Undone

Basically the same place, painted red, etc. They have live music on the weekends. Fairly popular, I guess.

^^^^ +1. Conference championship locked down.

El Oh El. As the venerable Bobby Knight would say, it's a profession that's just one or two steps up from prostitution.

Bo confirms: Rex will play this weekend.

Our offensive line is a more solid unit than we thought going into the season. Their play is consistent, and they're starting to shed the brain-dead penalties and mistakes. Little by little, Taylor slowly gets better every game. His decision making is the most important part of his improvement. Zaire Anderson reminded me of a junior Lavonte out there today. Didn't always know where he needed to be, but he flew to the ball to make plays. Beast.

Generally when a guard pulls, he's pulling into a specific area, not roaming around in a large general area of space. And it's about isolation as much or probably more than a pancake block. Isolating a player is absolutely as effective as a pancake; once your back clears that space, if the pulling lineman made his assignment and doesn't need to push further up field, he's good. In my opinion, Seung Hoon has pretty quick feet. He moves laterally quickly.

His tender? His tender what? Sounds like a sensitive subject.

My vote is C. Berry's. It's going to be really close to the stadium on 'O' street. https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=c.+berry's+lincoln&fb=1&gl=us&hq=c.+berry's&hnear=0x8796be59ca561265:0x633a859b1fd5deb9,Lincoln,+NE&cid=0,0,13866334404677282255&ei=BOFRUPP8C43lyAHDh4D4BA&ved=0CJwBEPwSMAA It's technically barbecue, but they have awesome burgers, too.

Yes. This is being discussed in a countless number of other threads, to be honest.

I realize the patented Pelini "Peso" defense is not exactly the same as a 3 - 4 scheme, but we essentially did play the Peso format throughout much of last season. Then Bo came out and essentially said that we weren't ready for the transition from covering spread offenses to the power offenses of the B1G, as a reason for the drop-off in defensive play. I just don't buy his excuse. Both the Peso and what we're doing now require lightning speed from whatever players are behind our line (be it LBs or DBs) when your line just stands their blocker up. We had to shoot to the gaps, and we had to have fast LB play. We had that in 2010 especially. Also, one issue that seems to fly under the radar a bit is our complete unwillingness to blitz. I swear, I feel like our LBs don't even have a feel for blitzing, even if we were to use it more often.

Again, quite the assumption, right? If they haven't seen the field, how do we know they're more talented?

Exactly. Even if Maher had made his last FG attempt, we still gave up well over 600 yards. Losing this one by two points or winning it by one point shows a terrible epidemic of issues that won't bode well in conference play either way.

That's a great post above, Enhance.

Exactly. There's a difference between berating the players' ability and merely pointing out how the players' abilities might be able to be used differently to achieve better results. That's not condescension - that's a football message board.

Taylor gave 100%. His amazing run kept us in the game, not to mention that long scramble to pick up a 1st down. I really believe he leaves it all out on the field, and is a huge asset for us. It wasn't his fault that a zone read was called in his own end zone that led to the safety. Props to you, Taylor.

Obviously, nobody likes the kind of criticism we give here. Nobody likes the armchair offensive coordinator. Just one comment on this topic for me, though: The zone read out of the end zone that lead to the safety. The zone read being one of the slowest developing offensive plays available in college football. That one upset me. Run a dive or trap, something with a short, quick hand off to get some separation from the end zone. But not the zone read. They broke through so quickly with a blitz on that play that it didn't matter whether Taylor kept the ball or handed off. They were on top of us in the back field (in the end zone) before the play could take off. Not the right play for taking a snap in the end zone.

Fair enough - he rushed for 53 yards, as opposed to 75, 100, or 125, or some other number that would have made it seem more subjectively substantial to anyone. I'm going to go back to my secondary point about Bo claiming that we needed to make a specific transition from defending spread offenses to power offenses. So let's talk rush defense then. Let's say we're in more of a 4-3 look. If we're playing Whaley and Fisher it's just...it's just sad out there. I hate saying that - I really do. But it's the truth. So whether we're talking specifically about a mobile QB running wild, or stopping a more traditional ground game, how can we possibly do it with the scheme/personnel combo we have on the field? Again, the point is - what exactly have we transitioned to? Ohio State and Michigan are not the stereotypical big, slow, smash-mouth style of Penn State or Iowa. And they're the teams we need to beat. We have transitioned to nothing that works.

