Eric the Red
Team HuskerBoard

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Husker Quarterback Weekly #10: Where have you gone, Grant?
Sun, November 7, 2004
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The team isn’t intense, the team isn’t ready to go, and why do we keep running the ball? Well, there is only one group of people to blame……….the seniors. That’s right, not the coaches, Joe Dailey, or the Cyclones vaunted offense.
With a chance to just about clinch the division, to bury a weaker team, and prove to the country that Nebraska does belong; all we got were overthrown passes, dropped balls, blown coverage’s, two missed field goals and one extra point (NU lost by 7 you know), and players who seem to do nothing more than go through the motions.
Coaches can only do so much. Just about every coach’s game plan will work if the players are coachable and play. This years team is simply not that…coachable. Blame it on the changes, the talent, the offense, the schemes, whatever. The players still need to want to play. This year they don’t.
Callahan made it his first point to mention, on his radio program, that the intensity isn’t there and the passion is missing. He went on to say, “I thought we had overcome that problem last week.” Well coach there is only one group to blame and that’s the seniors.
There is no team nucleus. No team leader both on the field and off. Ruud shows by example, Bernard (still one of the biggest jokes out there) and Sievers by their mouths, and several others with one part rather than both. You can not take a combination of a few. But one person who has both must step up and it must be a senior. Not a sophomore or junior, surely not a freshman. All the great teams of the past had it. Mike Brown in 1999, Jason Peter and Wistrom 1997, Tony Veland and Christen Peter 1995, and Trev in 1993. They could always back themselves up, on and off the field. Even TO repeated this point. At some point the seniors must step up and take the team by the balls to be successful.
When you have a player with all the tools, there’s respect given. There’s an urgency, a pressure, there’s motivation to get things done and play the best you can. If you don’t get the job done you let down a group of players who have given there lives to a program. But unfortunately, there is none of that on this team. Even if this team was 0-8 there is still plenty of motivation. You are playing for the well being of an entire state. You have the support of 1.7 million and more loud. You are one of the lucky, the few and elite football players in the country playing for a great University with even greater fans. That is simply motivation enough. The “N” always speaks loudest.
A saddened, disgruntled
Eric the Red
Ps I will be attending the CU game and as always cheering as wildly as possible, come join me and hold up “our part”, hopefully the seniors will too. Don’t give up on this team.
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