and you do what is necessary NOW in this day and age and under the current rules and competition level to win. Frosts biggest mistake was caving into those who yearn for the past to return, Had he instead focused on just winning and not winning a certain way to please those folks, maybe we wouldn't have ended up with a less successful coach than the last one.