Again, I'm going to push back on this. Even when our defensive line does get into the back field, a mobile QB merely has to sweep to the outside, and it's a jailbreak. Pelini's defensive rhythm is the following: "Eh, we'll just take what the offense gives us. Our linemen will shift to the angle the play is heading." But it seriously fails every time against mobile QBs. Using a corner blitz is practically nonexistent for us. There's no variety in what we do defensively. Our defensive line stands straight up. Their quarterback has 5-7 seconds to think about what he wants to do. Play develops according to the opponent's every whim. We get beaten to the outside. Repeat.

I agree with both of you. But maybe the point that I didn't make clear above is this: Pelini's stubbornness is going to absolutely screw us this season. If you intentionally play a scheme where your line doesn't penetrate, then get constantly KILLED with that particular game plan, where do you go from there? To me, the answer is to corner blitz. Something that Bo is clearly opposed to doing, roughly 90% of the time. Bottom line, in my humble opinion: Even though our defensive team speed and talent is severely lacking, with a shift in scheme, we could definitely be better. And it seems fairly obvious that it starts with forcing a mobile QB to: A) Make decisions quicker B) Not allowing the outside to be wide open space Corners blitz. Linebackers shift out. Safeties stay home. Whydoweneverseethisman.

Going to put out a few thoughts on this. A lot of it is probably just being discouraged after the crushing blow of defeat. Last year, Bo did something fairly rare - he made an excuse. He blamed poor defensive play on not being "prepared" for the transition from defending spread offenses to the style of play in the B1G. I'm going to call BS on this. There were at least three decent B1G teams on our schedule last year with mobile QBs: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Northwestern. Consistently, as we saw tonight, these teams were able to maintain offensive drives by merely having their QB scramble when their receivers are covered. So this is to say that while there are some boring, big, slow, power offense teams in the B1G that fit that stereotype (see: Iowa, Penn State), on average it's no excuse. UCLA completely shredded us by having a QB be able to extremely easily scramble for significant yardage when receivers were covered down field. There is no transitional problem here. Our defensive team speed is woeful. Without Bo admitting this and "shifting paradigms," as they say, it's like we start out in the negative against mobile QBs. Ohio State...that game is going to be an embarrassment of embarrassments.

One team's defense showed up to compete tonight. The other's didn't. We have no play makers on defense. Compton is the only player that comes close. The drop-off in recruiting prowess is coming to fruition on that side of the ball.

Cy...it kind of seems like you're almost putting words in our mouths. Don't forget that the majority of this fan base still holds ourselves to the highest standards. That's why we dream of national titles, not just conference titles. Not just "going to the Rose Bowl." So regardless of whether or not our conference play is deemed as weak, or prone to padding stats, we still dream of being the best. We've taken a monumental slide from that level of play...but it's still the goal. Also, you really put on the rose-colored glasses with the whole "No conference championship game ensures a true champion" thing. Reference the Big 10's ridiculousness from two seasons ago; it was pathetic. It was essentially a three-way tie. I agree with you to a point - it ensures that every game counts. But I'm guessing you understand that Iowa State's chances just got infinitely more unlikely (as if that was previously thought possible) of winning a conference title. The nice thing about the old Big XII set up for us was something we probably took for granted - in the more recent era, all we really had to do was ensure that we beat Mizzery and K-State, and we could at least get to the conference title game. With a little luck, maybe we win that game. Winning it outright is much harder to do.

To expand though, I think the devil was in the details with regards to that last season. There were/are plenty of times still where significant down field yardage could be had if he would just take off a half second earlier. Internal clock is probably a good way of putting it. There are going to be plays where nobody's going to be open. We didn't see that much against Southern Mis, but those are the plays where hopefully he can develop the timing to take off. Especially with his straight-line speed. There's a happy medium there that he wasn't able to find with it last year. Overall, I'm pretty sure everyone will agree though that he's developing a good pocket presence. But if he can combine that "fifth sense" of when to take off, he'll be lights out dangerous.

I think actually that you might be taking it too seriously. It's not too dissimilar to the betting odds discussion in the other thread. The preseason poll is an educated guess, and then it settles out from there. It's pretty straightforward. And, some people enjoy discussing it.