Ulty

I love McKewon's articles, and I love comparing stats, but I don't think we needed this article to know that we'd win more games if turnover margin and defense improve.

In college, I managed to score the digits and get a date with a smokin' hot bartender, which was noteworthy because she was always getting hit on by college dudes every night and was used to ignoring such flirtations, and my friends said there was no way she would even give me the time of day.

When I took her out, it came out during the conversation that she was a vegetarian, and when I asked why, she said that she couldn't eat anything with a face.

I was at a loss for words. I looked down at the burger I had ordered, and seeing no face on it, enjoyed eating it and never called her again.

The point is: beauty is only skin deep, but meat is always delicious.

I agree that the best is (in Dan Hawkins voice) DIVISION ONE COLLEGE FOOTBALL.

The diverse styles, the strategy, the pageantry, the bands, the recruiting, the controversy, the traditions, the loyalty, young athletes becoming grown men, the scandals, the iconic uniforms, the ugly uniforms, the college chicks. It all beats what you get with the NFL, and there is much more of it. It is more interesting and more dramatic.

The only thing the NFL has is more parity and a higher level of competition. The best of the best are on display, and they all go head to head against each other. Both are enjoyable, but college has far more going on and more to get invested in, especially if your alma mater is involved.

I'm a pretty laid-back fan and don't react too emotionally to wins or losses - but the one moment that had me whooping, hollering, and jumping was Turner's catch at the end of the MSU game.

In all, I thought it was one hell of an entertaining season. Except for Ohio State, Idaho St, and the CCG, every game contained 4 quarters of intrigue, if not outright excitement. I haven't had this much fun watching Husker football since I got out of college (2001). I'm disappointed at all the angst and hand-wringing on the internet over a couple of lopsided losses, when we just witnessed week after week of fantastic entertainment apart from those two losses.

Yes, it is HIPAA. HIPAA prohibits people who treat the person from disclosing names. For example, I can say, I took an x-ray of a tib/fib today of a 18 year old boy and that is not violating HIPAA. If I say I took an x-ray of John Smiths fractured tibia that is a violation of HIPAA.

wait a minute...How did John Smith break his tibia? How soon until he returns?

I was in the marching band at UNL from 1997-2001 so had soem good trips, bookended by National Championship games in the Orange Bowl (yay!) and Rose Bowl (boo!).

But my favorite bowl trip was the Alamo Bowl against Northwestern in 2000. That was the year I had turned 21 so I finally got to let loose during the trip, and the Riverwalk in San Antonio had a lot of awesome things for a young lush to do.

We also had a lot of Northwestern fans in our hotel who talked a lot of shite before the game (which I didn't understand - I mean, you're Northwestern for cripes sake). of course we beat the holy hell out of NW in the game, which is a really good feeling when people have been flapping their gums.

Allow me to jump off topic for a second then hopefully bring it all back together. When I was a young man in college I met a young lady who caught my eye. She was pretty, fun to be with, a little bit flirty and attentive. I eventually fell in love, married her and we raised 3 good sons. She is a good mother, had a decent job for 38 years (recently retired). There was a stretch in our early marriage when I thought the grass might be greener on the other side. I started focusing on my perceived faults of her and wondering if I made the right choice. It took me a few years to realize, she is who she is, and I could go through life accepting her better qualities or ruining my marriage by focusing on her lesser qualities.

That's a great story, but we'd all still like to see your wife win that elusive conference championship before we judge her.

9 wins is no longer a measuring stick for greatness, but neither is it a barometer (on its own) for whether or not a coach should get fired.

I wonder if Borland's tackle of Martinez was just a perfect storm of Borland wrapping up well and popping his hips in order to take down the runner, along with Taylor standing up straight and still trying to move his feet. What turned into a suplex probably wasn't more than what every good tackler tries to do on every play, you just usually see the runner go down instead of on a high-flying ride.

Even if Borland meant to do it this way, even in wrestling or judo, it's difficult to get such a perfect takedown, and I bet Borland never would have expected Matinez to actually fly up as he did. I bet he couldn't replicate this tackle on another runner if he tried, even with a smaller dude.

Having said that, he still should have been flagged, based on the precedent of flagging other guys for cleaner, faster hits, that the tackler often has no way of controlling. From a football perspective, I'm not really concerned about the Borland tackle. But from a safety perspective, I don't know why the refs would look at this any differently than any number of other hits that get penalized.

I do appreciate that Borland walked over to Martinez afterward, though.

...and Ochs grabbing Crouch's facemask was much worse than this.

2007 was a special year?

Well, I feel that if I have to put a "sarcasm" emoticon next to every sarcastic comment, it's like having to explain a punchline.

He won't catch Ball's rushing TDs record.

 

EDIT: I thought Kaepernick broke Crouch's record in 2010, but he tied it instead.

 

Crouch = 59 rushing TDs in 43 games (NCAA record tied with Colin Kaepernick)

Martinez = 29 rushing TDs in 38 games

This isn't exactly on topic, but Kaepernick was truly great at Nevada.

 

And no, Taylor will not get the record. But having two conference championships would be nice for him I'm sure.

Even further off topic, Kaepernick saw some playing time against Nebraska in 2007, going 1/3 for negative one yard. I was at that game, and I knew right then that 2007 was going to be a special year.

I'm gonna go ahead and prepare to be very happy right now, so I can avoid the rush.

Should we be worried about Wisconsin in the Big 10 Champ. Game?

 

 

We should be worried about Iowa and if we beat them, then yes, worry about Wisconsin. One should be worried about every opponent. Otherwise, complacency will get you one in the "L" column.

If you are a coach or player, maybe...

