Husker Fridays: Week 6

Well, Nebraska suffered their first loss of the season last Saturday against Virginia Tech. I'm gonna blame it on the fact that both dweebs on College Gameday picked us to win. Jinx!

I actually didn't get to see the game, even though it was on ABC prime time. I dunno, I guess the network execs thought viewers in Cleveland would rather see Penn State play Illinois. What-evs. But, judging from conversations with my brother and parents, they looked pretty good, but still made some mistakes and got absolutely killed on penalties. That's OK, though. Progress, not perfection, as a good friend of mine likes to say.

Tomorrow, though, it's gonna be a whole different ball game (pun intended). Tomorrow marks the start of Big 12 Conference play for the Huskers, and they're kicking it off with a doozy: The Mizzou Tigers.

Rewind to October 2003: I was a senior in college and my best friend and I had taken a road trip from Illinois (where I went to school) to Mizzou. I was going for a campus visit as I was applying to their grad school program, and I figured scheduling it the same weekend the Huskers were in town was pretty much the best idea I'd had all year. I rarely got to see Husker games once I started college, and I'd never seen one in Columbia. What transpired was not pretty. The Big Red gave up 21 points in the rain-soaked 4th quarter to lose to Missouri for the FIRST TIME IN 25 YEARS.

Needless to say, they've been on my shit list ever since. Doesn't help that Mr. David McKay (formerly of AP Warped Tour booth fame, now of Photo Finish Records) is from Missouri and always decides to cheer for them after USC (his alma mater) effs up. So, now I actually know a Mizzou fan who will no doubt, like the past season, give me major crap via text message every time the Tigers score.

However, not all Mizzou fans are bad apples. (And for clarification's sake, David's pretty okay in my book.) Tom Shatel is a sports columnist for the Omaha World Herald, who also happens to be a Mizzou alum. He gave an interview this week to Behind The Stripes, an online branch of the Columbia Tribune. He sheds some very interesting light on why Nebraska's program so quickly spiraled into the shitter under the fearless leadership of one Coach Callahan.

Here's an insightful excerpt:

BTS: This Huskers team strikes me as being tougher and more fundamentally sound but not all that athletic. Just doesn’t seem to have many playmakers to match up with Missouri or the other high-powered teams in the league. What’s been your impression so far?

Shatel: Bo was hired to clean up this program, literally. So much sloppiness, so many mistakes, so much lack of motivation.

A quick story for your Tiger fans: Callahan ran this program like an NFL team. I had numerous former players who would attend practice (when they were allowed; BC didn't like former guys hanging around) tell me they couldn't believe what they were seeing. In a Callahan practice, only the first team would run plays, against the scout team. The second and third team would stand and watch. This is an NFL thing. Apparently after he was hired as AD last October, Tom Osborne went to a practice and told someone, "There sure is a lot of standing around going on here.'' I had one former player say he witnessed the second and third team players get into a water fight at one practice; they were that bored. As for the players who practiced, if a mistake was made, practice would not stop and the mistake would not be corrected. It was all about tempo. Onto the next play. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not college football. And this team rarely hit in practice. Nebraska? Not hit? Surely, you recall the game in Columbia last year. That wasn't all Missouri.

Anyway, Pelini was brought in to change that. He did so immediately. There has been lots of hitting and lots of teaching going on. Real college football. What a concept. There will be blood. But it's going slower than Pelini had anticipated. Here's the problem: The new staff basically has to re-program a group of kids who were brainwashed to play a certain way. When linemen have been backpedaling for so long, it takes time to get them to go forward and attack. Pelini's defense takes time to learn. Right now there are still a lot of mental errors as the system sinks in. That does not bode well for Saturday night against a quarterback and receivers who could run the offense with the lights off.

I'm not saying Nebraska's going to win tomorrow (though judging by the eleventy-hundred upsets last week, anything's possible). I'm just hoping to see more of Bo Pelini's ship-steering in the right direction.

And as for Mizzou's grad school program? I was so appalled by the behavior of their fans at that game, I decided to give all my money to Boston University, instead. I figured a school that had long ago traded football for hockey would never mock me for wearing a Husker hoodie.