CheeseHusker

I highly doubt they will be looking ahead to Arkansas State. I also think the 4.5 point spread is almost a slap in the face. If we play well, this thing won't be close. A classic trap game is Northwestern last year.

It was naturally easy for me, because I grew up around the Big 10 anyway. I've been around all those Badgers for years and year. I feel like there is more of a brotherhood in this conference. I feel like everyone respects each other, save for maybe the Michigan-Ohio St thing. It's been fun for me because I would wear my Nebraska shirts back in the day, and they'd kind of ignore it. Once in awhile, they'd go "that's cute". But it was never anything mean-spirited or nasty. Perhaps more curiosity. I enjoy showing my Huskers off a little bit to them.... maybe some of my old friends back there can say "I get Nebraska" now.

The defense was good in the second half..... I'm sure some adjustments helped. I also think that our best talent on that side of the ball might also be the rawest. A lot of the younger guys looked really good. As the year progresses and they get more experience, we might see the emergence of the next really great Husker defender or two. We still seem to have a really hard time bringing down a quarterback once he leaves the pocket. It was a big problem last year and it was a big problem in the first half yesterday. I'm so tired of seeing a linebacker corner the guy in the backfield, whiff on the sack, then allow him to scramble for 15 yards. On 3rd and 12. Still a problem. Still have nightmares of that $^%# from Northwestern doing it. I'm not too worried about Maher yet.... special teams are always a slow starter. The offense deserves every bit of praise it is getting..... it's early yet, but there was a professionalism there that I just haven't seen in a long time. Great timing, great execution, great blocking. Taylor throwing as well as I've ever seen. Receivers getting open, making incredible catches. Backs absorbing hits and then dragging the piles, getting 3/4/5 extra yards after being hit. No false starts. No holding. No turnovers. If that becomes the rule and not the exception, we will be a very tough team to beat. I feel like Southern Miss tested us a little, and I feel like we swung back and swung back hard. I don't know how much it proves, but I certainly feel like there is much more to be gained than if we'd played Pacific and won 63-7.

I like the 600 yards of total offense. That's the best tribute to the 80s I can think of

Nebraska got pretty lucky. The afternoon storms actually cooled things down enough to a point where the nighttime storms didn't get too bad. As it was, still some funnel clouds north of Lincoln. If the environment had been a bit less stable, you might have seen the kind of carnage they got in Kansas and Oklahoma tonight. As for Lincoln tornadoes.... I lived near the airport and one just missed us by maybe 1/2 a mile. Would have been approximately 30 years ago. It was April 3rd, because my brother's birthday was the day before, and they had a tornado drill at school. Then the very next day, there was an actual tornado. That's the only one I can remember, though. I moved in '84.

This was the worst thing about it for me..... especially since I moved to Colorado FROM Wisconsin. If this had happened 20 years ago, I would have been within 3 hours drive of four different road game sites. Then I come out here, and Nebraska plays in Boulder once before they split. At least I got to go there. Oh well.... Lincoln's only 8 hours for me. I'd rather do that anyway.

Actually, I'd like to see that 1971 jersey become our primary. I love those shoulder stripes.

I voted 4-team... in an ideal world I'd like 8 or 12, but I don't think you can do that without destroying the bowls. Do five major bowls.... Orange, Cotton, Sugar, Rose, Fiesta. Cotton should be included I think because of Jerry World. Get rid of all particular conference tie-ins except Rose Bowl, so that the Orange isn't stuck with the ACC winner every year. Instead, do a rotation where the three non-semifinal bowls can pick any one of the six non-semifinal teams. Set up two as de-facto 1v4 and 2v3 semi-finals and play all five games on Jan. 1. You don't even need to call them semi-finals...just set them up that way. If happens that #1 or #2 come from the BIG or Pac-12, then set up the Rose as one of the semis. Play the champ game at the site of one of the three bowls that didn't get a semi-final the next week on Jan 8/9. You get five BCS games on Jan 1, a championship game later, and a de-facto four team playoff. People will argue over who #4 should be, and occasionally you'll get a #5 and a #6 who will feel slighted. But at least the national champion will be decided out of a pool of four.

It was a lousy game and the first one was too.

It was never going to happen.... but a nice theoretical would have been the BC offense with a Pelini defense. A shame Ganz didn't have an extra year or two.... we might have had a shot at the NC in '09. Just like I always dream about the 1983 team having 1984's defense.

It's not the players' fault. It's not the coaches' fault. OK... who is accountable, then?

I don't necessarily expect 13-0 or 12-1 every year. Or even 10-3. The records are made out to be far more significant than they are... you can go 10-3 against a bad schedule and be dissatisfied, but 10-3 with a division title and a bowl win suddenly seems a lot more palatable. What I do expect, and I don't think it is unreasonable at all for anyone else to expect, is this: - Being competitive in losses, instead of losing by scores like 48-17 or 45-17 - Not habitually losing to unranked teams with losing records on your home field - Beating the weakest teams on the schedule by large margins on occasion, in part to allow extended reps for second, third, and fourth string players at skill positions - An offensive line that doesn't commit three false start penalties in four plays - Wide receivers who catch the football, which, you know, is kind of the whole point of playing wide receiver - Not turning the ball over. Period. - MAKING and FINISHING tackles when they are in position to do so, instead of completely missing the player (inevitable resulting in a long QB scramble or other large gain on busted play) - Quite simply, just sound, fundamental football.

