On the Burning of Our Football Program

Yesterday I had the opportunity to take in Iowa State’s drubbing of the Hapless–er, I mean, Kansas Jayhawks. It was a lot of fun and good to see the Cyclones get a win (the quality of the opponent notwithstanding). Despite my Nebraska loyalties, I’ve been a part-time ISU fan for a long time. After all, my favorite football game of all time happened October 1, 2005, when the Huskers and Cyclones battled to a double-overtime Nebraska win.

While nothing beats being in Memorial Stadium for a Husker game, the overall game experience was great. My girlfriend’s father, with whom I attended, knew a lot about football and was a great conversationalist, and whoever runs the PA system at Jack Trice Stadium does a lot of fun things to keep the crowd in the game.

But while I loved the experience overall and hope to get to another game soon, one thing I definitely cannot say I enjoyed was the fans. While they were friendly enough to me (though it certainly helped that I was wearing the right colors), it made me more than a little uncomfortable the way they talked about their coach (one of the most successful ISU has ever had), their starting quarterback (the team’s leader, and best player, for about four straight years now), and their offensive coordinator (who was in the middle of producing over 500 yards of offense).

And I really don’t mean to call the Cyclone fans out in this, because it’s hardly an attitude native to Ames.

Ohio State fans are already whining about their team, despite being undefeated. San Francisco 49er followers started to complain early and often last year, in spite of three straight trips to the NFC Championship game. Heck, reading the comments of Texas fans in the last days of Mack Brown is about like reading the diary of a middle school girl who’d just been dumped (“He said we’d win games together, and he said we’d be national champs forever, and it wasn’t true! And now my life is ruined!”).

I guess that’s just how sports are. The entitled whining, the undue scrutinizing. That is just what football fans do.

But that’s not what the best fans in college football should do.

As bad as I felt for Rhoads listening to the grumbling from delusional fans who don’t understand why it might be hard to win more than a couple of games a season in a place like Ames, I’ve been outright disgusted by Husker fans over the past day and a half.

There’s a lot of reason to be frustrated right now. We’re 2-3 and we could easily be 5-0. But. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it can’t all fall on the coaches. But. This is a staff trying to adjust to a new program, a new culture and environment, and players they didn’t recruit. But. Let’s not pretend this was the worst loss Nebraska’s had. It’s not even the worst loss in the past decade. If Pelini and his staff could turn the 2009 season around after losing to Iowa State at home, there’s every reason to believe Riley and his staff can turn this one around after losing to Illinois on the road.

But they can’t do it without our support. If you don’t believe fan support absolutely can impact a program, look no further than the aforementioned Pelini regime. Losing the fanbase caused him to go from a hot up-and-comer (in 2011 Bleacher Report ranked him #11 on their list of best coaches in the nation) to a loud-mouthed buffoon in just a few years. Once he lost support of the fans, he was always on the defensive, always trying to justify his employment. It made it all but impossible for him to learn from his mistakes or grow as a coach. And so he didn’t.

The worst thing we can possibly do right now is repeat that scenario with Riley. I don’t know if he’s the man we need for the job, and neither does anyone else. I do know that if we run him out of town before we get a chance to find out, the rest of the football world is going to spend the next year shit-talking our program. I know nobody, coaches or recruits, will want to be a part of that kind of toxic atmosphere. I know the condition of our program absolutely cannot improve if we can’t shake those aspects of it.

The title of best football fans is not something we can just claim. We need to earn it. To defend it. We haven’t been doing this for several years now. I include myself in this.

After this week the game against Wisconsin has suddenly become a lot less important to the division championship, and a lot more critical to our program than anyone could have predicted. Let’s show up in full force and full throat. It’s time to earn that plaque we hang in our stadium the way we expect our team to earn championships.

On Coach Mark “Bo” Pelini

Uuuuuuugghhhhhh…

I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in.

I’ve wanted to use this for a while. I wish it was under happier circumstances, but… eh.

Okay, so I realize that in my last post I basically all but promised that I was not going to blog about football again for a while. And I really meant it. But considering the news broke yesterday that Pelini was dismissed by Nebraska Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst, less than 48-hours after his team completed the biggest comeback in a road game in school history, I guess I kind of feel the need to put my thoughts out there. In part because a lot of people have asked me for my opinion and I don’t feel I’ve given them a very clear answer. Mostly because I just need to put into words why I, someone who genuinely tries not to call for a coach’s job, finally agree with this decision.