As fans, overlooking an opponent costs us nothing. No reason for us to worry about Iowa. I do worry about Wisconsin because rematches so often go the opposite way from the first game.

If TO had coached for five more years, we would have had a minimum of eight more national championships. No doubt in my mind.

He has the speed to produce the sort of signature Heisman moments that look good on the highlight reel.

He has the WR corps to produce really good numbers throughout the year.

He'll have the type of career numbers that help a lot of Heisman candidates in their senior years.

He has the team and schedule to rack up a lot of wins next year and keep a high ranking.

The potential is there.

John L. Smith is very optimistic that he will return next year

 

http://sports.yahoo....552--ncaaf.html

Other things John L. Smith is very optimistic about:

1. Finishing the season with a winning record.

2. Making a profit on Hostess stock.

3. Getting to an NHL game this year.

4. Mitt Romney being sworn into office in January.

5. The new Twilight movie being awesome.

6. Enjoying himself at Guy Fieri's new restaurant.

Having said what I said above, in 100% of the investigations I worked on with that job, and even years later when I worked for the state of Nebraska investigating employment discrimination, serious problems in the workforce could always be traced to upper management. It starts at the top. Good businesses with good management either have a good relationship with their unions or keep the workforce satisfied enough that they don't want to form a union. In my example above, management was weak and incomptent, allowing the union to basically take over the entire culture and fill the leadership void. Corrupt unions don't exist in a vacuum.

I used to work for a corporate investigations firm, and when we had to go into a facility to interview alleged wrongdoers, we'd have to deal with the unions - most of our cases were in factories with strong unions, and most of our bad guys were drug dealers, gang members, etc. The Supereme Courthave held, under a case called Weingarten, that union employees have a right to union representation in any meeting during investigatory interviews, so we'd often have union stewards sitting in while we talked to the bad guys. Many times, they obstructed the process.

I remember one case in particular where we had a guy admit to working on a factory production totally wacked out on drugs, and he had also sold drugs to coworkers and had been responsible for injuring coworkers because of being under the influence and being a part of others being threatened by the pro-drug community in the factory. The union rep stood up for his druggie brother and threatened to have his union buddies shut down production if the investigation continued or if the company started firing employees based on the damning stuff we found (and there was mountains of evidence in additino to the employees outright admitting what they had done).

The union steward said to us: "I don't give a f#&k about this company. I only care about the union."

At the end of it all, we had done our investigation very well and had billed approximately $50,000 to the factory for our efforts. We found lots of bad guys, drugs, evidence of other crimes, and policy violations up the yin-yang. The company did not discipline a single person, let alone fire anyone. They were afraid of the union, despite having full rights to fire people. They also should have fired the guy who specifically said (on recording and in front of a supervisor) that he didn;t care about his job.

Now, I am liberal on most issues and generally pro-labor, and unions do serve a valid purpose, but sometimes (often?) they get too big for their britches and go beyond what they were supposed to do. If the purpose of a union is to protect the workforce and ensure people have safe and fair working conditions, one would think a good union rep would be outraged at the employee who admitted to selling and using drugs on the job, because it endangers his fellow workers and the workforce altogether. In the case og Hostess, a good union would see the forest beyond the trees and think that keeping the job for now is better than shutting down entirely, and maybe keep up on diplomatic negotiations with the company (easier said than done, and perhaps Hostess management were being strong-armed asses, I haven't read enough about it), but in either case, the result is certainly not in the best interest of the workers.

In my example above, I ran into many similar situations in other investigations where the unions had the same attitudes and enabled (or even encouraged) illegal or inappropriate behavior and held management hostage, as opposed to actually making the workforce and the workplace better. To be fair, I've seen quite a few good union reps who care about their work and their employers, but the problems I often saw were from the largest and strongest unions. Corruption and power became more important than quality of work conditions. It happens too often.

Would be cool to see a lot of option plays and fullback handoffs on Saturday. And maybe the coaches can all put their names on their headsets with an old school label-maker.

If this Bradley dude is committed to Tennessee, maybe he's just coming to scout out Bo Pelini, since he'll be coaching in the SEC next year ya know.

He never got a proper sendoff at his last home game as a coach. It was a freezing, windy day in which we were up on Iowa State 63-7 at half time. The stadium was half empty by the fourth quarter started. No one knew at the time that Tom was never going to coach another game at Memorial Stadium.

I have a 3 year old son and one year old daughter. I love, love, love watching football with them and teaching them the important gestures (touchdown, throwing the bones, and first down), but if my kids want to play sports when they are older, I'm going to steer them to things other than football. The more we learn about it, football just seems too dangerous, especially looking at it as a parent. I wouldn't go as far to forbid it, however.

With my genes, my son wouldn't be seeing the football field anyway. We're an Ultimate frisbee family.

Sports are an important way of learning socialization, teamwork, and toughness, and freaky injuries can happen in any sport, but the near-inevitabilty of long-term damage in football players is something a parent like me doesn't want to deal with, especially brain injuries.

Many programs really benefited from Steve Pederson's tenure as AD

...including the football programs at Kansas, Iowa State, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, etc.

I think Bo has things going in the right direction here, too, and I hope he stays at Nebraska as long as his sideline demeanor doesn't seriously hurt the recruiting process (sarcasm).

However, I don't think he's accomplished enough yet to justify any deep-pocketed program buying out his Nebraska contract and giving him a new one with a raise. (Although I guess that still puts Auburn in the mix, since their last hire was a slimy coach with a losing record.)

**edit: I don't mean to say Bo is a slimy coach, I mean he would be an upgrade for Auburn, although an expensive one**