Guy Chamberlin

Let's just nip that in the bud. The negative nannies are not out "in force." It's a handful of skeptics, and they're not entirely wrong, given that nothing can be remotely proven yet. After a bumpy initial 48 hours when nobody knew who in the hell Mike Riley was, I'd say the reaction to his hire has been extremely positive and getting better by the week.

Lincoln, Nebraska has mountain ranges in either direction. It's less than a half-hour to Linoma Beach and only an hour's flight to the excitement of Chicago!

If the headline read "2000 Husker Recruiting Class the Worst Ever?" there would be less panty-bunching, but some Dirk-hating would no doubt survive. Meh.

There's nothing wrong with that article. Put me on Team Panties in a Bunch.

I don't do this kind of homework myself, so I appreciate Chatelain doing it for me. It's actually pretty interesting, what with being "unprecedented in Nebraska history." Maybe a turning point in the program that you would never have known at the time, but relevant when you look back 14 years later. I recognized only six names as being Husker players AT ALL, much less being any good. And for some reason I took it as a positive. My Kool-Aid says a smart 31st ranked class beats an over-hyped and under-vetted 17th ranked class. And if by "click bait" we mean getting people to read an article, I'm not sure what else a news organization can do. This piece does not appear to misrepresent the facts, unlike the penis-enlarger ads that keep popping up on my internet browser and the bastards who refuse to refund my money.

Is this surprising? We don't have a head coach who is going to generate clicks for the "OMG he said/did WHAT?" We have never been a 'sexy' program to talk about. (Not having a metered market in the state is probably a giant factor with this, "if no one is monitoring, is anyone watching?") Surprising? Not really. But we did used to be a "sexy" program to talk about, simply because we were a difference maker in college football. The Husker's ability to poach top athletes from warm-weather states and inner-cities to Lincoln, Nebraska always made us a story. We used to be a sexy destination for interior lineman. It would be nice to get back to that. I thought a good first class for Mike Riley might get some mention. Michigan and Nebraska are in essentially the same boat, but Harbaugh generates media heat in a way Riley can't. For that matter, Wisconsin and MSU haven't been in the conversation either. Nobody talks about Notre Dame. Lots of talk about Texas, but nobody else in the Big 12. Good news is that nothing matters till it happens on the field. A lot of under-the-radar recruiting classes end up thriving. Media activity around recruiting has gone a bit crazy since Nebraska was relevant.

Glad Riley is making the rounds, because I'm hearing zero mentions of Nebraska in any of the national draft day conversations. Plenty of talk about Harbaugh and Michigan, even if it's to remind us he started late and there's not much of a story yet. Also several mentions of Miami, just to confirm how far Al Golden and the program have fallen.

It's National signing day and it looks like things are going great for the Big Red. We better find something to complain about.......... I suppose we could follow the live feed of the big Youngstown State signings.

I'm seeing a lot of warm weather signees and SEC poaching. Good for Nebraska.

I remember the first day of a couple UNL classes, where the professor is running down the syllabus and mentions the 25 page term paper, and a half-dozen or so students immediately get up and walk out.

I need to know which ones will lead Nebraska back to glory, and which ones will turn out to be over-hyped disappointments.

Ag College has awesome ice cream.

Could go either way. 1) A cocky kid gets humbled, takes accountability for his own life, decides to address a substance abuse issue. Good for him. 2) A cocky kid gets humbled, huddles with his management team looking to deflect his poor on-field performance and waning marketability, decides to use rehab as a sympathetic PR move for a problem Johnny doesn't really consider a problem, but together they will launch a "second-chance" narrative to protect their business interests.