I haven't posted anything on the game yet.... I've managed to make it two days without doing so, mostly because I haven't found the right way to describe really how I felt, or how I see things going forward. I've abridged this post for emphasis.... but pretty much everything here is 100% spot on and covers my feelings to a tee. I remember the 90s, but I also remember the years leading up to it. It is ironic that this game was a Citrus Bowl (I'll be damned before I call it by the sponsor name), because I am finding so many parallels between the way things are now, and the way things were in January 1991, after we'd just lost a different Citrus Bowl. The amount of cynicism and despair I'm feeling about the program today is very similar to the way it was then. My thought then was, okay, Osborne had his shot in '83, didn't work out, and now the Florida teams have passed us by (yes, I know it was Georgia Tech). That 1990 squad was considered a national title contender halfway through... they outplayed CU for three quarters and then melted down. Then they were creamed by a mediocre Oklahoma team on a day where they made just about every dumb mistake in the book and had some bad luck go along with it (I'll maintain the late hit that pushed Mickey Joseph into the bench and shattered his leg is one of the worst non-calls in college football history). For most of my life, that spring was the low point of Husker fandom for myself and a lot of people. It happened to be a bad year for me personally, as well, but for many other reasons. The future for Husker football didn't seem particularly bright at that point. Osborne went out and got some recruiting classes that were not highly regarded at all at the time, but turned out to be among the best in school history. At the same time, he took all the program's shortcomings in stride. He make tweaks to the system and then went out in earnest and managed to find some incredible players. He also turned good players into great ones, and mediocre players into good ones. They went out and recruited talent, but they also created talent. This is what Pelini and co. need to do now. This is not the time to fire them. But it is time to push them, to make sure they have examined and re-examined everything and ask themselves if they are doing everything possible to move forward. Re-double our efforts in everything.... recruiting, coaching our system, finding depth, finding better talent at every position. History can repeat itself if this program is willing to be introspective enough about the present and to be understanding about what it needs to do to approach elite status again.

Gave up hail mary. Three procedure penalties in four plays. Red zone fumbles. Guy gets thrown out throwing punches. Is this what we've become?

He just dropped two more rounds in the draft.

Dennard's day goes from bad to worse.

Sports Illustrated on CNN doen't even have us in the top 50.

Pretty sure this story has been debunked.

I don't want to see Alabama-LSU again, I already saw it... and it was the dullest game of the year.

The team that played Michigan State could do it. With a month to prepare and a matchup I think would excite and motivate, I think the "good" Huskers would show up, and would at least put up a real good fight. The Huskers of November 5th and 19th would be lucky to keep it within 4 touchdowns.

In the end, Osborne needed 9 years to win a conference title outright (1981).... but early in that season, the Huskers were 1-2 and getting booed at home. One of the very first games I went to was a game against Auburn where we had lost the week before and were down 3-0 at halftime. That's when Turner Gill came in and changed everything. Shatel's article is interesting because it points out a key difference between Tom and Bo in terms of expectations - Osborne got 9 years, but Pelini may not have that luxury only because the years preceding him were obviously much darker than the ones that immediately preceded Osborne (*ahem* 70-71) so the "win now" segment is much more vocal, having sat through most of the last decade of futility without any trophies.

Began building in 1976 (year 4) and came to a fever pitch in 1978 (year 6), until the OU win. The pressure on him to beat Oklahoma was immeasurable. That stretch from 76-78 was brutal.... there were some bad losses in there - Missouri, Iowa State, Washington State, Iowa State (again and at home), the OU hook and ladder game, Missouri (again, after beating OU). It's since come out very recently that Osborne was going to be fired had he not won the 1976 Bluebonnet Bowl... that team would have finished 8-4-1 with a loss. That and 1990 are probably Osborne's two most disappointing squads.

For all this team's struggles, Taylor's quietly become very good at being, to use that awful phrase, a game manager. I thought the play he made to avoid a sack and find Kinnie, even though he was out of bounds, was a great illustrator of his growth. The NW game was on the defense. The Michigan game was on special teams. Really, I can only fault Taylor for one game this year, and that's Wisconsin. Since then, he's been far from our biggest liability.

Outback Bowl is Tampa, correct? Capital One is what used to be the Citrus and is in Orlando. Both New Year's Day. Really, those aren't bad at all.

Up to this point, I thought of Suh as an aggressive player and an undisciplined player. I would not have gone one step further and called him "dirty". The kick has changed it, for me. That has crossed a line and gone into a whole another threshold. Being a Husker fan and a Packer fan, and watching him go from the guy on my team to the guy trying to kill my team, I guess it is always a bittersweet, star-crossed experience anyway. But I've been able to respect him as a player and be in awe of his dominance. Now this.... I'm afraid I just don't have that respect anymore. Particularly since he has come out and basically been defiant about it to the end. I don't care what Dietrich-Smith was doing.... it was nowhere near anything remotely deserving that retaliation. It was a chippy game with some seriously overzealous officiating.... but that call was warranted, and just. And he never pulled garbage like this as a Husker. Yes, there were late hits and personal fouls. Nothing like this though. What makes this aggravating and disappointing at the very least is that some jerk will blame Nebraska for it, claim that that's "our culture" somehow, and our reputation will take a hit, even though he's only really become worse since entering the NFL.