It’s been one of the crazier weekends in recent memory. I went from saying on Thursday that I was done caring about Pelini-led teams, to finding the Huskers down 24-7 and wishing Pelini would just go, to watching them rally back and hopping right back on the bandwagon, hearing of his firing via text message and just feeling utter revulsion, then acceptance, and finally, sometime last night, support.

But first things first, I do want to clarify something. Nebraska football, both the team and its fans, have always had a strong tradition of giving credit where credit is due. When Ricky Williams ran all over our defense in 1998, the Husker fans famously chanted “Heisman” as he walked off the field, and similarly when our players end their practices with prayer, they say “If we lose, we’ll stand by the road / And cheer as the winners go by.” It’s a tradition that has given way in recent years to jealousy; pointless, smug shit talking; and unending negativity. It’s a tradition I would like to uphold today.

So let me start by saying that this is not about Pelini being a bad coach. He’s not. As many people have pointed out, he’s the only coach in history to take over a team that had a losing record and win 9 games each of his first 7 years. That is a good accomplishment. And the claim that he hasn’t won any big games simply is not true. Last year’s victory over Georgia in the Gator Bowl is a good place to start. The program sorely needed that win, and he got it. The year before that, unranked Nebraska upset #20 Michigan, again at a time when we really needed to keep the momentum rolling. But I think his best moment, which most Husker fans have already forgotten, was in 2010 when after failing to show up against a miserably bad Texas team, Pelini rallied his players to knock off back-to-back unbeaten teams, first #17 Oklahoma State on the road, then #7 Missouri at home.

I also want to give him credit for how hard his job has been, more so than I think people realize. As I said, I thought Pelini’s best coaching moment came in 2010, though the end of 2009 would be a close second, as Nebraska nearly upset undefeated Texas in the Big 12 Championship, then shut out Arizona in the Holiday Bowl. Either way, after 2-3 years, it seemed like Pelini and his staff might have been building a contender, putting the pieces together.

And then between 2010 and 2011 we change conferences to the Big Ten. I think this was a good move and that we are better off, but I think this made the job harder for Pelini than many realize. Not only did he have to adjust to new opponents, new opposing coaches and coordinators, but it also completely changed his recruiting dynamic. Nebraska coaches can’t recruit in Texas and Oklahoma the way they used to, and the recruiting territory it opened up, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and, now, the D.C. area, is devoid of programs we have any history or rivalry with. Nebraska can be a hard sell to recruits to begin with (cold weather school, located in a small, quiet city) and this change certainly didn’t do the man any favors.

That said, this was still the correct decision on Eichorst’s part. Because I don’t think Nebraska can be good. I don’t want a program that wants to be good. I want a program that aims for greatness, even if it means taking a tumble or two along the way.

The question is, then, what if Pelini was just on the verge of greatness? After all, as everyone points out, it took Osborne 9 years before he won an outright conference title. Who’s to say Pelini wouldn’t follow the same arc? Well, I don’t buy that for a second, and here’s why:

If things were ever going to be different under Pelini, they would have been different this year.

All the talk last year was about Pelini’s hot seat. Would a 9-win season save his job? Did he need to win the conference in order to be safe? It was inescapable, and it never let up.

If that didn’t galvanize the team, nothing will.

When they lost to Iowa, the dreaded 4th loss of the season, it seemed Pelini’s days were numbered. And after his now-infamous press conference, I think everyone, myself included, thought it was only a matter of days. Instead, Eichorst came out in full support of Pelini and said he would be leading our team into the future. The team rallied one last time and upset a much more talented Georgia team in their bowl. Fans and players chanted “Bo! Bo! Bo! Bo!” during the trophy presentation.

If that didn’t give the program positive momentum, nothing will.

Over the offseason, we saw a much more open-minded Pelini. He allowed reporters at his spring practices and fall camp, showed us a different side of his personality than the rage-filled boor we’d grown accustomed to on the sidelines and in interviews. These moments gave the program great press, scored huge points with the national commentators, and, most of all, were fun.

If that didn’t allow the team to come to this season loose and focused, nothing will.

And none of it has happened.

I really thought things might be different at the start of this year (and I know I wasn’t the only one). The players talked differently. They carried themselves differently. For a while maybe they even played differently. Even the fan base seemed to have changed.

By the time Michigan State rolled around we got our first indication that this was no different. By the time Melvin Gordon clocked out early, a new FBS record in hand, we got our final, bitter confirmation: we were watching the same season we’d seen play out six times before.

