Fan Day Without the Fans?

Another wonderful message to the Husker fans that their desires are secondary. No longer is fan day on a Saturday as it has been moved to a Friday between 2:00 pm and 3:30 pm on August 5th this year.

As a member of the media, I was obviously at a few of these. Hell, I think I have been to the last six or seven. Thousands would show up, and there might have been one day out of all those which had weather that wasn’t excruciatingly hot.

But thousands would still show up, because they could. This was their one time in the entire year where they actually got to meet in person, the players and even coaches they followed from afar.

And now it’s on a weekday in the middle of the afternoon.

By the way, it’s hotter in the middle of the afternoon versus right before noon when the traditional Fan Day kicked off.

I’d be pissed if I was a fan. I really would. There are a lot of parents who aren’t going to be able to take their kids to this now with the change.

Oh, if you are a diehard sycophant, you will no doubt find a way to twist this so that it makes it look like whoever made this decision actually cares.

But to me, the rescheduling of this and the subsequent reason for doing it (it was to make their schedule easier, not yours), is no more than them pissing down your back and telling you it’s raining.

Thank you “Josey Wales.”

I won’t be at Fan Day for the first time in a long time. I won’t miss it, because it was a job for me. But I don’t share the same mind-set as over 90 percent of the people who did show up even if the weather was brutal, which it almost always was.

I guess it was too much to ask them to take a day off so that they could give back to the fans. Instead they want the fans to be the ones who have to sacrifice, yet again.

Kudos

Taylor Martinez is indeed the man

Is Taylor Martinez a head case?

Can he, a notably quiet guy even among his teammates, ever truly step up as a leader for this offense?

Can he stay healthy?

There are certainly a host of questions revolving around the quarterback position at Nebraska, not the least of which is if redshirt freshman Brion Carnes can handle being the defacto number two now that Cody Green is off to test the waters elsewhere.

But this is about Martinez. We know it is. And to his credit he showed early in the season last year that when he’s healthy he’s one of the most dangerous running threats from the QB position in the country. He even showed his passing-prowess against Oklahoma State, when he threw five touchdowns against the admittedly dreadful Cowboy pass defense, totaling over 300 yards against no interceptions.

His health wasn’t the only issue, however. I am quite sure those in Husker land hope that the second-year starter will get his ball-handling issues under control. If he wasn’t just coughing it up, he would make inexplicable throws to nobody in particular whenever the defensive heat was on. To say he was irresponsible with the football is like saying “Avatar” had “some” special effects.

Back to the health issue, though, that seems to be even more pertinent right now anyway as Cody Green, the almost-but-not-quite backup last year is now off to find a better opportunity with a team that runs an offense more to his liking and more in line with his particular skill set.

In reference to him almost being a back up versus being the actual back up, I say that only because that when the Husker coaches would finally opt for someone other than Martinez, which wasn’t often despite the fact that it looked at times like he could barely walk – when that point of desperation came, where did Green line up?

Well, under center course.

Wrong.

He spent much of the time split out wide while then sophomore running back Rex Burkhead was well behind center in the “Wildcat” formation. To the credit of the offensive staff, it actually worked. But this only illustrated just how bad the situation was, because for the better part of the second half of the season, even if Martinez couldn’t go, Head Coach Bo Pelini still threw him out there. And if he really couldn’t go, Burkhead seemed to become the unofficial number two.

Welcome Brion Carnes.

I would have added Jamal Turner to that mix, but no sooner did the fab frosh arrive on campus this January, he was moved from quarterback to receiver. Boasting quickness, speed, a vert and just a certain playmaking panache, he didn’t have a hard time breaking into a lineup of receivers which is woefully short on real experience. He even entertained the Husker fans during the Spring Game in the return game (both punts and kicks) as well as a somersault into the end zone following a TD reception.

Coach Pelini said that he wouldn’t have moved Turner to wideout if he thought he was going to have to move him back.

You think he is going to move him back now?

I’ll go with an early negative on that, as I don’t think Green was ever really considered part of the mix despite all the coach speak that told you otherwise. Green saw for himself the changing offense and how it relied on a certain amount of explosion out of the gate when it came to running – an explosion that the 6-4, 245 lbs. quarterback simply didn’t have.

So Carnes becomes number two without taking an actual snap. Well, unless you count the Spring Game. And we know fans do, as we have seen more than a share of Spring Game phenoms dubbed as the next…whatever, only to never actually see them show up in an actual game of consequence most of their football career.

