Guy Chamberlin

Yeah, that was definitely a dead man walking team, but if the question is "progress" I think Nebraska is still shuffling around on the same rock bottom and we're quibbling about inches. The reason I brought up last year's Minnesota game is because it felt so much like a 2017 game. I can't pretend it's about a bare cupboard anymore. Like I said earlier: good recruiting class, clean slate, super reasonable expectations and optimism, but I need a little more forward and upward motion in year four.

There is a difference between a bad record and a bad team, but the truth is Nebraska was both the last two seasons. The record, the metrics and the eyeball test tend to support this. The Huskers entered this unprecedented pandemic year with more returning starters than most, including its top 2 quarterbacks, running backs, tight end and receiver, coaching staff and scheme, and they generally played like the 101st ranked scoring offense in the NCAA. When a surprisingly healthy Nebraska team played a COVID decimated Minnesota squad down to its third and fourth stringers, the Gophers not only played like a better team, but like the team that wanted it more. SP+ doesn't address the fact that at the end of the year we were slightly better than Rutgers in head-to-head competition. It's also hard to see progress when the team plays worse in the second half of the game, which Nebraska did almost every game. There appeared to be no adjustments or motivation coming out of the locker room. I don't count the first season against Frost, as the team that finished 4-2 actually did show a lot of promise. That's the main reason 2019 was a disappointment. If you're tired of beating your head against the wall, think of it this way: If Mike Riley hadn't been fired, and proceeded to coach these exact same players to the exact same results for the past three seasons, would you still call that 2017 season rock bottom?

Every year commentators watch Kyle Shannahan running an offense with FB Kyle Juszczyk as a lead blocker, unguarded receiver, and occasional short yardage back and wonder out loud why more teams don't do this. It makes nothing but sense.

I guess in due time someone will look back and chart the success rate of the players taking the portal route. No doubt some guys will be leaving teams where they were underused and find success and NFL consideration on other teams. Gotta think a lot of guys will always be moving sideways -- onto teams in a similar situation to their old team. These teams feel like they have to take some gambles on portal players, but it's not like the player can walk into the starring slot he was denied on his old team. You'd have to figure in name players like JD Speilman, who end up disappearing on their new roster. And the guys who do get the starting spot, but it's at a lesser school and goes largely unnoticed. Maybe the largest category are the players who get neither playing time or an education. Guess you can't blame them for trying, but 18-19 year old former high school superstars — and their parent advisors — might be getting the wrong life lesson from the Portal.

Yes. All Confederate flags should be flying half staff.

Just Google "the worst s#!t Rush Limbaugh ever said" and you'll get plenty of hits. I actually culled that list for brevity's sake. There are newer compilations featuring the times Rush spoke ill of the fatally sick, recently deceased, and grieving survivors.

I guess I listened to Rush a fair amount in the 80s and 90s, back when I was in my car a lot. I had other choices, but I listened to Rush enough to remember him well. I knew I disagreed with him but he must have been entertaining. He opened every show during the Clinton administration with the number of "Days Held Hostage" -- his equation of living under Clinton to being an Iranian hostage. The callers were mostly sycophants, but every now and then a liberal would get through, and Rush would engage them with relative civility. In his Sacramento days, he would happily take on fools on both sides of the aisle. I'm sure others have studied and written about it, but there was a shift in the 1990s in the marriage between AM Talk Radio and the Clinton administration. The accelerator seemed to be the Waco standoff, the BTF, and Janet Reno. It wasn't so much about policy differences and Big Government anymore, it was about Black Helicopters and homosexual recruiters, One World Government, Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster. I remember driving around Nebraska listening to G. Gordon Liddy's am talk show, where Liddy and his callers would sign off with dark warnings and reminders to "keep your powder dry." That's when I saw this getting really creepy. Guns and Bibles and the manifest destiny of the white guys in power. So no, rightwing commentators can't force people in a direction they weren't already leaning, but they can and do craft self-serving narratives out of thin air and disburse them to millions. There is zero evidence the 2020 election was rigged, that Antifa was behind the Capitol insurrection, or that AOC and Green Energy are the culprits in the Texas grid disaster, but when right wing think tank consultants huddle up to craft counter-messaging overnight --- and that is what they do -- they are working towards a willfully ignorant America to serve their political purposes. This is a bad time to be that stupid.

Are you recommending Howard Stern for the Medal of Freedom, too?

I just listed his thoughts and policies. If that's conservative thought these days, let's keep it as far away from America as possible.

