Guy Chamberlin

in 2015, the year Nebraska fired Bo Pelini, there was only one football coach who was considered a sure thing. Jim Harbaugh. And Harbaugh was only willing to leave the NFL for his alma matter and millions of dollars. Sure enough, Harbaugh took Brady Hoke's 5-7 team and turned them around immediately to a 10-3 record and perhaps the best defense in the country. In 2020, Harbaugh faces an angrier fanbase than Scott Frost does at Nebraska. I'd be surprised if he's at Michigan next season. So what's my point? I'm not sure. Maybe just that coaches can turn losing programs around immediately, and our fanbase isn't more or less demanding than our peer programs.

Wait. I thought the ball was in your court?

Well this is just one of the not funny ones, Archy. I also found the one about Illinois strange. The media hasn't ignored the surge in Illinois and other midwestern states this fall. Florida was news when it was leading the summer surge with Texas and Arizona. New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Illinois got most of the press in the first surge. It's almost like when people yell "Chicago!" when they want to ignore a racial incident.

I believe the most unifying sentiment in December 2017 was that if Scott Frost can't turn this program around, nobody can. So yeah, this is a low point for both Frost and the program. Solutions are a little harder to agree on.

Believe it or not, I don't disagree with what you've said above. I've posted similar sentiments myself. Just saying that opening a new thread with "all of Husker Nation realizes Scott Frost is not the answer at head coach" is categorically wrong even forgiving the hyperbole. You're implying that the evidence is already there and Scott needs to go now. So not only does "all" of Nebraska not agree with you, you're probably in the minority. In addition to blind Frost loyalists there are fans who simply want Frost to make his own changes, and an overwhelming majority who consider yet another new coaching search to be unhealthy for the program at this point. As in: who is available, who wants to come here, how much will they cost, and what exactly will change? I think HuskerBoard posters are a little more cynical. My ventures into Facebook, LJS & OWH, and 247 Sports comments sections finds a lot of Husker fans who are genuinely embarrassed by fellow Husker fans jumping on and off coaching bandwagons. I personally think Frost has earned the heat and needs to address it, but I still can't endorse your lead sentence and what you consider the obvious course of action. Dragging Moos into it is a stretch, too.

Genevieve Brand is definitely associated with Johns Hopkins, but I immediately found it odd that this bombshell was printed in a student newspaper and not cited elsewhere. Turns out, of course that many others associated with Johns Hopkins discredited her sketchy analytical technique and extrapolations. Even a layperson might have noted she misidentified the three leading causes of death in the U.S. in order to make her point. But I guess as a warrior against Groupthink, Brand will have her research heavily distributed and endorsed by folks like you who engage in the conservative version of Groupthink, which never, ever ever requires peer review, or even a :30 Google search.

In fairness, corporations from a wide variety of states gamed COVID stimulus benefits to divert funds meant for small business. The Pentagon, too. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/22/covid-funds-pentagon/

So you're not going to apologize for using misleading memes to avoid inconvenient evidence?

When I told out-of-staters I was a Nebraska fan back then, they always asked what Bo Pelini's problem was.

Lost me at the first sentence. Plenty if not a majority of Husker Nation is more embarrassed by posts like yours than Scott Frost's record. Doesn't mean Scott's seat isn't or shouldn't warm, just that your powers of observation have traditionally been pretty awful.

Looks like Oregon State and Arkansas will pull ahead of us, but we still have an edge on Kansas and Vanderbilt.

Hey, did you see where Gebbia had an excellent game running and passing, leading Oregon State to a victory over #15 Oregon yesterday?

Nobody knew we had a huge rebuild project when Frost was hired, and the expectations were reasonable: Frost was expected to immediately do better than Mike Riley with what he was handed (that's why you hired him) then steadily improve as he brought in his players, system and culture. Nebraska fans weathered the worst start in Nebraska football history (0-6) in 2018 and were hugely optimistic about how the team finished that year. Nebraska fans were not alone in their expectations: the college football world and the pollsters put Scott Frost's 2019 team in their Top 25 and Sleeper lists. Our young, inexperience QB was on most Heisman lists. Scott Frost has not had the worst luck. Everyone has bad luck. Everyone is dealing with adversity. Do you think he'd be luckier if he got to play Wisconsin this year? Bad trends and patterns have emerged in this third season. The players under-performing, not buying in and transferring out are largely Scott Frost recruits. This is legitimately troubling, So let's get it straight. Fan expectations last year were for a sign of improvement, six wins and a low-tier bowl berth. This year we simply wanted to see some bad trends get addressed, maybe play .500 ball in this weird season. Husker fans are famous for their loyalty and friendliness to opposing fans, but they are also pretty good students of football, and generally smart enough to know that coaches dictate a lot of the problems we're seeing on the field. Do you know what fanbase would be this critical of a team playing this poorly? Every fanbase. Frank Solich says hi from Ohio University and a .571 lifetime percentage in a mid-major conference. Bo Pelini says hi from LSU, where he is no longer a head coach but is getting utterly roasted by a fanbase with even higher expectations.

