J-MAGIC

I think most reasonable people would consider us playing like a Top 25 team to be "turning the corner". So let's say we do that and play like the 22nd-best team in the country next year. That would put us at four losses already baked into the schedule.

Every athletics department and school has replacement lists lined up for coaches. Nebraska certainly does and if you think it doesn't you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how athletics departments work. We don't have anyone hired yet because gauging interest and negotiating agreements takes a lot longer than A WEEK.

OK maybe not $2M; my bad there. But some of the payments revealed in the FBI probe were several hundred thousand a year so it was already significant money. I just don't see how this is going to be some crazy or bad change. People will drop stupid money early, but if it doesn't provide value for these companies making the mega-offers, then the market will adjust and stop doing it. And for every extravagant mega deal there are dozens of smaller deals that are helping other lesser-known athletes get compensated. I just can't understand thinking this is a bad thing in any way. From a certain perspective this money has always belonged to them and they're just now getting access to it.

I'm not mad at "Oh, this is kind of strange and possibly concerning." But I am mad at the "This has to mean we're firing our coach; why is our athletic department always in shambles, 20 years of ineptitude" crybaby stuff.

No offense but college basketball was maybe the most under-the-table-money sport out there so I don't really see how something like this is fundamentally changing anything? Instead of Duke or Kentucky funneling $2M through EYBL camps people are just going to do it in the open now.

Some people's reactions to this have been absolutely asinine. We know almost nothing about what happened and it just as easily could be something banal and a non-issue as it could be something concerning. The knee-jerk alarmism to everything that happens with the football team is getting so old.

Pollard in that article: “You know, there was a day 17 years ago that the thought of Iowa State’s athletics director (being the person people in) Nebraska thought that’s who they should go hire (is crazy) because they, rightfully so, did not look at our two programs as being comparable,” Pollard said. “I would argue right now that our program is ahead of their program. I’ll take that as a huge compliment but Jamie Pollard is a Cyclone and I’m going to continue to be a Cyclone.” Inarguable that ISU is ahead of NU right now but that's largely because of one good hire (Pollard also hired Gene Chizik and Paul Rhodes) so this seems like some pretty big talk lmao. Whenever Matt Campbell decides to leave for a better job that program is going to get hit by a semitruck.

Please turn off your screens and go get some fresh air

I know a certain segment doesn't care about them so I'm excited for their responses, but the numbers would say 2018 and 2019 were similar quality teams and that last year we were significantly improved over both of them. They would also say the 2018 offense was the best of Frost's tenure though.

I never said he did a bad job? I said a 40 year old who played within the last few decades and just got done working at a conference might be able to relate to current athletes and be more reactive to the unique situations and opportunities around NIL stuff than a 70 year old living in Montana. Moos also had almost nothing to do with the fundraising for the facility and his lieutenants were driving the NIL stuff, from recent reports.

Preseason SP+ would project us (30th) fourth in the Big 12, significantly behind OU (3), ISU (7), and Texas (20), and one spot behind OSU (29). So to be fair we probably still would win a lot more games there. It's a significantly weaker conference than even the Big 10 West.

For purely rational football reasons, we should absolutely not leave the Big Ten. It's a more competitive and relevant conference than the Big 12, we get vastly more money and exposure than in the Big 12, and we're going to have a much better shot at getting playoff berths in the Big 10. It's just a better conference for football, and that's on top of it being a (much, in some cases) better conference for most other sports and definitely in academics. But I think undeniably being in the Big 12 was a lot more fun as a fan. Playing teams we weren't even real rivals with such as K-State or A&M or Oklahoma State elicited some emotional response from me and had some juice. Aside from Iowa and maybe Wisconsin, these games mean nothing to me emotionally, and most of other fanbases in this conference don't want us here and think we're stuck-up hillbillies delusional about the old days. Obviously that it's come in arguably the worst five-year stretch in our program's modern history is not helping that, and that emotional reward will probably change as we develop more history with these teams, but right now we're in a place we're not wanted with little to no connection to anyone we're playing, and that's going to take years or decades to change. That's not fun! And on a certain level, I care more about having fun watching the Huskers than I do about the athletic department's balance sheet. So while I get the football reasons are very clear, I'm also not going to be super critical on anyone for jonesing for a return to the Big 12, and I don't think the reasons for our fans wanting to go back can only be "Let's take the easy way out." Overall I'd prefer we stay, but also I would be lying to you if every time we play Illinois I wasn't thinking "I wish we were playing Oklahoma State."