Let's take the man at his own word. A few jewels from our Medal of Freedom winner, the late Rush Limbaugh (not all of them racist — he was a multi-faceted a$$h@!e: “Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud.” “The only way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is to use them.” “Citizen service is a repudiation of the principles upon which our country was based. We are all here for ourselves.” “I think this reason why girls don’t do well on multiple choice tests goes all the way back to the Bible, all the way back to Genesis, Adam and Eve. God said, ‘All right, Eve, multiple choice or multiple orgasms, what’s it going to be?’ We all know what was chosen” “When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it’s an invitation.” “Styrofoam and plastic milk jugs are biodegradable! Do you know what isn’t biodegradable? Paper!” “The ocean will take care of this oil spill on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It’s natural. It’s as natural as the ocean water is.” “Let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do — let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work” “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?” “There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history. Does this sound like a record of genocide?” “Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is also a White House dog?” ~ Rush Limbaugh, while holding up a photograph of 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton on his 1993 television show “Exercise freaks … are the ones putting stress on the health care system.” “If you believe in God, then intellectually you cannot believe in man-made global warming.” “Republicans are going to have to realize that if they are to prevail, they are going to have to engage in a political fight that results in the defeat of the Democrat Party — not bipartisanship.” “Cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease. Nothing wrong with saturated fats.” “You don’t have to be a scientist to know that the President doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he says fossil fuels are the energy of the past. We have more oil than we need. We’ll never run out of it. It’s all we’ve got.” “Some people are self-starters, and some people are born lazy. Some people are born victims. Some people are just born to be slaves. Some people are born to put up with somebody else making every decision for them.” “If you feed them, if you feed the children, three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves in the summer? Wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the State. Pure and simple.” “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.” “Let’s say we discover the gene that says the kid’s gonna be gay. How many parents, if they knew before the kid was gonna be born, [that he] was gonna be gay, they would take the pregnancy to term? Well, you don’t know but let’s say half of them said, ‘Oh, no, I don’t wanna do that to a kid.’ [Then the] gay community finds out about this. The gay community would do the fastest 180 and become pro-life faster than anybody you’ve ever seen. … They’d be so against abortion if it was discovered that you could abort what you knew were gonna be gay babies.” “So Miss Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” “We’re not sexists, we’re chauvinists — we’re male chauvinist pigs, and we’re happy to be because we think that’s what men were destined to be. We think that’s what women want.” “From this day forward, somebody propose it, liberals should not be allowed to buy guns. It’s just that simple. Liberals should have their speech controlled and not be allowed to buy guns.” “Public and private polling indicates that Ohioans, by a substantial margin, want to overturn the new anti-union law. Which means, if this is true, that people in Ohio want to rape themselves” “Look it, let me put it to you this way. The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.” “You just gotta be who you are, and I think it’s time to get rid of this whole National Basketball Association. Call it the TBA, the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call ‘em gangs.” “Holocaust? Ninety million Indians? Only four million left? They all have casinos — what’s to complain about?” “To some people, bankers — code word for Jewish — and guess who Obama’s assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers. He’s assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.” “The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.”

I've always been self-employed, so I've never been comfortable without a lot of money in the bank. I also had a prudent Depresseion-era Dad to teach me about saving, and a considerable middle-class safety net. Gotta admit I was one of the people who rolled my eyes about the $600 payment, wondering what kind of change it could really make. Then I remember talking to a waitress a few years ago. Small resort town and she had time to talk and tell us her life story. Something about her brother who was always on hard times, and how she was proud of her own finances. "I always keep at least $100 in the bank," she told us, "because you never know what might happen. That's what I always tell my brother." We were kinda flabbergasted -- what kind of cushion is $100, even as a single person in a small town? But there are a lot of those people in America. I believe the current figure is 40% of Americans have less than $500 in the bank at any time.

Yeah, but your original post suggested it was a Midwest thing. Whoever these fancy strong armed quarterbacks are, they surely don't come from the Midwest, or want to play here. That's the part I don't understand. I also see high school teams play pro style ball. It's not rocket science. It's football. RPO is different, but not necessarily less sophisticated or requiring fewer reps. Offensive linemen I kinda get, but if you're a promising recruit and you're not learning to protect a drop back quarterback, you're hurting your chances for an NFL career. What we're seeing are really good teams that know how to both run and pass. The quarterbacks are mobile, even if they're not taking many designed runs. And while running is great, they have to be better passers than runners. That's where Nebraska has been getting tripped up.

Well technically Devine Ozigbo, Stanley Morgan, and Lamar Jackson have all drawn NFL paychecks. Scott Frost's improving defense also leaned heavily on Riley recruits like Bootle, Doman, Miller, Dismuke, and Stille this season. Three seasons of Frost recruits on the OL produced a season with fewer rushing yards per game and per carry than the 2018 team Frost inherited. And if we're talking about re-ranking recruiting classes, Frost's previously impressive 23rd ranked class tanked much like Rileys. And the defections have been every bit as disheartening. Like I said. Clean slate. Starting over. Good recruiting class by all reports. But it's Year Four. The Riley excuse has run dry.