Hey, us media types or in my case, former media types – we did the same thing.

I loved Alik Tillery.

moving on….

Brion was the man, though, boasting by far the best passing numbers of the glorified scrimmage, showing poise, quickness and patience in the passing game. Martinez on the other hand, looked like Martinez. That is to say his throwing motion made you cringe, his accuracy was suspect and even during the Spring, months removed from the bowl game debacle against Washington, he said he still felt that ankle of his give him pause from time to time.

I wonder if that’s still an issue heading into the Fall, and with the amount of time removed from when he played in that final practice of the Spring, will it be time to ask if his injury is mental and not physical?

But hopefully for the Huskers that won’t come up to open the season.

Speaking of offense, it’s Tim Beck’s baby with Shawn Watson off to Louisville, so he can hopefully get back to an offense he likes to coach. That leaves Beck to coach an offense that seemed at times to be about as close to the full blown option as we have seen in Lincoln since Frank Solich was the head man at NU.

Beck said during the Spring that this would be an attacking offense. To me that would imply that this offense didn’t do that in his mind last year. He must have meant the second half, because Nebraska was tearing teams up for most of the first half, albeit except for that hiccup against Texas and the lackluster performance against South Dakota State. Oh, and let’s not forget eight balls put on the ground against Idaho, all but three of those they somehow got back.

We’ll get to that last part here in a second, but back to this new offense.

Nobody was complaining about the offense when Taylor was healthy. Anyone who watched the Longhorn game knew that three dropped passes that were certain touchdowns had a lot more to do with the Huskers losing yet again to Texas, than the ineffectiveness of the entire offense. And anyone who watched the SDSU game saw that one team wanted to be there in Lincoln, and it wasn’t the team in red.

So, “attacking” offense to me means…..well, not a hell of a lot. I think it’s something you say when you are trying to convince people that it won’t stink as bad as it did last year.

But I’m cynical like that, I guess.

Oh, speaking of cynical, am I the only one who thinks that just because it says “coach” on your shirt (figuratively speaking), it doesn’t mean you can coach every single position on the field, especially if you have never coached it before?

When Tim Beck was also made the quarterbacks coach, I looked at his resume’ on Huskers.com. I don’t see “QB” listed anywhere in regard to positions he’s coached prior to being named that here in Lincoln. And this is yet another cynical side to me, but in my estimation there are two positions that you can’t just pick up and coach if you have never coached it before. At least at this level and certainly at the next. That would be cornerback and quarterback.

There’s no doubt Beck understands offenses. He’s been directly involved in those in some regard at nearly every level before he joined the Big Red. But does that make you a quarterback coach?

If you are the glass-half-full type, you can look at what Brion Carnes did without knowing if he had done similar things in practice this year or the year prior and there ya go, that’s proof that Beck is getting it done. And then you will look at Martinez and Green and say that…well, they were doing that last year, too.

Right.

That’s it.

They were doing that last year, too.

Since Taylor is the only one of the duo back for this season, I’d think most fans would actually want him to get better.

Maybe he will, but I’m going to take the cautious approach and see if he actually does.

Which kind of runs full circle back to the biggest problem the Huskers had last year, and an issue that Beck said he had a system for dealing with over the Spring.

Turnovers.

Lots of turnovers.

A ridiculous amount of turnovers.

With this blog format, I won’t be spewing out too many numbers unless that’s the specific purpose of the thing. I will give most the benefit of the doubt that they will have enough knowledge of the subject that I don’t have to keep rehashing the mathematical feats or frustrations from a year or years prior.

But with that said, here ya go:

45 and 16

That’s fumbles put on the ground and fumbles ultimately lost.

45 to 16

The first number should make you cringe. It should actually scare you to death. Out of 120 teams in the FBS, you know who had more?

nobody

Not only that, nobody had 40 or more

Only three teams had more than 30

Yeah, it was that bad. And that’s not even counting the interceptions.

Yet, with a nation-topping (or in this case would it be “bottoming?”) 45 balls put on the ground, the Huskers “only” lost 16, which basically means they might have been, at least in that regard, the luckiest team I have ever seen.

And then you throw in the noted Husker defense, which was so good at getting the ball back, that they managed to keep the Huskers ranked in the top half of the country in turnover margin.