49ers fan here, so anything that makes Seahawks unhappy makes me smile. But we used to have the most sought-after coach in both college and professional football, and when inside the 10 yard line in the last minute with the Super Bowl on the line and a backfield of Frank Gore and Colin Kaepernick, Jim Harbaugh calls four consecutive passes to the end zone. Niners lose. NFC Championship game last year. Same situation. Kaepernick throws an interception on first down. Niners lose. Carroll didn't suddenly get stupid. He has three plays and one timeout. He has seen this same Marshawn Lynch get stuffed 4 out of 5 times in similar plays this season. He plans for one pass and two Lynch runs if needed. No coach plans for an interception, the same way they don't plan for a botched handoff, a fumble or a false start. I would have given the ball to Lynch in a hurry-up snap with the Patriots on their heels, myself. It's gonna go down as one of the worst calls in all of sports history, but thrown six inches to the right and it's a touchdown and no one thinks to question the call. And for all the crap piled on Carroll (which I honestly don't mind) there are tons of coaches who would approve of the planned sequence, because you see it called all season long.

We need to find this man a good ice cream shop.

The NFL is full of guys who rarely see the field in their chosen position, but excel on special teams. As a speedy gunner with a history of epic hits, Kenny might have the edge over some pure receivers. Some ball control issues, but a potential return man, too.

A postmortem has to be about Bo Pelini, because he's the one who is dead to us. But if we're honestly looking back at the 2014 Nebraska season, it also had several of the best highlight reel plays I've seen in my many years as a Husker fan. I'm not gonna let anyone take those away from me.

Now I kinda want to go to this douche site and bait somebody.

Sorry. Turns out the hard-drive in my brain had deleted the entire 2007 season.

I wasn't an Indy or Bust guy myself. The team showed some moxie, coming inches away from beating a clearly better Michigan State team. I could live with that. Didn't have a choice, really. If we had played Wisconsin tough, both sides of the ball, but lost a close one to a very good team at Camp Randall, I would have said "when are we going to win one of these?" but I would have lived with it. That alone could have eliminated us from the Indy title game. But had the team dusted itself off, regrouped under an inspirational coach and finished strong against Minnesota, Iowa and our quality bowl opponent, that would qualify a significant improvement and we would have been crazy to fire Pelini. The irony is that in virtually every game where it seemed Bo Pelini's job was on the line, the team that loved him so much came out and played worse.

No question Bo was on the hot seat, but I don't think Eichorst had a magic number of wins Bo needed to achieve to avoid being fired 2014. After the fact Bo complained that he WANTED that number as a benchmark for keeping his job. In Bo's rant, he could be excused for thinking the administration secretly wanted a loss to Iowa in the final game, just to make their decision more defensible. But Wisconsin was the dagger and everyone knew it. Bo could have stopped the bleeding with an inspired victory against Minnesota, but that loss merely confirmed his ceiling as the coach of a mid-pack Big 10 team. That we needed overtime to beat an unranked Iowa changed nobody's mind about anything. Bo had a fair chance to prove himself on the field in his 7th season. It was startling how little he changed. There were plenty of outside analysts who totally understood our frustration with Bo Pelini. But there appeared to be just as many who accepted the math: you don't fire a consistent 9 game winner.

I'm not satisfied with the last decade or so myself, but just to be clear the "trough" Nebraska has fallen into since Tom Osborne left has us going 152 - 69 with one losing season and 16 bowl appearences in 17 seasons. Not bad as troughs go. In a few years Frank Solich, Bill Callahan and Bo Pelini will be lumped into the same trough. Won't really matter why they were a bad fit or if they should have left sooner or later. Just a distant reminder of the lost years before Mike Riley followed by his wunderkind protege Jack Hoffman returned the Huskers to NCAA glory.

Frank had an even better team in 1999, going 12 - 1, beating 4 Top 20 and 2 Top 10 teams, and finishing the year ranked #2 and #3 in the polls. Osborne only had four better seasons in his 25 years. I don't know why we insist on forgetting that 1999 team.

Thanks, Count, but I'm still not seeking a +1 in my Reputation Points. I apologize. As someone who's all about the numbers myself, I have no idea how it slipped through the cracks. What's weird is how we used to disagree all the time about Beck and his playcalling and the actual caliber of our offense and how that perspective changes with a fire(Bo) and a hire(Beck to Ohio St) You have always remained a thoughtful and reasonable poster.

Thanks, Count, but I'm still not seeking a +1 in my Reputation Points.