LukeinNE

Two eh years after that posting really took the sheen off the guy for a lot of people. College football is so "what have you done for me lately." I think we'll be fine under him.

Interesting.....though this is probably bad news for Brennan coming here?

A light breeze could knock me over if Wisconsin hires Pelini. I think he's a good coach. I think there's a number of places where he could coach a championship team. Wisconsin is not one of those places. Totally different offensive inclinations, Wisconsin does not have the ability to recruit the guys Pelini needs defensively. Pelini moving to Wisconsin feels like doubling down on every shortcoming that prevented him from breaking through at Nebraska.

Yep glad to see him getting out there, and early returns seem to be good. If he can keep the Missouri twins on board, that's huge. The good news on that one is that the parents seem very involved in the decision and I can't imagine Riley not impressing parents.

Shocking, but good news. All of these coaching changes are going to damage Wisky's program. This leaves the door wide open for Riley.

The staff will get at least 3 years unless years 1 and 2 are absolute disasters (no bowl), and I don't see that happening. Riley and his staff managed to keep OSU pretty much afloat over a decade and a half of coaching there. Going from OSU to Nebraska, I'm not sure how Same Coaching + Better Players + Weaker Schedule = Worse Result.

I'd be surprised if Riley's classes at Nebraska are substantially different than Pelini's in terms of the talent we bring in. As different as the two are, I imagine Riley's approach to recruiting is probably very similar to Pelini's: low pressure, no lying or misleading recruits, focus on character and fit. And really that's fine. I rarely felt like we had inadequate talent under Pelini, just that our players too often played fundamentally unsound football.

Well I definitely do not agree with the home run or strike out logic. Tom Osborne was 20 years of hitting doubles before he finally hit it big. I saw the 9.5 wins a season Pelini brought to the table as a good staging ground while he tried to figure out how to break through. The lack of breakthrough was frustrating and the blowouts were not good, but I get pretty exasperated when people dismiss the 9 win thing as some sort of birthright that even Elmer Fudd couldn't screw up. If Notre Dame and Michigan can get sucked into the hire/fire cycle for a decade plus, we sure as hell can too.

I wasn't in favor of firing Pelini - still not sure about it. I dislike giving up a sure thing for the greener side of the hill. I wish Bo the best, and frankly think he'll do just fine. He's a good coach. I also think we'll be fine with Mike Riley. Is he the guy to end our championship drought? I'm dubious - but I am pretty confident that he won't drive us into the ditch. He kept a historically horrendous (seriously OSU pre-Riley = KSU pre-Snyder, this can't be repeated enough) more or less above water for a decade and a half. That's a damned good coaching job, and I'd be stunned if he's a disaster at Nebraska, where there are 5-6 wins built into the schedule pretty much no matter what. Hopefully his overachievement at Oregon State transfers to Lincoln and turns 8-9 win regular seasons into 10-11 win ones. I see Riley's doubled his Twitter followers overnight. Welcome to the madhouse coach. Good luck.

Those look very much like Callahan Win/Loss records to me. They're almost identical. In fairness to Whittingham, a conference move is challenging, especially when going from non-P5 to P5, and Utah is a tougher place to win at in the Pac 12 South than Nebraska is in the B1G West....all that being said, I'd file this potential hire under "why did we fire Pelini for him?"

Whittingham? Eh. I mean, I think he's a solid coach....just like Bo. 4 years in the Pac 12: 8-5, 5-7, 5-7, 8-4. I don't think he'd be a disaster, but I don't see him leading us out of Bogatory either.

IIRC, all but Walker accepted the Affordable Care Act/Medicaid expansion. Does that mean you agree that the ACA is fading as an issue (excepting the truly extreme of course)? Of course it is. If the electoral fundamentals play out to their historical expectations, the GOP will have unified control of the government after the 2016 elections, at which time they'll make a few cosmetic changes to the law, claim it's all they could do with the obstructionist behavior of Senate Democrats, declare victory and move on leaving the law essentially intact. You're aware that the states they just won in (again) are to the left of the nation as a whole, right? One side of the political spectrum really, really hating someone does not mean that person is unelectable. Obama and Bush are testaments to that fact.

I'm just gonna throw this out there: chaos always happens in November. Always. Without fail. I think if we win out, we're in at 12-1. It'd be a very narrow miss if we're not.

The 4th quarter against Sparty. Moral victories aside. That's pretty much it though. Aside from the Miami game, we've basically done what we were supposed to do against average at best teams. After Miami, the 4th Qtr in EL was easily the most impressive thing I've seen from our team all year. If pressed for a whole game, I'd probably have to say NW - dominating the 2nd half after trailing at halftime on the road.