There’s a funny stat about fumbles recovered. On NCAA.com, it shows the North Carolina State defense led the country last year with 20. And you can imagine that they probably forced a few of those along the way. Yet Nebraska’s offense, obviously trying very hard not to turn the ball over, got nine more fumble recoveries than them.

Come on, NCAA, where’s the love?

Yeah, I know; I’m taking cynical to the level of smart-ass. But come on, if you have followed football more than, ohhhhh….five minutes, you know turnovers don’t win you games when you are the one turning it over.

OK, back to the quarterback as this entire thing has been more or less about.

Martinez finished in the top 40 in the country in pass efficiency last year.

Yeah, I’m not kidding.

Did you know that in order to be even ranked by the NCAA in that category you have to have a minimum of 15 attempts per game, which over a 13-game season would equate to 195?

Guess how many Martinez had.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

OK, he had 196.

10 touchdowns, seven interceptions and he threw 59.18 percent of his passes complete. Not exactly blowing anyone’s doors off, but in this offense, which I will just assume won’t be a monumental shift in philosophy from what they did last year – that’s not completely horrible for a true option QB.

Now, I know that the common knee-jerk response to Spring Game performances is to start assuming what you see in the Spring will manifest itself in the Fall. But I think we have all learned to our dismay and sometimes to our delight, that’s often not the case.

Brion Carnes could indeed be the next starting quarterback for the Huskers. But it’s way too early for him to be put out there with the pressure to perform in an actual game. He should get reps, but not the starting spot.

This is, once again, about Martinez. It’s his show, potentially his team and perhaps his time.

However, he’ll have to answer a few questions along the way:

Can he stay healthy?
Can he control his spontaneous mental hiccups when the pressure is on him?
Can he hold onto a ball?

There are many more of course. But those three seem to me to be the most relevant in regard to where he was as a quarterback last year, and where he needs to be.

It seems that for years now we have been saying or at least implying that as the starting quarterback goes, so will this team. With all the questions on defense, I don’t know that, that is the case this year. But there is no doubt that the Huskers, if they are going to be able to survive and possibly thrive an absolutely brutal schedule in their first year of Big Ten play, this position has to be solid the entire year.

Thank God for the NCAA

We are approaching a time of year that I have often called the abyss of sports. It’s a time where if you aren’t a diehard follower of baseball, your life as a sports fan is miserable.

The good news, though, if you can call it that – is that the other sports find their way into our minds due to the rash of lockout situations at the professional level.

Yep, there’s nothing like rich people arguing over money to keep a hungry sports appetite sated.

And, of course, there are the various doomsday scenarios at the collegiate level involving Ohio State most recently, but have also involved North Carolina, USC of course, and if you believe the rumors, Auburn may find itself under the heel of the NCAA sometime soon.

What’s that old saying about no news being good news?

Here is what is funny about the college stuff. Well, funny to me. And this is hardly a revelation. You could say I am stating the obvious.

But let’s look at the list of recent targets by the NCAA:

USC – Perennial contender for a national title as well as the unquestioned Pac-10 leader for most of Pete Carroll’s tenure as Head Coach.
Ohio State – Has dominated the Big Ten for years now, including boasting a very non-rival like record against Michigan (they have lost only once) during the tenure of now-former Buckeye Head Coach, Jim Tressel. Oh, and there’s a national title in there somewhere, too.
North Carolina - were it not for the literal dismantling of that NFL-caliber defense prior to the season last year, the Tarheels might have very well played for a national title. But losing over half of your starters due to NCAA penalties can have an effect on a teams’ potential.
Auburn – Defending national champ
Oregon – Has taken over as the dominant team in the Pac-10, now officially the Pac-12. Played Auburn for the national title this last season, and is one of the favorites for achieving the BCS title this year.

Outside of USC and perhaps Ohio State, these programs have found themselves in the crosshairs seemingly at the height of their popularity, which can with most be paralleled to their success as well. USC didn’t find itself really under the knife until Reggie Bush and the national titles were a memory. Ohio State is kind of a sketchy exception, because they did indeed draw a lot of the wrong attention with former Buckeye Maurice Clarrett not long after OSU finished as the top team in the country. But it goes without saying that the “stuff” didn’t hit the proverbial fan until recently.

Everyone loves a winner?

Not the NCAA, apparently.

It’s gotten so bad that University of Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne has reported his own program to the NCAA for an apparent violation involving the purchasing of certain books with a scholarship which weren’t permissible under current guidelines.

He even went so far as to put his own program on probation for the period of two years.

