It's over. Colorado 2001 was like a cataclysmic disaster of sorts in terms of how we spoke about it and the lasting tremors it sent through our program. I can remember people talking about that game like the final whistle had just blown six, seven years after the fact.
Well, last year we got the KSU Matt Turman Playbook thrown at us in the CCG on national television and we literally got beaten like we were a kids Pee Wee team who'd just met up with 100 coked up Lawrence Phillips clones on a gravel road in Calcutta. The term "ugly" doesn't even begin to touch on how badly we got embarrassed.
Colorado 2001 was a pretty damn solid CFB team. Won the conference title. In place of more traditional markings, the Buffaloes had the final score from that grim day in Boulder etched onto their rings.
Wisconsin won that game and the conference mantle and rapidly went ahead wrapping up an 8-6 season that saw their head coach depart for (supposedly) greener pastures. There were no specialized rings. In NE, a lot of shrugs stood in place of anger, frustration, all those laments that a stunned fanbase often displays.
Because none of us were stunned. In almost all of us, some part of our mind muttered "Pfff. Of COURSE."
That is the state of NU football. An epic dismantling of almost historical proportions is just kinda...murmured over.
Bo Pelini is not the man for the job of making Nebraska football a program that demands an annual spot in the perennial "who can win it all" discussion. I have finally lost the ability to see glints of silver buried on slabs of slag. It's an ugly gray mound, and that's all it'll ever be under Bo Pelini's bumbling attempts at leadership.
I wish the man the very best. Somewhere else. Go Broncos.
Aw hell...and Go Big Red.