I commented during that game that I didn’t think Pelini had learned anything in his time as a head coach. In fact, in a lot of ways I think you can say he’s regressed. For all the complaints you can put on his early teams, they showed up to play and they played their best football at the end of the season. They were tough, not the least bit flashy, and they didn’t always win, but they rarely felt out of the fight.

Now it’s the exact opposite. Now Nebraska will dazzle you with their finesse in September and be fighting for scraps come November. They’ll impose their will on opponents… as long as those opponents don’t push back. At all.

Pelini either can’t or simply won’t fix this problem. What keeps causing these collapses. What keeps inspiring these blowouts. Why his teams never seem to show up for a full game. Instead we get quotes about executing (which has always been a bit too similar to Callahan’s excuse that the players were making mistakes). Instead we get reminders of his accolades.

A coach who informs us, after getting embarrassed on national television in a conference championship game, that he doesn’t have to apologize for 10 wins is not a coach I want leading my team.

Or a coach who’s likely to win those championship games in the future.

I sincerely wish the best for Pelini. I hope he finds a soft landing spot and another head coaching job some day. I hope he learns from mistakes he made here and builds a perennial national power. I hope we see him in the playoffs every year.

But if there’s any reason to believe he could have taken Nebraska further, I just don’t see it. Time for a change in Lincoln.

Go Big Red.

Husker Thoughts Week 6

I don’t even know where to start with this game.

Well, actually, I guess I have to start with the second half. Because it was an amazing half of football. But also mostly because I, believing the game started around 9, missed the first half in favor of seeing The Boxtrolls, the greatest animated film since I’m not even going to finish that claim because it would take far too much research.

But getting back on track, when I came into the game Nebraska was down 17-0. And then, after watching the third quarter tick by relatively uneventfully, I noted partway through the fourth that Michigan State had actually managed to expand its lead to 18. And yet, watching the two teams on the field, I really didn’t think there was such a disparity between the two. Whatever had happened in the first half, and I’m still not entirely sure, though I’ve managed to catch up some thanks to sportswriters and fellow Husker fans, I felt that if it had just gone a bit differently, the game could easily be close, or it could even have been a significant lead in Nebraska’s favor.

Regardless of whatever else might have happened, I think it’s pretty clear that what Nebraska didn’t do for the first three quarters is block anybody. I’ve seen my mother open bigger running lanes than the alleged pipeline opened last night. A fathead of Ndamukong Suh could have sacked our QB and stuffed our rushing attack. Our line did such an awful job of protecting our quarterback, I’m told Mark Pelini is a leading candidate to be the new head of the Secret Service.

And I think the most frustrating part of that, to me, is that Ameer Abdullah, baring some sort of miracle, is out of the Hesiman race, through no fault of his own. The loss stings, but I can deal with it. I’m a Husker fan, I’m used to disappointment. Seeing a man who is easily one of the nation’s top three backs (and the only one with a name not reminiscent of little girls or ’80s cheese) held to 45 yards on 24 carries because of an offensive line that created so little space Harry Houdini himself couldn’t have found a way through really irks me in ways I can’t explain.

Abdullah, I know, does not care. He’s a true leader, and cares only about the team. But he has done everything that’s ever been asked of him, and more, and carried this team in ways that I didn’t even know it could be carried. He deserves all the recognition in the world for that, and it’s just hard to accept that one game with a 1.9 yard-per-carry average has ended that. Never mind the fact that any mortal would have been lucky to average even half a yard in his situation.

I’m not sure what happened, if Nebraska finally figured something out offensively or if the Spartans thought the game was locked up and quit playing, but with just over 4 minutes, that crazy, inhuman man carried his team into the end zone again, and with the extra point the Huskers pulled within 11. The friend I was watching with offered encouragement, saying the game wasn’t over and the Huskers still had a chance. I appreciated his support, but, as I explained to him, this type of thing doesn’t happen to Nebraska. Sure, they can rally from 17 down if they get started in the third quarter, or 21, provided they injure the opponents’ starting quarterback, but not 11 points in 4 minutes. Any other team in the country could have a chance… But this type of thing doesn’t happen for Nebraska.

A De’Mornay Pierson-El punt return (seriously, how exciting is this kid?) and a missed field goal later, I was pounding on my thighs in anticipation and wildly texting about how it might actually happen.

And of course it didn’t. Of course, when the game’s on the line and Nebraska needs to make a play, they don’t. Because how could it happen any other way? Even in the week of wild upsets and miracle finishes, Nebraska couldn’t pull of their wild miracle upset.