Curious, but admirable I suppose.

And maybe he’s getting ahead of the curve.

After all, it’s not like Nebraska is a household name nowadays. They are better than they have been in awhile, but they certainly aren’t Nebraska of the mid to late-90s. That kind of success might never be seen again, here in Lincoln or anywhere else for that matter. But this is Nebraska, and like most traditions of this caliber, it’s usually just a matter of time before this amorous dance with a national title becomes a tangible tango.

When that time comes, maybe Dr. Tom’s proactive approach will serve his program well.

I don’t blame him. He’s seen firsthand how negative publicity can overwhelm a program. He got all of that and then some following the 1995 national title that saw his team come together in historic fashion on the field and fall apart at the seams off it.

There may not have been any over-inflated NCAA investigation to deal with, but the national media as a whole vilified a man who just a year prior they were lauding for how he won without cutting corners.

‘He did it the right way’ was replaced with ‘he did it his way.’

Success, it would seem, has its price.

The laughable thing has been, at least up until this last year, is the NCAA’s typical answer:

‘We’re going to take games away.’

Oh, that will show them. Take games away. Take wins away. Take titles away.

Did it show Bobby Bowden, the former Head Coach and icon of Florida State, who was at one point tied with Penn State Head Coach Joe Paterno in regard to all-time wins? Yes, the NCAA penalty handed down to his program certainly took him out of the running for that honor. But Bowden got a far bigger curve ball thrown to him by his own school when they unceremoniously ousted him from a job he had held for over 30 years.

Did it show Pete Carroll? He was out the door off to one of the highest paying Head Coaching gigs in the NFL before the hammer really came down on the program he guided to multiple national titles, including the one the NCAA now says they didn’t win.

50-19 over Oklahoma. That’s right, isn’t it?

That didn’t happen?

Whatever.

Does USC have to give all the money back they earned from all those big-time BCS appearances? Do they have to give back the seemingly countless number of five star prospects they got due to their nationally renowned success? Do the players from that national title team that wasn’t, now have to trade in their BCS bowl gifts for some arcade coupons they might have gotten from being in one of the dot.com bowl games? Does ESPN have to go into their archives and erase their seemingly endless sycophantic blathering on behalf of the Trojans during that now-tarnished era?

On a somewhat related note, the NCAA went so far as to scold the University of Kentucky when they had the audacity to celebrate the 500th victory of their second-year men’s basketball Head Coach, John Calipari. Why, you ask? Well, because Calipari got nailed by the NCAA and stripped of over 40 of those victories, stemming from some improprieties at Memphis while Calipari was their Head Coach.

I wonder, if I got super drunk at that celebration of half a thousand wins, and then went on a rampage of flipping up dresses of unwary women, will the NCAA tell the local police who arrested me, fingerprinted me and gave me a cavity search with the jaws of life and a spotlight, that didn’t happen either?

My posterior thanks you.

But under new leadership, the NCAA has proven that yes, it does actually have teeth. USC can attest to that, losing two years worth of post-season opportunities as well as 30 scholarships over multiple seasons.

I wonder, though, if the NCAA knew the kind of outbreak they would have over just the next couple of years in athlete/coach stupidity, do you think they would have set their new bar as high as they did?

Ohio State fans can yell all they want about how they believe Pete Carroll has lied to everyone from the outset. But without a paper trail to prove it, they don’t have anything, nor does the NCAA. But Jim Tressel, a.k.a. Mr. Integrity, apparently left a paper trail Ronnie Milsap could follow with ease.

Not the least of which was an NCAA document that Tressel himself signed, stating that yes, his program was in compliance with all their wonderful rules.

Oh, that cardinal rule. Don’t lie to the NCAA. You can commit all the heinous offenses under the law imaginable, and as long as you don’t violate the NCAA rules you’re fine. But lie to the NCAA, and they are going to have your nuts on a plate.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

So, in theory, what Ohio State should be looking forward to in regard to punishment, should be at least what USC got. So, if we are going on this new apparent theme of the NCAA and how the punishment fits the crime, THE Ohio State should be getting THE treatment, if you catch my meaning.

Would the NCAA do that?

Would they now not hesitate in bringing another nationally prominent program to its knees?

Heck, even Boise State has found itself under the scrutinizing eye of the NCAA in recent months.

It seems that almost in the blink of an eye, the member institutions of the FBS, formerly Division 1-A, have gone from having an absentee landlord to having a governing body move into the apartment across the hall.

