J-MAGIC

"Here are 21 contextless negative facts, which surely means we'll have a bad upcoming season"

1) There are plenty of "clear-thinking" reasons to see 8-4 as a possibility if you aren't a total crank who only wants to focus on the downsides of the team 2) Sports are supposed to be for fun. If you're quoting Carl Sagan at people to police their realism about a leisure activity, you might be doing this for the wrong reasons.

You're not wrong on any of this, I just think it's very telling that our coaches thought playing Austin Allen in the slot on almost 75 percent of our plays was the best thing for our offense. We also basically spent zero time in 10 personnel in the back half of the season, which is a huge departure from Oregon and UCF. I just think it's pretty clear from rewatching stuff that outside of Wandale we just didn't have a Big Ten-caliber receiving corps. I think that can change with the Omar and Toure additions and with the Betts-Brown-Nixon trio learning the playbook, but we didn't have it last year.

This doesn't track for me because almost all of our run concepts have some sort of read or RPO off them. Everything had an unblocked player or a tag on the outside. If the defense is dictating it's a give to the RB then I don't see what you're suggesting our coaches do (beyond completely changing the offense or developing better players).

I'm doing a little project and breaking down some of our games from last year. It's amazing how much 12 personnel they were playing last year after Martinez took back over with two of Allen, Volk, or Stoll out there at all times. It's like over 75 percent of the plays I've charted so far. And it's not like traditional 12 personnel formations or plays -- it's 11 personnel formations and they have the tight end split out like an X or Z or even in the slot and just performing those roles. Not everything obviously but I think that's pretty telling on what our coaches thought of our talent level at receiver.

FWIW KU and ISU are both AAU accredited with strong research bona fides. I think that's where they end up going.

Our offensive scheme and playcalling have been fine and a lot of times pretty cutting edge. We won the Rutgers game after we saw their backside end was crashing down and started hammering a Bash play I had never seen them run before. Sometimes they go into the grab bag a bit, but Frost has always been that way, even at Oregon, but you take the good with the bad. People who complain about bubble screens or swing passes don't understanding the function they serve. The basic truth with our offense is that our players have just not as good/experienced as most of our opponents and we're young and make bone-headed errors.

Basically every Big Ten president except ours and OSU's came out in full support of the decision because it wasn't Warren's decision, it was theirs.Some of you guys have created a boogeyman out of a middle manager.

Basketball isn't nearly as monetarily profitable as football. Kansas' football team brought in more money for the university than its basketball team in the last pre-pandemic year because of the Big 12 TV deal

Yes, if we were winning 11-12 games a year and were one of the very best programs in the country we would be recruiting a lot better? What are you arguing for here? With more wins we can definitely pull in some more top 100 four-star guys and maybe be a consistent top 15 recruiting school, but without a natural recruiting base this is always going to be primarily be a scout-and-develop program that's heavily dependent on finding under-the-radar guys. The staff evaluated everyone they thought they had a realistic chance at and chose the best one. I think there's some writing on the wall that we chose Torres over four star MJ Morris and higher-rated AJ Bianco. I think it's inarguable recruiting has tailed off a little this year because of the lack of wins (I would also argue not being able to get anyone on visits until a month ago has hurt a lot more), but some of you guys are way overreacting to a slight dip that is easily fixable if the wins come.

Connelly is projecting them 16th, which would be Ferentz's third- or fourth-best team.

Also McCaffrey only had to come into the game because of an equipment thing with Adrian and immediately tossed a pick. No excuse for not winning but that was a weird, fluky game.

Maybe I'm in the minority here but I think we would have handily beat Illinois last year if AM is starting. Receivers were running wide open downfield all day and McCaffrey was incapable of getting them the ball. Eventually Illinois figured that out and sat on everything short. AM came in and we went right down the field and scored. Defense didn't look good either but it was on the field a ton because of the turnovers. If we show up I'm not super worried about that game (though they are certainly capable of beating us if we play poorly as last year showed).

Yeah it'd be cool if we just won every toss-up game we played but that's not realistic. So the schedule is as tough as it seems to me. And I think people are really underestimating how tough @ Minnesota and the Iowa game will be. I know we've played Iowa close the past few years but on paper this looks like one of Ferentz's best teams so just shrug them off at your own risk.

I can't speak for others, but personally when an inflamed mob (some of whom were carrying assault rifles and zip ties and planted pipe bombs) broke into the U.S. Capitol by force in an attempt to circumvent regular government proceedings I was very concerned for the continuation of our government. Maybe not everyone who broke in that day was serious but generally I think we should react and be concerned by coup attempts, even if some of the people doing them were wearing funny hats! But you do you.

Based on the win probabilities we have about a 37 percent chance to beat all four of Illinois, Northwestern, Buffalo, and MSU to get to 5-1. Seems like what happens in these four games is going to be the key to our season. Win them all and eight wins are on the table. Drop one or two and you're flirting with bowl eligibility.

I completely agree it is a narrative-based award but I assumed all the narrative stuff was included when we're discussing someone's "college career". The suggestion here seemed to be that Crouch's Heisman is somehow lesser because he didn't go on to NFL success as other winners did. Maybe I'm misunderstanding Loewarn and if I am my bad.

I know this is a few days late, but, man, Marlon Lucky would have absolutely killed in the spread offense era. He would have been great in Frost's offense. Feels like he was ahead of his time.

Damn I forgot that they wait until all the players have finished their NFL careers before they award the Heisman so that they can evaluate those, too.

Personally I think it's cool a player on my team won the Heisman. I was 9 years old when Crouch won and I though he ruled and was the coolest person alive. If people want to be upset one of our players won an award over Rex Grossman or Ken Dorsey I guess that's a thing you can think but I truly couldn't care less.

Those are real trends but watching the game in someone's basement is never going to be as fun/memorable as going to the stadium to watch in person.

I mean to a certain extent that's just what you get in a sport played by 18-21 year-olds. Every school has check-out games; Alabama, Wisconsin, Iowa. They just usually have the talent or depth to withstand them, which we haven't recently.

https://twitter.com/mikegolicjr/status/1417155660345749508?s=20

The last 5 years have been the worst five of our modern era and we're playing in a division with three of the teams on historic all-time stretches in their programs' histories running development systems that have been entrenched for 15+ years. This isn't always going to hold true. It would be nice if national media people had enough context to not write short-sighted stuff about how NU and Purdue are the same now but I guess it comes with having our recent record.

I absolutely cannot stand this "Nebraska's stuck in the past and needs to accept it's an average program now" stuff. It's specious and surface-level and completely devoid of any context or history so that it can make points the authors want to make. No reasonable fan thinks the 90s are ever coming back but with the resources and money this place has it's still a good program and job that can still be winning 8 or 9 games consistently if it has competent people and systems in place. We consistently delivered top 25 teams less than a decade ago and Frost has signed nothing but top 25 classes, so this "They can't sign recruits anymore!" stuff is bologna. Rittenberg can eat my shorts.