Personally I'd be in the bleachers 10 out of 10 times over the rooftops but to each their own.

I am begging a certain member of this board to turn off his computer and cable news and just go for a walk.

Stewart seems like the perfect hire: Understands the culture and what made Nebraska successful in the past, doesn't seem like a big egomaniac who's going to want to make immediate changes, and young and progressive enough to navigate the shifting landscape of college athletics in the way that a 70-year-old Moos might not have been able to from Montana. Also seems like he has enough backbone/competence to make some changes in the big-money sports if it becomes clear in a couple years that we need them.

When I left work on Friday the board was at "Moos probably wanted to retire and Nebraska asked him to politely leave sooner" and now we're at full-blown "Palace intrigue, power struggle, let's fire our coach, lowest point in program history." I'm having whiplash here; we've gotta slow down.

I agree that it's unlikely. I just think with Moos there was a zero percent chance of a rash decision like that happening. Now I think there's a non-zero percent chance of it happening and that's a little teeth-grinding to me. It's all moot if we just win 10 games, though.

Personally I'm concerned because we could be a vastly improved, top-25 or top-30 football team next year and still go 7-5 with our schedule, and a trigger-happy new AD could use it as ammunition to bring in his guy instead of letting things play out and setting us back five-ten years. Same in men's basketball. On a certain level, yes, there's no problem if Frost or Hoiberg just win. But I'm also a KU alumnus who was there during the Gill, Weis and Beaty years. The reason KU is as bad as it is now is because a coach wouldn't immediately win, so the new AD wanted to get "his guy" and canned the coach mid-rebuild, which obliterated the roster. Doing that once is very harmful (let alone three times like happened to KU) and if we don't get a person who values patience or continuity we're putting ourselves at risk of entering that cycle, and that scares me.

Some reasonable inference would say Moos was ready to retire and had been considering it for a while, but NU was slightly unhappy with some stuff and preferred to do it sooner than Moos envisioned. If that's the truth I'm not super upset or concerned.

Count me out on Pollard. Hiring and keeping Matt Campbell was obviously good (though that's not quite the masterstroke some make it out to be; Matt Campbell won about a billion games at Toldeo and a coach staying somewhere says a lot more about that coach's priorities than the actions of the AD), but he's also deeply messed up their men's basketball program and seems like the personality type to come in and want to make "his" hires, which is about the last thing we need right now. I want a competent, respected person with no ego who understands the culture and what wins at Nebraska. Bounds would be great imo.

This seems to be what the beat writers are insinuating happened. Would also track with the OU thing. Moos was blindsided because he wasn't in the building and these conversations were going down with his lieutenants instead of him.

Yeah I'm not gonna waste my time on this one.

I am not agreeing with you; the facilities are not being built for them. The athletes catch tangential benefits from the facilities being built, but they are being built for the athletic departments and schools to make more money.

All due respect but I feel like that's a skewed way of presenting it. They're being built to recruit the best players possible to ensure program success, which brings in higher levels of revenue for the school and lets the coaches and administrators keep their jobs. Do the players get to benefit from them? Yes. Are these colleges spending billions on escalating and lavish improvements because they want their players to have the best facilities out of the kindness of their hearts? Absolutely not. Nothing about it is altruistic; it's serving the schools just as much, if not more, than the players.

I think most student athletes would very obviously prefer to have slightly worse facilities and be able to make money off their skills than have the obscene facilities arms race we're seeing today.