But, don’t expect this to continue.

What we have seen and probably will see for perhaps this up-coming season and maybe one after, is the NCAA laying down the law, imposing its so-called will and actually enforcing the preposterously large set of laws and even more ridiculously enormous set of by-laws in order to regain some sense of control.

There is what I would see as at least a two-fold purpose. One is to show people that the NCAA isn’t this hand-slapping entity that has neither the ability nor fortitude to actually enforce its own rules. Second, to stop what seems to be a growing number of almost arrogantly defiant violations.

Did Tressel really think that kids stupid enough to trade memorabilia for tattoos would be wise enough to be able to cover it all up after the fact? It seems pretty obvious to me at least, that at the very least, Terrell Pryor thought he was untouchable – so untouchable that in front of local and national media he drove up to football offices of Ohio State on the day Tressel resigned, driving a Nissan 350z with in-transits – and without a valid driver’s license.

By the way, just as a point of irony, how funny is it that former Florida Head Coach Urban Meyer seems to be the top candidate in many people’s minds as the man who could replace Luke Fickel after his year-long interim stint as OSU Head Coach is over.

That’s great. You go from one coach who seemingly tried to cover up everything to a coach who seemingly couldn’t cover up anything.

Over 30 arrests of football players during Meyer’s tenure at Florida?

Yeah, let’s hire that guy.

If Tressel was Mr. Integrity, what’s Meyer – Dudley Doright?

Either way, back to the NCAA, don’t expect this “cleansing” to last very long, because even the NCAA in the midst of finally enforcing some of its rules, won’t forget just who pays the bills.

Ohio State does. USC does. Auburn does. So does Nebraska, Florida and most any other program with even a grain of sand on this beach we call tradition. These are the stalwarts of college football, holding history firmly in one hand and potential squarely in the other. It’s something that most teams from non-BCS conferences can’t even fathom and even success stories like Boise State and TCU can barely hope to achieve.

When  Nebraska stunk not so very long ago, I remember listening to analysts talk about the climactic drop of the Big Red. All those wonderful streaks. All those impressive records. Gone, and people wondering if they would ever get them back. It seemed to a person they chimed in that yes, of course they will be back. And good, because college football needed programs like Nebraska, to maintain some sort of relevance..

I am not sure that’s the case, because I don’t think one team makes or break an entire division, even if it’s a traditional power. But two? three? four? At some point whatever the NCAA would hope to accomplish by dropping the guillotine on these heavyweights, will be countered and then surpassed by how much allure is lost in regard to the college game, because guess what, nobody outside of Boise, Idaho and Fort Worth, Texas, wants to see Boise State versus TCU in the actual BCS title game.

That’s Bea-Arthur sexy.

So, when will the NCAA call off the dogs? When will this wave of discipline of the elite cease?

My guess is that it will end when the NCAA is satisfied that it has made its point. And that will only come when the violations are at least somewhat discrete. Let’s face it, it’s gotten so bad lately, every day seemingly another NCAA infraction committed by another powerhouse program. And some of them are so blatant that if the NCAA didn’t do anything other than slap someone on the wrist, it would appear more powerless and/or toothless than perhaps ever before.

It’s pretty bad when even plausible deniability isn’t a viable curtain to hide behind for the NCAA. They can’t hide behind it, because the violations have seemingly happened in such a public manner that you would have to actually try to avoid it not to see what’s going on.

Once we get back to the good old days of people being able to cover stuff up, work behind the curtain effectively and always make sure that there isn’t a paper trail, perhaps we’ll finally find some real peace.

There’s good and bad to that, of course.

But for now, I’m happy, because baseball just doesn’t do it for me.

The Sterotype Isn’t A Myth

You know how stereotypes go? Often they aren’t true or at least, are applied without taking a little closer look. But you didn’t need to be a fan of the Big Ten as well as the Big 12 to know that each had its own identity when it came to the run versus the throw.

I still remember the happy days (as I like to refer to them) of the early Big 12 and much of the history of the Big Eight. it was a running league. But starting with Oklahoma winning a national title in 2000 with a super high-powered passing attack, the Big 12 became very much a passing league. Yes, even Nebraska, the one remaining traditionalist, abandoned the adherence to the option attack as well as their option coach at the time (Frank Solich) and went…west coast.

Yeah, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, too.