Nothing. I learned nothing. Today's game seemed uniquely designed to teach us nothing. Are we better off with Luke or Adrian moving forward? No idea. Surely one of the young running backs will start showing promise and earning more touches. Right? Are we asking too much of Wan'dale, or using him too little? Both? Does Frost stay too loyal to offensive lineman who embarrass even the broadcasters? We already knew that. Are the wide receivers good or s#!tty, are they getting open but the QBs don't see them, or does the OL not give passing plays a fighting chance? I don't know. Is the defense better that last week? Last year? Trending in the right direction? Or you know, not? Can this team survive two turnovers but not three? Three stupid penalties but not four? Will there ever be a Nebraska game where HuskerBoard fans don't screech referee bias? Do we learn more from close games where we choke in the clutch, or blowouts where we never get a rhythm? And what difference does that make? How good is Iowa? I'm guessing they didn't learn anything playing Nebraska either.

McCafferey or Martinez as the starter doesn't make much difference. They've showed the same flashes and made the same mistakes. Unless the team has an opinion on this. If the team thinks one QB deserves it and Frost is making the wrong decision, that's where the whole program goes South. Also, if we spend too much time with a dual QB backfield and otherwise just shove the ball to Wan'dale any way possible, I don't see why any good RB or WR would want to play here.

Forgetting all the obvious reasons for not going back, I gotta ask the folks who bring this up bi-weekly: Looking at the teams in the Big 12, how many more wins would you pencil in for the Huskers?

In Year Three there is only one person responsible for the team culture. Plenty of coaches turn the attitude and discipline around the minute they hit campus, because that's what they're hired to do.

At the moment NU is a better destination than Oregon State, but man....that moment seems to be closing fast. The scary part is that records didn't mean anything and perception was everything 3 years ago. The Callahan/Pelini/Riley years meant nothing in 2017. If you were a recruit - or someone advising a recruit - the important thing was that Nebraska quarterback, Oregon disciple, and UCF turnaround artist Scott Frost was returning to Nebraska, and that was an exciting place to be. Everyone could shrug off the transitional year. But if you're a recruit -- or someone advising a recruit -- you have no idea what's going on at Nebraska right now and it's not an exciting place to be. Scott Frost's value on the HC open market has plummeted. You don't watch them on TV and think you might be the missing piece.Things are happening at Indiana and Minnesota. Maybe even Illinois, Purdue and Rutgers. If you're 18 years old, you have zero memories of Nebraska as a blueblood. When the head coach says his young team mailed in the game in a blowout loss to a bottom feeder you probably don't want to join either the coach or the team. This is a short year with a bunch of asterisks, but these last three games could make a huge difference in who wants to stay and who wants to come here.

Yeah, but if I have to pick between the Constitution or Donald Trump, my American allegiance goes to the former.

The horizontal camera shots in play-by-play football rarely show it, but when they swing to the vertical cams you can see receivers getting great separation, pleading for the ball, then hanging their heads when our quarterback forces the ball to a much closer and better covered primary receiver. The announcers occasionally point this out, and apparently they see it as an ongoing problem for both quarterbacks. Hence my post about preferring a pass-savvy quarterback.

I'm also gonna go against the grain and say Nebraska needs to recruit a passing quarterback. They're all over the place. It's what makes them a quarterback. If they see open field and want to hook slide or angle to the chains for a first down, they will, but they don't consider themselves dual threat quarterback and neither do we. They see the field better, they hit open receivers, check down to secondary receivers and even lead them in stride. Then do you know what happens? The quarterback hands the ball off to his running backs. A lot. The opponent who stacked the box and dared you to beat them with your arm just lost that gamble. Now you call whatever game you want. You don't pass more than you run. You just pass a lot better. It's what all the cool teams are doing. A better passer is the running game's best friend.

None of Nebraska's turn-overs, penalties, missed tackles and assignments has to do with the complexities of the system they're being asked to play. The "system" is football, and almost every other team is doing it better than Nebraska. It's still about desire and discipline, which includes not accepting defeat when thing turn south in the second quarter, firing up yourself and your teammates on the sideline, and if you're a coach it means helping young men get their head in the game and making halftime adjustments so they don't simply repeat and get used to their failures. Some of that is adjusting your system and drilling in on technique, but there's got to be a joy of the game and a serious thirst for winning. We're just not seeing that. Also, we may not be seeing players who are losing faith in the program. That can be a real cancer. Let's start by aspiring to be Illinois, a low-tier team with qb problems that came in to an opponent's house, played motivated football for all four quarters, and joyously celebrated a rout of a supposedly better team.

I can't believe I'm turning to the thread on the erosion of democracy to take my mind off Nebraska football.

It sure can. For people with lupus it's a real lifesaver. So when your idiot President inspired a run on hyrdoxychloroquine among people it couldn't help, it threatened the supply for the folks who desperately needed it.

(Psssst! You're in the Politics & Religion Forum plague thread!)