Okay, two comments. The first goes to OLDMAN...I hear what you're saying, my fellow Husker fan, but only partially agree with you. Yes, I agree in that "in this day and age its hard to motivate the Xbox 360 athletes" but I disagree that winning isn't that important. To a real athelete, winning is ALWAYS important and I believe, in my short time as a Husker fan (I married into the Husker family in 1996 and I know that's only a speck in time compared to some of you guys) that winning is STILL important to any Husker player. I cointinue to WANT to believe that, anyway. Win-loss records don't measure the importance of winning in a young man's heart, it only measures whether or not he performed better or worse on a given day than the opposing player. True, in the more recent past, particularly during the failed years of the Callahan period, it appeared as if the players were playing with less heart than the national championship teams of the '90s. But who could blame those players? They were recruited by and played for a man who was an automaton, a machine of a coach who knew or cared little about Husker tradition and who did NOTHING to become a true and integral part of the Nebraska tradition. But who, really, can ever match the intensity of those five national championship teams who absolutely ruled college football? I attended last year's K-State game and even though there was a scoring marathon going on in that game, it was still a matter of the Nebraska players (and the K-state players, for that matter) wanting to WIN. It's all about desire which cannot be confused with ability. But, please, Oldman, my words are not meant to criticize: They are intended only to suport a portion of your point.
Secondly is the running up the score issue that many Nebraska fans believe Mike Leach at Texas Tech possibly plans to do against NU. If he does, is it any different than when Nebraska ran up the score against it's former opponents? Now before everyone jumps up my southern regions about that comment, I only mean it in that I recall Coach Tom putting in the 2d, 3d and sometimes 4th stringers and those guys scored because they were still better than the opposing team's first team. But what was Coach Tom to do: Stop a player who was doing his best to move up to 1st string? Were the 2d, 3d, or 4th stringers supposed to drop flat, inches from the goal line? No, that's not reality. So, I think the running up the score issue works many ways, but Nebraska fans should, in my opinion (which if you add my opinion and fifty cents, you can buy a coke, that's the value of most people's opinions) recall that with parity now a major part of all college sports because of scholarship limits and so on, there are going to be schools who can not and will not forget the trouncing the former Nebraska teams placed on them. And when Nebraska comes to town, or when some other team comes into Memorial Stadium and the NU team is in it's rebuilding phase as it is now, then you can expect scoreboard payback from certain teams such as Missouri or Texas Tech, two teams Nebraska has traditionally beaten to bloody pulps. The true measure of a sportsman, however, is taking the defeat, regardless of the score, and building from that. As for Bo, well, if Texas Tech runs up the score, I think Bo will remember the man who hired him and he will, like Tom Osborne, represent Nebraska proud. Then next year, or the year after when NU football is back again as a player on the national scene, and is feared again, then Bo can do whatever he wants and it will be like old times when NU didn't dare to lose at home and when the other team wished the Husker plane had broken down and not be able to deliver them to Norman or Missouri, or wherever. Let TT run up the score: somewhere down the road, they too shall regret it.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