But even I, someone who was pretty sure that it wasn’t a myth or some story which became true simply because everyone told it, was a bit skeptical about just how much the Big Ten differed from the Big 12 in regard to their commitment to the run.

And that is what you should take note of. It’s not how many times you run the ball or even how well you run it, a.k.a., average yards per carry and game. it’s a commitment to the run which is best illustrated in just how many running plays you call during the course of a game.

If you call close to the same percentage, that being 50/50, that’s balance. It’s what every coach says they want to do, but I don’t believe that for a second. Outside of perhaps former Texas Tech Head Coach Mike Leach, I honestly believe that if a coach knew he could run all day and be successful, that’s what he would do.

I don’t think Leach would. I think his penchant for the forward pass would compel him to throw it at least 40 times a game, even if the run was clearly better.

But there are very few teams out there, perhaps none, that can run the ball all day or at least, have a very identifiable trademark of the run, and have it work most times, regardless of the team they face. Now, we know Nebraska was going to run back in the day. If it didn’t work initially, they would keep running it until it did. To their credit, it usually did work out in the second half when their noted offensive lines simply wore down the defensive lines which were ill-equipped to stand up to four quarters of that kind of pounding.

But back to the commitment to the run, I did just a bit of research between the two conferences, looking at total plays and then looking at how many of those total plays were runs.

Now, it should be noted that there may have been some rushes which weren’t meant to be, i.e. quarterback scrambles, broken plays, etc. But then again, I am quite sure out of all the passing stats every team in the country compiled last year, not all of those yards and attempts came in the most conventional manner either.

But the following is a pretty telling comparison of just what you are going to see and more importantly, how serious the Big Ten is in running the ball, thus gearing themselves up to stop the run.

Indiana has a new head coach this year, so what they do might not be reflective of these stats. But that’s good news for them, because they were simply horrible last year.

Nebraska – 916 plays – 634 rushing attempts – 69 percent
Kansas State – 847 plays – 554 rushing attempts – 65 percent
Kansas – 823 plays – 470 rushing attempts – 57 percent
Iowa State – 828 plays – 455 rushing attempts – 55 percent
Colorado – 847 plays – 450 rushing attempts – 53 percent
Baylor – 939 plays – 468 rushing attempts – 50 percent
Texas A&M – 1,034 – 519 rushing attempts – 50 percent
Texas – 878 plays – 433 rushing attempts – 49 percent
Oklahoma – 1,211 plays – 578 rushing attempts – 48 percent
Missouri – 929 plays – 439 rushing attempts – 47 percent
Oklahoma State – 982 plays – 450 rushing attempts – 46 percent
Texas Tech – 1,054 plays – 437 rushing attempts – 41 percent

11,288 total plays
940.67 average of plays per team in the Big 12 (2010)

Illinois – 903 plays – 619 rushing attempts – 69 percent
Wisconsin – 860 plays – 584 rushing attempts – 68 percent
Ohio State – 896 plays – 547 rushing attempts – 61 percent
Michigan – 941 plays – 556 rushing attempts – 59 percent
Northwestern – 942 plays – 557 rushing attempts – 59 percent
Purdue – 796 plays – 442 rushing attempts – 56 percent
Iowa – 806 plays – 449 rushing attempts – 56 percent
Michigan State – 817 plays – 444 rushing attempts – 54 percent
Minnesota – 825 plays – 447 rushing attempts – 54 percent
Penn State – 873 plays – 448 rushing attempts – 51 percent
Indiana – 861 plays – 348 rushing attempts – 40 percent

9520 total plays
865.45 average of plays per team in the Big Ten (2010)

No More Recruiting

It should be noted, that for anyone who has read my stuff or will be reading it for the first time, to say I am long-winded is the understatement of the century. I know about as much about being concise as I do about actually writing correctly, from an editorial point of view.

Yeah, not much. So, you have been warned about that, too.

For my second entry on this blog, I will first tell you that there is one thing I won’t touch on much. And what that is would be considered ironic considering what I did for the better part of 10 years:

Recruiting

When I started doing this, I was as big of a fanatic about the stars as anyone. But back then it made almost no sense to get caught up in all the hoopla, because there were only a handful of recruiting analysts who covered the entire country.

Tom Lemming, Allen Wallace, Max Emfinger, Bill Buchalter, etc.

They distributed their stuff through bi-annual magazines, and in the case of Lemming, he actually had a toll-number you could call, pay the per-minute-charge and sort through a menu that let you hear the latest on the nation, the region, a conference or a specific team.

