Danny Bateman

Tim Beck still thinks the zone read in our own end zone is a good idea.

Holy crap... On an impulse, I headed back from college to watch a game with my family... In Denison. What are the odds?!?!

It's a moot point if we continue to crap the bed when we finally get games that have some pub nationwide. I believe it is also affecting recruiting this year, like you mentioned in your above post. If we had won that UCLA game and were a top 15 program right now, we'd probably look a lot better to prospective recruits. If we don't start to win some of the big ones and acheive some national success in our BIGGEST games... being high on a kid's list initially will go by the wayside when it's actually time to narrow things down. We'll be out.

Cannot... stop... launghing... at... Barnstache's... expression... and... protruding... beer-gut...

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I agree with much of the rest of your post, and +1. But we don't give Blackshirts to our defense because they're the little brother to the offense. We give them Blackshirts and expect them to perform at a certain level of excellence, full stop. If we're to the point where we expect less than perfection from our defense, then it's time to end the Blackshirt tradition right here and now. Oh, I totally agree with you. The state of the crap we saw on the field last year defensively was hard to watch. I really, really hope someday soon we get back to a point where our defense is the dominant unit that this team hangs its hat on, and it STAYS that way. However, it seems the wcoaches have stockpiled more offensive talent than defensive since Bo got here. It probably has a degree to do with recruiting hits and misses for those sides of the ball, but it is what it is. I just meant, comparatively, everyone knew at the start of the year the offense had all the experience and the majority of the defense was very young. I don't think anyone expected the defense to lead this team. I just think their the lesser unit this year. It fluctuates year to year, obviously, for every college team. If you have to break in a more or less brand new unit do to player turnover, you probably can't expect perfection right away. But they damn well better improve in a hurry or our beloved tradition is going to be trashed. We're not even an average defense at this point.

None of us really have any ideea of the inner workings and psychological dynamics of the team itself, only what we can gather from observing during the games themselves. Therefore, I'm not going to call out any idividual players. However, I will say one thing... It sure would be nice to see someone on the sidelines getting a little animated and firing guys up when things start to go a little bit wrong-- the other team scores or a dumb turnover or what have you. Instead we see a lot of guys scrambling to figure out what the hell is going on. I wish we SAW some visible passion and someone holding others accountable and demnding more. I'm sure that goes on behind closed doors-- i.e., Abdullah addressing the team-- but I wish we saw some of it during the games. Perhaps we have none of those types of leaders on the team, yet. I certainly hope we get some, soon.

JJHusker's still fired up! I'm more at a point of passive indifference at this point, since I know we have virtually no chance of winning handily against a good opponent, a slim chance of winning a VERY tight battle, and the odds HUGELY favor us getting our ass kicked. Which then leads to us getting trashed by commentators on national TV, which is bad for publicity and recruiting... It is a vicious cycle. The fact that it's gotten to this point is really just sad as a fan. It makes me sad to watch us pull this same crap big game after big game after working over poor teams fairly well and showing flashes even within the big games themselves. FYI, as for Tommie, I don't care how he feels about Brion and what went down. What he did on the field for this team is enough for him to have unlimitied slack to say whatever the hell he wants about the product on the field. Especially if it's accurate. He's earned it far more than any of us.

You didn't read very well, then, because I answered your question in the very post of mine you quoted. Directly or indirectly, the Offense has LITERALLY NOTHING AT ALL to do with the Defense's play. If the Offense fumbles the ball at the 1 yard line, I fully expect the Defense to keep the opponent out of the end zone. That's their job. It's insane to blame the problems of one side of the ball on any other side. The Defense is to blame for not stopping UCLA. The Offense is to blame for failing to score after hitting 21 points. Knapp, I know this has been broached before, but basically my two cents... I agree with you wholeheartedly. The defense cannot point their finger at the offense for their porblems or vice versa. The defense has to stop people. And the offense has to score points. BUT... I think that the folks that believe there is more blame for the offense than the defense and therefore let that spillover into blaming the offense for everything do so because more is expected of the offense. We ALL knew going into this season that the O was going to have to carry the extremely young D. We're breaking in new players at basically 8 of 11 spots on the defense this year, and growing pains were totally expected with that level of inexperience. Meanwhile, the O wields the best corps of WR's NU has ever had, a legitimate 3 deep at RB, SUPPOSEDLY the best OL we've had during Bo's tenure (color me skeptical), and to top it off, a 4 year record holding QB running the show. I think it's obviously to any of us by now that Bo's teams are wildly inconsistent. They seem to handle adversity VERY poorly (although, the cardiac combeacks last season could form an argument against this)-- in that when things start to go wrong, they compound and continue to get worse and worse until we've made the game unwinnable. This is a trend we've seen far to often and it distrubs the hell out of me. I absolutely abhor the fact that in the season we finally have permanant captains and a ton of important contributing seniors, NO ONE is shown rallying the troops or getting fired up on the sideline. Who is going to hold anyone accountable?! The time to do it is during the game to get the ship righted and try to win, not afterwards with a sheepish look on your face because you just peed another game down your leg... But I digress... The handling of adversity... the snowballing of problems once they begin... and the wild inconsistency and underacheivement of this team even within games (i.e., playing lights out one series and crappiing the bed the next) indicates the psychological problem within the team and coaches by extension that people have pointed to in the past. They just do not seem to be able to respond well to the other team scoring once or twice and instead seem to retreat into a shell. The same goes for coaches. One part of me feels extremely bad for the players... I'm finally of the belief that a huge part of the blame for the offense yesterday should go to Beck. In the past I've tended to think it was just on the players, but these UCLA games (between what we saw yesterday and that damn zone read in the endzone last year) have done Beck in for me. I'm officially off his bandwagon, and he's starting to p*ss me off. I finally saw a great explanation of it yesterday: The best coaches have their base system or scheme in place, and run it every game. They will tweak it to take advantage of what they think they can exploit on the other team. Beck seems to abandon any type of base offense so to speak and instead exclusively devise and run a gameplan for each new opponent each week. We do have the zone read and the toss sweep which we see every week. But, instead of deciding what we do WELL and DOING IT, Beck seems to think it is better to try to force what we may NOT DO AS WELL simply because he's seen something on tape that leads him to believe the opposing defense is weak against it. Well, we often fail to execute those particular plays (god... I sound like Bo) because we don't normally run them, lose yards or gain minimal ones, and it blows up in our face. Basically, it boils down to Beck trying to get cute and outscheme the other team rather than doing what we do well. And it has me as fed up as all the rest of you. Sorry, I tried not to ramble. The point is, they blame the offense because WAY more was expected of them. And it isn't even entirely the offenses fault. A majority of the blame should go to Tim Beck. But the defense bears blame too. Moreover, I believe a huge part of the blowout losses is a pervasive psychological tendency to give up and inability to regain focus and execute well when things start to go wrong, which obviously leads to snowballing and games getting out of hand. I will give it the rest of the season. There is always hope. But Beck is really blowing games with his damn play calling, and if the psychological problem remains and we don't win the B1G this year, I don't know that it will ever get better under Bo (with this staff) and it may be time to change things up.