What's that? Kasich (Ohio), Sandoval (NV), Martinez (NM), Walker (WI), Snyder (MI). All GOP governors winning easily in Obama states with pretty conservative records because they figured out the tone issue and knew which fights to pick and which to back down from. If the party has any sense, one of them will be at the top of the 2016 ticket.

1. No turnovers. 2. Hold Wisconsin under say.....7 yards per carry. Do those two things and I think everything else falls into place.

The 4th quarter against Sparty.

Pulling even among Asians is a huge accomplishment. One of the mysteries going into 2016 is whether a white Democrat on top of the ticket can command anywhere near the same amount of loyalty and excitement among minorities that Obama did. The answer in the 2010 and 2014 midterms is emphatically no....but they are midterms. Candidate selection will be key. A big bright spot I will point out for the GOP: they are kicking ass and taking names at the state level. Heading into next year, we're going to have 32/50 governor's mansions in GOP hands and at least 63/99 statehouses controlled by Republicans. Washington generally and the Washington GOP specifically is a hot mess, but I can't hide my enthusiasm for what I'm seeing out of several Republican governors.

That's actually a really weird gerrymander from a Republican perspective. The idea in a situation like this is to pack as many Democratic votes as you can into one far-left district, so that the remaining blue leaning areas of Austin can be more easily be absorbed into the red suburbs and countryside. I mean, obviously their method works too, it just seems wasteful to have a D+9 district in the Austin area when you could have a D+40 district and make all those other Republican seats that much safer. It has the added bonus of actually letting Austin vote as a cultural entity, so that particular gripe can be turned aside.

I endorse this, for a number of reasons. Really, really high up on that list is I'm tired of crappy weather and injuries leveling the playing field for the Hawkeyes. Better to just wipe the floor with them to open October every year.

Agreed. One of the most talented teams Bo has put on the field, all 3 phases of the game have shown flashes, and the B1G is in shambles. It's time to bring some hardware back to Lincoln. I'd accept a major bowl win as a replacement this year. If Sparty continues to get better, rolls up the rest of the league, has a good showing in the playoff....I could handle losing to them a couple times in a year, particularly if we put up a better fight the second time around. But if that happens, we'd better look good in whatever big bowl picks us up (we're Nebraska and we'd be 11-2, I think the Orange or Fiesta or Cotton would all be delighted to have us), because aside from Sparty, that'd be the only real team we play all year. Yes, 11-3 would be a step forward, but kind of a hollow-feeling one if our best win is at Wisconsin - a team that looks to be skidding toward a 5 loss season.

I'm pretty optimistic about our running game in this one. Their M.O. so far this year has been to get a lead, bait the other team into getting pass happy and capitalizing with picks and tons of sacks. Strip the sacks out of the rushing statistic, and they're giving up 4.5 yards a carry on the ground. A greatly diminished Oregon managed almost that with 3 sacks included in their final box score. This, by all accounts, is a substantially worse Spartan defense going up against a much improved Husker rushing attack vs a year ago (having intact offensive linemen is very helpful). That doesn't mean I don't have concerns about the game as a whole - I have several - but I think we're going to be ok moving the ball on the ground.

I want a win on Saturday. That'd be a great step forward. But what really stuck out to me on those stats wasn't the record - 8 straight losses on the road to top 10 teams isn't good but isn't embarrassing - but how completely uncompetitive those losses were. The most "impressive" loss was the 1998 game against KSU, followed by the 2008 loss at Texas Tech. Outside of that, bludgeonings across the board. I'm not big on moral victories, but if we could somehow manage to keep this at least within two scores, that'd be a nice change.

The honest answer is yes of course we did, and Sparty had little to nothing to do with most of those turnovers, but that's a good response from Pelini. No need to give them any bulletin board material.

I think part of it was attitude and execution, but mostly I think it was Miami's scheme. McNeese and Fresno went all Kevin Cosgrove circa Texas 2007 against Ameer Abdullah. The numbers game made it likely that we'd struggle to run, and we did. Nebraska's passing game had an off game against the former and it almost got them the W. It didn't against Fresno and they got BTFO. I get Miami's scheme: let's take away the big play and use our athletes to beat them man to man. What I don't get is their utter failure to adjust when it became obvious their front 7 was totally outclassed by our line and Abdullah's ability. Yes, pulling in the safeties probably leads to another home run or two over the top, but at some point the body blows are going to do you in and you have to risk taking a haymaker to stop them.