Yes, I called the number…..more than once.

I’m so ashamed.

But five guys? Six? Seven? Trying to cover an entire country?

Yeah, that’s not happening.

The kids you heard about were often the ones who had coaches who were dialing up these recruiting guys to let them know about such and such kid. To say the coverage then was comprehensive in any way is laughable.

Guess what?

It’s only marginally better today.

Even with big ole’ recruiting networks like Scout, Rivals, 24/7 and a few sites from a sub-division of ESPN, you still don’t have enough people to cover the entire nation.

Think about the fact that there are over 300 million people in this country. Of that number, approximately 1.5 million play high school football.

Of that number, approximately a quarter of a million will be playing their senior year.

So, 250,000 kids who technically are able to hold a scholarship offer if a school so desires to give them one.

Go into any database right now of all those recruiting sites and tell me how many total kids have profiles, even if it’s just a name and where they are from.

It’s not a quarter of a million.

Well, since we know that out of this quarter-million kids, they can’t all play football all that well, and not all of them could get offers even if they were good enough, take into account how many scholarships are out there for high school athletes each year.

If you take the total number of scholarships each member institution of the FBS is allowed to hand out each academic year (25) and multiply that by the total number of schools (120 last season), you end up with 3,000 scholarships.

Now, there are special circumstances like USC, which lost 30 scholarships over three years due to NCAA violations. But let’s just go with the average for right now.

So, that’s 3,000 scholarships available for a pool of prep athletes that is around 250,000.

That’s a .012 chance any kid is going to get an offer, strictly from a mathematical perspective.

Speaking of that 3,000 number, go into those aforementioned recruiting databases and see if there are at least that number of prospects with profiles, even if it’s just a name and where they are from.

Nope, they aren’t even close to that either.

So, just from a numbers standpoint, there is no way that all of these recruiting services combined are going to be able to track them all. There just isn’t.

POLITICS/RANKINGS

Another thing I learned as a member of this business was that rankings are achieved in a variety of ways. I was with the original Rivals as well as The Insiders, which became Scout.com which eventually became a property of Fox Sports.

And how those rankings sometimes manifested themselves was a byproduct of the same thing that you see goes into voting for awards like the Heisman, the number one team in the coaching poll and pretty much everything that involves someone telling you what they think.

We know how the Heisman works, and much of this can be applied to recruiting rankings, the AP Poll, etc.

First, you are going to look at the players you are most familiar with. Whether that means you cover a team on which they play, you have seen them on TV the most or maybe they are playing at your Alma Mater. There are a lot of reasons that go into your familiarity of a player.

In recruiting it’s the same as analysts are going to have a better handle on a kid’s ability if they have actually seen that ability firsthand. I have often heard fans bristle about how a kid didn’t make a combine which was put on by a recruiting service, and inexplicably that kid’s ranking either dropped very soon after or they certainly didn’t rise. If you as a fan are going to get mad at a recruiting service, thinking that they dropped that kid simply because he wouldn’t go to one of their organized combines, you better be mad at every single FBS team, because they do the same thing.

I know that many schools bill these football Summer camps as an opportunity for young local kids to get to meet and learn from legit position coaches from their local FBS institution as well as around the country. There’s some truth to that, of course. But these Summer camps are also ideal opportunities for these college coaches of the teams hosting the event to evaluate some talent firsthand.

For a few years I was able to actually cover these camps, and I have seen some kids come in as relative unknowns and leave with an offer in hand. Conversely, I have seen some kids come in with a bunch of offers, including one from Nebraska, and not long after they left the camp, Nebraska stopped recruiting them altogether.

That’s why these camps are so valuable to these coaches. It gives them a chance to see a player in person doing their drills, running their plays, thereby giving them a much better idea of what this kid can or can’t do.

Now, I am not saying that some of these recruiting guys don’t knock a kid down a notch if he doesn’t attend one of their camps he’s been begging the prep athlete to attend. But I would say that isn’t the norm.

Once you get beyond just the familiarity with these recruits, then you get into the actual ability to evaluate.

I have outlined this before, but it’s a huge part of why I don’t give rankings much credence. So, it is worth repeating.

In the NFL you have teams with talent scouts. That’s all they do – evaluate talent. They have budgets in the millions, and unlike college coaches who are limited by NCAA rules in how often they can evaluate a kid in person at a camp or game, these scouts can go to all the games, and they also have all the time in the world to evaluate film.

