Commentary: The Triumph of Bo's Will

[omahapanda]

http://www.huskerlocker.com/blogs/view/bid...of_bos_will/o/1

[knapplc]

The Triumph of Bo's Will

 

The day began, in my memory, with two images: A picture of that beefy-faced Chase Daniel, just imagining that Heisman Trophy he never won, and the visage of a grim Kirk Herbstreit, his eyebrow cocked like a “serious journalist” imparting the scoop of the day: That LSU coach Les Miles, whose team still possessed an outside shot at the national title, was about to head to alma mater Michigan.

 

We're talking championship week 2007 here, and that Saturday afternoon when the Tigers knocked on the back door of the BCS after getting tossed out the front. What you may recall is Miles' impromptu press conference to debunk Herbstreit's news, the “have a nice day” signature line, and LSU having to start a backup quarterback so irrepressible -Ryan Perrilloux – that Miles booted him before the 2008 season even began.

 

And – oh yeah - Bo Pelini, then the LSU defensive coordinator, was about to be named as Nebraska's head coach the following afternoon. Bo was smack dab in the middle of distraction. And he pushed it out to the edges of his mind. And his defense secured a 21-14 win over Tennessee, and a berth in the BCS national title game.

 

Just. Like. That.

 

“That day – somebody told me there was a press conference,” he said. “I was in the locker room reading a book. Kind of what I do every game.”

 

***

 

Question: Where is Bo's sentimentality, his grasp for this moment – what it means to the fans, to the Big 12, hell, even to the media, which is ready to get back on the stage, to cover a game of this magnitude?

 

Answer: Not where reporters can get at it.

 

Bo locked down in Tuesday's press conference. He's getting friendlier about it as time goes on, but it was his shortest Tuesday session of the year, and less insightful than six-pence pulp fiction. It's fun to watch, in a sense. He didn't cop to anything in regards to Saturday's Big 12 Championship. He conspicuously donned a black hooded sweatshirt for the first time this year – don't read a thing into it – and brushed off any notion of the intangible, as it pertains to Nebraska v. Texas.

 

Is NU an underdog?

 

“I don't even know what that means,” Bo said. “That's for the bookies in Vegas.”

 

The spoiler role?

 

“That's up to you guys,” he said. “Say what you want to say. Build it up how you want to build it up.”

 

And so it goes. We're used to this now. Or at least we should be. In moments of high pressure – and NU has plenty at stake, as does the Big 12 North, if not in the immediate sense – the Cornhuskers' coach dials in, talks tough, and tips his hand only far enough to see the white of a card's corner.

 

The bigger the stage, the quieter and grimmer Bo seems to get. He's been through plenty of career-altering situations by now – the 2003 Alamo Bowl, Hurricane Katrina – to know he wants to approach it. And, as always, he returns back to a word. Process. It's his catchphrase. No fewer than four players and coaches I've talked to this week refer to it.

 

“There are certain things you have to do to keep your team on task,” Pelini said. “There’s a certain approach we take. If you do that and you stay with it, and they feel you staying with it, then they stay with it. They are going to follow the lead. There are certain ways you direct their mindset and you direct their focus.”

 

Said offensive coordinator Shawn Watson: “Every game here is a one-season game. That's part of the process. It permeates through all of us. Bo sets that table for all of us and sets that tone. To a man, to a coach - we're similar. We've adopted that same philosophy.”

 

It goes beyond brassy speeches, although Bo gives them. It is about guts, and it is not about guts. Individual plays – fourth-down on the goal line – define backbone, sure. The larger structure is more corporate in nature, and by that, we don't necessarily mean, as most football pundits do, business.

 

Modern football is written by men who are architects as much as generals, working from elaborate blueprints – housed in notebooks or folders or Blackberries, enriched by personal experience - that they tinker with only in fractions, as if to distinguish Bauhaus from Louis Kahn. Kahn, the modernist who left one of the great architectural wonders of the world - the Jatiyo Sangsha Bhaban - partially unfinished at his death, used to offer a cryptic lecture to his Yale students that began and ended with “Light - is!” Match those two words to the building itself, and you won't see the connection. Walk though the building and peer inside-out, and my sense is, you will.

 

Not so different from Bo's vagaries, which mask a much deeper plan and ideology from our perspective, but need few words from his own.

 

The blueprint – the process – isn't going to change this week despite the surroundings.

 

It's the biggest game of Bo's career, really. A chance to stride over to the Big 12's giant landowner, Texas - which lords over fertile recruiting fields that Big 12 North teams have to beg just to sharecrop – and say “I'm a rich 'un, Mack.”

 

Most years, it's just a game, for sure, with ordinary, linear benefits and consequences, all that. But these are the Big 12's two principals (and two principles), you see.

 

Yes, of course, Oklahoma has its camp, pleasurable as it is. But Texas is to speak Latin to Nebraska's French. One is a grand gesture that leaps its way onto dollar bills and t-shirts. Hook Unum! The other is carefully-manicured cultural artifact, wrapped in a rich bacon of pride that doesn't allow an inch of light into its economy without meticulous inspection.

 

If, on Monday, we laid out the programs' commonalities, what's at stake for each underlines their differences.

 

For UT, another accumulated crown, a title to stick somewhere inside its luxurious campus for todas las mujeres bonitas to walk by on their way to Sixth Street, ignorance of its existence.

 

For NU, a kind of a confirmation that vibrates like a signal of warmth, Ponca to McCook, Chadron to Superior.

 

Each is a vision – of success amidst glamor, of home seen through the poetry of a red balloon, lifting in a night sky – crucial to the development of the program.

 

In words and action without allegory, Bo is peppered with the stakes constantly. Just to get to this game, Nebraska had to lurch to the finish, and, amidst plenty of (warranted) criticism, he cut off the hand of his offense to stop its theft of a Big 12 North. He's put his defense in a weekly position to break, only to watch the Blackshirts rebuff its opponents, again and again, inside the red zone.

 

There is a will there, you see. Almost Luddite in nature.

 

“The message has gotten across to our players,” Watson said. “They understand: They have heart, and they have some fiber in them. They have something they're made of.”

 

This will is a room in the Bo's blueprint. Nebraska's best-laid plan is for it to be the difference on Saturday.

 

Bo is no more or less driven, per se, than his coaching peers, but he brings a zeal to transforming daily drudgery. The “compete” ethos is broken down into mini-games with practice, test within tests, mental or otherwise. Each day after practice there is at least one player – and often many more - doing wind sprints, rollovers, up-and-downs or some other penance. It was uncommon-to-rare during the Callahan era to see anyone serving that kind of punishment. And no Husker has been spared.

 

This blend of accountability and, frankly, works-based righteousness has NU on a five-game winning streak. The blueprint may have a tear or two in it, but the vision remains intact. It seems wishful that such a formula could work Saturday night, but, then, it was wishful thinking for LSU back in 2007. Bo didn't bother measuring the possibilities then, and he won't now.

 

The process reigns.