Nebraska Hate Week

This week the ‘Canes play their first real opponent of the season as the Nebraska Cornhuskers come to town.

Like  I said last year, this is the Green Bay of college football. Small town, big crowds, the beauty of rural America, “doing things the right way”, etc.

All of which is really just code for “this place is a frozen shithole, no one lives here unless they are trapped by circumstances or Warren Buffett, might as well go to the football game”.

Much like Miami, this program is coasting on accomplishments from over a decade ago and being a name brand.

If Miami wins this game, which it should, a bunch of people are going to call it a signature win for Al Golden. Which actually makes me angrier than anything about Nebraska itself.

Let’s get one thing straight: Nebraska sucks. They lost their 2 best players to the draft in Ameer Abdullah and Randy Gregory. They lost their most explosive player to a season ending injury in August. Their QB, Tommy Armstrong, is a runner that the Huskers coaching staff is trying to make into a pocket passer, because that always works.

Speaking of the coaching staff…Nebraska has a new coach this season. Despite going 9-4 pretty every year for like 157 straight years, Nebraska fired Bo Pelini.

One of Pelini’s 9 wins last season was an absolute demolition of the ‘Canes in which Nebraska ran on 33 of their final 36 plays, finishing with 343 yards on the ground for the evening (averaging 6.5 yards per carry, no less).

Nebraska essentially too out a megaphone and announced to the world before every play “we’re running it up the middle”….and you know what Miami did? This is probably shocking, but Al Golden didn’t adapt. He kept playing his defense deep because he was, and I’m paraphrasing here, “afraid of getting beat deep”. By the team that ran the ball on 90+% of its plays.

Can’t make this stuff up.

After the season, Nebraska fired the Real Bo Pelini (not to be confused with @FauxBoPelini, who has also taken his legendary performance to Youngstown State) and hired Mike Riley, the Webster definition of a generic football coach.

That’s right, Nebraska finished 9-4 but determined that they weren’t happy with the forward progress being shown, so they shitcanned the coach. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Nebraska enters the game 1-1, with a loss on a Hail Mary to BYU and a win against some crappy team whose name I forget and I’m too lazy to look up right now.

I can already see how this game is going to play out.

Nebraska WILL run the ball a gazillion times, while Miami stays in its shell.

Miami WILL blow this game in the second half.

Al Golden WILL say that it’s early, and we are still recovering from the guys we lost to the NFL last year--which will be ironic given the game in question—and that the injuries to Darrion Owens and Braxton Berrios have really made an impact.

If this post feels “blah”, it’s because that’s how I feel about this game. I don’t hate Nebraska, but I do hate what they represent: a paper tiger, a straw man, a windmill that Al Golden will tilt at and lose.

They are a smoldering mediocrity, and yet they are a smoldering mediocrity that still expects greatness, unlike our administration.

I was talking to my brother earlier and asked him "why should I hate Nebraska?"

His answer: "the self loathing stemming from the inevitability of them winning."

Nailed it.

Hate Week - FAU

This week the ‘Canes take their show on the road to face the FAU Owls.

FAU is a commuter school a short drive from the University of Miami. Their head coach is Ron Turner, the younger, dumber brother of professional tomato can Norv Turner, good for your Fantasy Team but poison for an actual NFL team. Last week they kicked off their season by taking out UCF, a victory which was significant but also lead to quotes like this from Turner:

"I literally pulled out my contract and looked to see if I had an out clause with all the off-the-field issues, and I didn't," recalled Turner, a former Bears offensive coordinator and Illinois coach. "I'd come home and vent, and my wife (Wendy) would be like, 'Stay the course, you're here for a reason, just keep going.' I knew that, but she kept saying it so I did. And I'm glad I did because right now I love this team."

Good stuff right there. Uplifting.  

The most famous game between Miami and FAU was in 2006, a 35-0 Miami win that was marred by an ugly benches-clearing brawl.

Other than that, FAU does not matter. They really, really don’t matter.

Know how I know they don’t matter?

Because all that stuff I just wrote was actually true of FIU, not FAU. Took you a second, didn’t it?

Boom…John Oliver’d.

FAU is actually in Boca Raton, a lovely place if you happen to be an 85 year old Jewish man from Massapequa.

If you are anything less, Boca Raton is a hellscape of old people who stopped being able to see 10 years ago and yet are still allowed to drive 60 miles an hour down Military Trail. 

It’s like a f*cking demolition derby filled with late model Lincoln Town Cars – only you have no idea you’re competing until it is too late.

FAU had no football program until Howard Schnellenberger, the man famous for turning the University of Miami into the most dominant program in college football history, decided he would like to build something from scratch. He made the Owls competitive in the Sun Belt Conference and got an on-campus stadium built, which is both impressive and at the same time the most Boca thing that could possibly happen.

Schnells essentially retired to a town filled with people who made him feel young, tried to recreate a piece of “home”…in this case a football program instead of a TooJay’s Deli…and then threw it in cruise control after creating something 40% as good.

 I can just see Schnells sitting in a rocker at his McMansion in Bocaire Country Club, puffing on his pipe, listening to the TV turned up to volume 80, pretending not to hear his pain in the ass daughter-in-law hassling him about the mustard in the fridge being expired.

On the field, FAU is pretty much as non-descript as they are off of it. They have an energetic young coach named Charlie Partridge, who was hired to replace Carl Pelini (of the Flying Pelini Brothers).

Carl was shit canned at mid-season a couple of years ago because of “admitted illegal drug use, the drugs in question being cocaine and marijuana”.

See? This is what being a young-ish man living in Boca does to people! You get so bored that you end up trying to recreate the final scene from Scarface at a split-level with a screened in pool off of Glades Road!

(Realistically, FAU’s brass is lucky that’s all that happened. This is the same Carl Pelini that apparently got run out of Nebraska because of rumors that he was sleeping with the daughter of a prominent booster.)

Anyway, FAU was the only team in Week 1 to score 40+ points and still lose. That’s a special kind of suck right there.

This should be a blowout for the ‘Canes, but similar to Bethune Cookman, if the expectation is blowout and we actually do it, does that tell us anything about the team?

Probably not. We will have to wait until Nebraska for that.