Because this type of thing doesn’t happen for Nebraska.

There are a lot of what ifs, and a lot of positives to take away from this game. Not the least of which is how good it was to see Nebraska not quit, even rally a bit against a superior team. And there’s definitely hope in a rematch for the Big Ten Championship, a sense that Nebraska, if given a second chance, can more than just hang with these guys, but beat them. That there was just as much raw talent wearing scarlet and cream as wearing green and white last night.

But ultimately all of these small victories only highlight the fact that this was just another frustrating, “so close,” We’ll Get You Next Time!, good-but-not-great game in the frustrating, “so close,” We’ll Get You Next Time, good-but-not-great Pelini era.

Bring on Northwestern, in a suddenly-critical Big Ten West matchup.

Go Big Red.

Husker Thoughts Week 1

Wow.

I know it’s Florida Atlantic. I know it’s the first week, but…

Wow.

Was anyone legitimately expecting this? I think everybody and their mother picked Nebraska to win this game, and that was never in doubt, but I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that this could be the most dominant win Nebraska’s had since the ’90s. The running game lived up to every bit of the hype, the defense, admittedly, had some hiccups early but went on to dictate just about everything to the Owls’ offense, and Tommy Armstrong looked darn good. His passes didn’t dazzle anyone, and they’re never going to. But he made smart choices with where he put the ball, he made decisive choices when running it, and most significantly he avoided turnovers. This is a guy who threw three interceptions in a 44-7 win against Purdue last year, so that was by no means a given. I’m not suggesting he’ll be in line for national (or even all-conference) awards in a few months, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised by what I saw today.

That said, there were quite a few negatives from today. The one that I hope will be the least important is the one that will probably be talked about the most, that being the injury to Randy Gregory. He only played one series today and was seen on the sideline with a knee brace. Hopefully this was just a precaution and he’ll be back in the rotation soon. He is arguably the best defensive player the Huskers have, but that said the defensive line was still dominant today without him. If the worst happens and he misses extended time, my guess is the defense would be worse off, but would find others to step up to replace him. Hopefully we never find out.

The other negatives, which I’m afraid are serious but will probably not be talked about, are the failed 2-minute drill to end the first half and the inability of the Blackshirts to create a turnover (despite two golden opportunities). It may seem stupid to bring these up given the 48-point difference in the final score, but it really isn’t. For on thing, these are aspects of the game that have plagued good Husker teams in the past and kept them from achieving greatness. Not being able to punch in a score at a critical time. Letting a game-changing (or game-sealing) turnover slip away. But more importantly is the fact that these are things good teams do all the time, and they do them whether the game is on the line or not. And if these Huskers are unable to do them when the game is not on the line, how much confidence should we have that they will do it when the game is on the line?

But I don’t want to beat those points into the ground any more. After a game with this many positives, it would be dumb to focus too much on the negatives. And it was a great game all around by the entire team. They looked excellently prepared, made great adjustments in-game, and the whole team came to play from beginning to end.

In short, it looked like the time of game we’ve been waiting 7 years for Pelini to produce.

More importantly, it looked like an excellent way to start the 2014 season. McNeese State comes next and they’ve had an extra week to prepare. Just in case the point needs to be driven home a bit further (or you’ve forgotten the last time Nebraska played a small team called the Cowboys), overlooking anyone is a terrible and costly mistake. Hopefully the coaches and players continue building on these positives and spend more time in practice patching up these negatives.

Go Big Red.

 

Random Thoughts:

I had no idea Pelini was poised to become the third-winningest coach in Nebraska’s history. I mean, I knew that the Huskers were pretty much awful before Devaney showed up in the ’60s, and that there’s really only been two great coaches in our history. So I guess when I stop to think about it, it makes sense. But there still seems to be something weird in the fact that you can have fewer than 60 wins and still be in the top three all-time for the college football program with the fourth most wins.

Kenny Bell had a really good game today and I completely missed it. I was going to criticize him here and say he needed to make more plays, only to discover he had 116 receiving yards today, second on the team. Not sure how I missed that, but my apologies to Mr. Bell.

I was really disappointed how little we saw of Johnny Stanton today. Mostly because it makes me wonder what all the hype was about. This is a player who was declared a “coup” for Nebraska when he first committed two years ago, now it turns out that after a year of redshirting he’s ready to ride the bench behind Fyfe and Armstrong for the next three years. He certainly could turn that around and start earlier than that, but on the whole it’s just very disappointing.