Lyle Lovett and Corso pick us. That's right, UCLA... THAT's our secret weapon. Lyle Lovett.

Opinions varied wildly on 6. It's seriously split right down the middle... half of people absolutely despised it and the other half thought it was a solid game. I loved RE4. Revolutionized the series. For some reason, had a hard time getting into 5. It's ok, but didn't captivate me like did back in the day.

Sadly, I don't know that Bo will adjust. I could see him seeing it simply as outside noise the team needs to ignore and playing up the "us against the world" mentality again. We shall see. I still have much hope for this defense, regardless.

It's pretty embarassing it has gotten to the point that ex-Huskers are officially asking the team to step it up over social media. I think it's a good thing, just bothered that it's actually gotten THIS bad. Let's hope they respond.

Looks really solid man. I just got my rig last one. It's my first one as well. You should easily be able to get a WiFi card for well under a grand. If your price turns out anything like mine... a card cost me about $30 if that. Otherwise, like Strigori already hit on, an adapter is a fine option as well. The next thing I'd consider if I were you (and you've got a little extra cash left over at the end) would be possibly buying a SSD to install your OS on. That should speed up things up a noticeable amount.

Listen guys... Overreaction runs rampant around here. Things are usually neither as good nor as bad as they seem. For a first game, that was a net positive. Sure, Wyoming gave us all we could handle and 600 yards is embarassing. But they've got a QB that is definitely the real deal and a ton of mistakes and sloppy play was expected, at least to any sane fan, when you're breaking in this many new faces in the front 7 of your defense. Look at it this way. I'd much rather go down to the wire now so there is no sense of complacency and laziness than coast to an easy win and let our young defense get their egos inflated and start to have a sense of entitlement. That is the LAST thing you want with a bunch of freshman who are still so green behind the ears and learning. I fully anticipate every single one of them is going to get back to work this week and will take So. Miss very seriously. Hell, I bet the upperclassmen are as embarassed as the rest of us. But I'm of the mind that this defense can still improve and be a heck of a defense this year. I think last year's D had athletically reached their ceiling. This year's edition has nowhere to go but up. Great potential. Bo didn't forget defense. He's just got a lot to work on. Especially that damn spread clearout stuff. If they sent a RB in motion, our one backer went with him and left Smith ALONE (?!?!) to gash our D. At that point there's not a whole lot the DL can do. We need to have someone closer than 15 yards downfield watching Smith. Once the DL learn to use their hands and work OL better, they could be SOOOOO much better than we had last year. McMullen went largely unhearalded. I think I'm the first one to mention him. He got some good pressure on the QB last night. Loved seeing him peel off the OT and almost immediately put Smith on the turf and force a bad throw. That doesn't happen with Meredith last year. He was just TOO SLOW.

Lol... After ONE game. I don't know that I'd necessarily even want to steal any Wildcat recruits, if they can be persuaded to believe UK is a good place to go for football in the first place. I just want to watch them crash and burn for karmic reasons. Suck on that, Marrow.

Had to do a little diggin in the Lounge to find this, but nonetheless, enjoy. Knapp's looking damn good by the way.

Great news. Had me a but worried. Sick of watching talented CB's slip away, especially when we've coached up so many good ones lately. I know it's a bit senseless to get worked up before recruits even step foot on campus, but this guy looks like the next diamond in the rough we found first. See a lot of Fonzie in him.

Would've rather had the Chinese gold medalist trampoliner, Dong Dong.