Football saturday

I haven’t written about sports in quite a while but developments this week mandated that I do so today. The Nebraska football team has been installed as a 25 point underdog at home this Saturday to the Ohio State Buckeyes. That makes them the biggest underdog they have been since 1956 when they played Oklahoma and won only one game that year.

The depths this program has fallen too is still unbelievable to its many fans across the state and the nation. They haven’t won a conference championship since 1999 which means that freshmen at the University of Nebraska were either born the year of their last championship or weren’t yet born at all. Nebraska’s last national title was in 1997.

Things obviously haven’t been the same since Tom Osborne retired. He named Frank Solich as his successor and Solich was eventually fired after a 9-3 season which Husker fans would die for today. He was replaced by Bill Callahan, a disaster from day one, and Callahan was replaced by Bo Pelini after Osborne became athletic director. Pellini had more success than his predecessors did but was eventually fired, in part because of his fiery temper on the sidelines which many felt didn’t represent the spirit of Nebraska football.

Pelini was replaced by Nebraska’s current coach, Mike Riley, who brought a significant number of his Oregon State staff to Lincoln with him. Riley had never been able to win at Oregon State but was hired during a short process that involved no other coaches but him. Riley was the temperamental opposite of Pelini which many of the fans were looking for but hasn’t been as good a coach and, consequently, the record shows that as Nebraska went to a bowl last year despite a 5-7 record. They got the bowl invitation because their fans turn-out wherever they’re playing, regardless of their record, and that’s what’s attractive to bowl organizers.

This season doesn’t look to be as good as last year’s, highlighted by the inflated point spread mentioned at the beginning of this column and it seems a miracle would have to happen for Nebraska to win enough games to become bowl eligible this year. Nebraska’s record is 3-3 going into this contest with Ohio State and of the six Big 10 foes we have yet to face, only one of them, Northwestern, has a losing record. We play them at home so that should be our fourth win of the year but I’m hard-pressed to come up with another one since three of our last five games are on the road.

I’m supposing that Dave Remington was hired as interim athletic director to make a coaching change either during the season or shortly after, because the previous athletic director, Shawn Eichorst, was the person responsible for hiring Riley. It has long been rumored and hoped for, perhaps even prayed for, that Scott Frost will be hired away from the University of Central Florida in order to return to his alma mater and coach the Huskers. Right now that looks like a distinct possibility and a good one at that. After being the offensive coordinator of the high-powered offense at Oregon, he has developed a reputation for winning as a head football coach too and that’s what Nebraska fans want more than anything. Whether he would adopt Mike Riley’s pro-style offensive attack or return to the ground game that Nebraskans so loved during their heyday is not known and perhaps that would be the key. Nebraska went to a pound-em-out ground attack when Osborn was the offensive coordinator under Bob Devaney, in part because of the cold, swirling winds that are usually present in eastern Nebraska during November that can disrupt a passing attack in a heartbeat and the ground game worked. The combination of fast and quick backs along with the big, muscled-up linemen, many of whom were home-grown walk-ons, meant win after win for the Huskers and many of those wins occurred because of total domination by Nebraska’s offense and Blackshirt defense. Neither of those is recognizable now on the current team and a return to that kind of football is what the fans desperately want.

The only reservation I have goes back to a saying that’s been around for a long time.

“Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.”