It's year 4. That's a decent amount of time for Frost's recruits to have replaced them. Mistakes were made. They may or may not have been corrected. We'll see. Like I said: Year One expectations.

And some fans greatly exaggerate the hole Scott Frost was asked to crawl out of. Riley recruiting classes were ranked #30, #26 and #23. Frost improved that with classes ranked #23, #17, and #20. Either way, the cupboard wasn't bare, much less smashed to bits, and three seasons of your own Top 25 recruiting classes, coaching philosophy, schemes, and player development would be enough to see marked improvement over your predecessor. New coaches are expected to put out dumpsters fires all the time, and do it immediately. That's why they were hired.

Our public elementary schools have been open for months and doing well. Our high school has been cleared to re-open and has been in negotiations for weeks. It's understood that parents and students will have the option to continue learning from home or in some kind of hybrid. The sticking point is the teachers: about 50% of the teachers in our district have no intention of returning to the physical classroom this semester. In some scenarios kids would come for a single class around 10:00 am., and need to be off school grounds less than two hours later. It's a logistical mess. The sad fact is a lot of students like sleeping later and having class in their pajamas at their home computer. All of this is taking place without any directives from any federal agency, and only sporadic recognition of State COVID requirements. Public and private schools within a short radius are all handling it differently. The constant seems to be -- as Fauci suggests -- COVID transmission is extremely low at the school level.

I've never understood the argument that Midwest teams and football players aren't speedy and don't know how to drop back and throw the ball. If this is about the weather, somehow Green Bay manages to run one of the best pro style offenses in the business in Green Bay. In winter. The teams we need to beat in the Big 10 feature quarterbacks who can drop back, look off receivers, and complete 65% of their passes to fleet receivers, who come from all corners of America. Also, most players you want to recruit dream of playing professional football. Telling them they can play a cold-weather, midwest style of college football less conducive to the NFL isn't a great incentive.

I'm with you on pissing everywhere but the toilet -- as God intended. But that post was specifically about painting environmental issues with a partisan brush. I'm afraid we have to part ways on environmental shower heads. I'll take the stronger water pressure and the shorter shower. And remember all that water I'm saving by peeing on the neighbor's fence.

A predictable heat wave in Chicago killed more than 700 people in 1996. Most of them poor and POC. What could have be done? Well it turns out the poorest people in Chicago lived in large complexes equipped with the absolute cheapest air conditioners money could by. They were so inefficient that they shut down the grid on hot days, causing blackouts and deaths and overwhelming the healthcare system. The Clinton administration set a new regulatory standard for air conditioners so that low efficiency ACs would no longer put entire grids at risk. The air conditioner industry didn't really fight it. When George W. Bush took office, they basically rescinded every regulation Clinton passed, just because, and that included minimum efficiency standards for air conditioners. I wish there was an island where everyone who believes unregulated free enterprise lifts all ships could live. Curious to see the government they would form.

I think we've already been through this. Yeah, there were some alarmist predictions that didn't come through....yet. As you are keen to cite earth science evidence dating back millions of years, you surely know that an estimate being off by decades -- or a century -- doesn't negate the prediction. In the case of melting polar ice, it's been happening considerably faster than most previous prediction models. Look into those, rather than the most alarmist thing a single individual said years ago. The irony for conservatives is that moving to a green economy supports the supposed bedrock of conservative thinking: more efficient, long term solutions that conserve limited resources and spur new economic development through American innovation. Big Oil may whine, but like Big Auto and General Electric, and 3M and other blueblood American Capitalists, they are moving into renewable energy because it makes business sense. Always did, regardless of climate change. It's an incredible opportunity. Instead: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to outlaw cows.

It's hypocritical to call out hypocrisy if you're a hypocrite yourself. Did I just blow your mind?

I have Year One expectations. That's both good and bad. It's almost like Scott Frost had a three season false start. The part you can blame on Riley is gone. Expectations have hit bottom. Let's start over. We have a good recruiting class. I think the team will look and play young, but if that means deserving young talent is stepping up and playing well, a lot of mistakes will be forgiven. My only demand is forward motion. And excitement. Ears pinned back, nothing-to-lose-everything-to-gain excitement. I can't attach a win total to that. We just need to look better than last season. Even with young talent. Especially with young talent. That's not asking too much.

Do me a favor and replace "rioting" with "protesting" since you know it makes a difference.

Again, no one is prosecuting a crime here. Donald Trump would never go to jail for this. The reasonable question was whether his grotesque and un-American actions to over-turn the election warrant condemnation, rescinding some of his federal government perks, and prevent him from seeking the office again. As many have already observed: if you don't punish Donald Trump for this, when would you ever punish anyone?

Who knew that the "I could shoot someone on 5th Avenue" quote would get even creepier over time.