And not highlight film either.

A college coach simply doesn’t have the time to watch game film on every potential recruit out there. But that’s just part of the job of an NFL  scout. And it’s good film, too. Not that mostly grainy, wide angle crap that sometimes is hard just to watch much less good enough to give you a quality angle on any one particular player. And Scouts get the actual cuts of the games, meaning they get side angle views, from the back the front – everything. College coaches get this side angle shot from a crow’s nest and that’s about it.

And speaking of time, that’s all Scouts have. This is all they do. Their entire job is to find the best talent available.

They don’t have to coach. They certainly don’t have to recruit. They don’t have to babysit any of the players. They scout. That’s what they do. That’s all they do.

Also, they have this thing called the NFL Combine. It’s an event, and it really is one nowadays as the NFL Network actually covers it live.

Well, this combine is a place where unless you are a guaranteed top five pick in the upcoming NFL Draft, it’s where you want to be. It’s where you would beg to be. This is where millions of dollars could be made if you do well.

There isn’t a single high school combine where you can say that every top flight recruit wants to go, can go or is even inclined to go.

So, in one nice little setting in Indianapolis you have some of the best up and coming football talent from all over the country and from every collegiate division of the sport.

That doesn’t even include the Senior Bowl, which is another huge forum for potential stars.

At the prep level you now have a multitude of all-star games. And nowadays these organizations that represent these All-American events are giving kids official invites even before their junior year, hoping that they will either maintain their level of play for the next two years or at least be good enough that it wasn’t a complete reach to offer them a roster spot in the first place. They do that, because they know that most of these kids will take the first All-American spot offered to him now that the U.S. Army All-American Bowl isn’t the only show in town.

You see what this is all saying?

With the NFL you basically have unlimited resources and man-power to find the best athletes out there, and you actually get to choose them in a draft or in free agency versus having to recruit a kid for two years and hope you can get them in the end.

And how many of these NFL teams STILL can’t seem to draft worth a damn?

Seriously, how many?

You get a handful of teams that are lauded for having a real impact, getting instant contributors on the first day and then building their team for the future on every draft pick after that. The rest can’t seem to recognize a good player if they came up and hit them over the back of the head.

With that very harsh and obvious reality, just how likely is it that a prep player will deserve his star ranking, bad or good? And how accurate is that star ranking, really, when you figure in that there is perhaps another 50 percent of prep athletes out there who these analysts don’t even know exist?

They aren’t going to rank some kid a five star if he can’t play. But I know kids who have been viewed as five stars who weren’t ranked as such, because people were convinced that kid wasn’t going to qualify, academically.

What the hell does that have to do with anything? I don’t care if he can’t spell his own name. If he has five star ability, rank him a five star.

Oh, and this doesn’t even touch on an analyst ranking a player or a recruiting class high because he knows the head coach.

Tom Lemming  and Bill Callahan anyone? You remember that, right?

Lemming was gushing over Callahan’s classes, even when they weren’t that good. Why? They were pals. Husker fans didn’t care though. All they saw was the high ranking and suddenly, Lemming is the greatest recruiting analyst on earth, because he had the intelligence and courage to see the Husker recruiting class as much better than all those other people and services, which were quite obviously overrated to begin with when it came to evaluating talent.

After Callahan was ousted and the gushing stopped, Lemming became just another guy who didn’t deserve to have a job.

And here’s another aspect to the rankings that isn’t huge as far as overall impact, but it’s there to be sure:

Connections

Any media outlet out there, and i mean from sports to local news, politics to world events – if they are worth their salt, they  have connections.

John Clayton, an NFL Insider for ESPN. Wow, listen to this guy. How does he know all that stuff?

Really? You honestly just asked that question?

You know darn well how he knows all that information. He talks to people. But more than that, he talks to the people who know.

Welcome to the media.

Outside of what is right in front of you and obvious, if you want to know, you have to know who to ask. And, of course, they have to be willing to tell you.

At the collegiate level it could be anyone. Coaches, boosters, trainers, people in football operations, alumni or even current players.

One thing I was taught early on in the recruiting business was that these players are your “IN.”  Get to know them through the recruiting process, and if they go to the school you cover, you got an inside nobody else might have.

I was taught that, but it never took hold. I personally didn’t like the idea of cultivating a relationship with this kid for the sole purpose of bleeding them for information at a later date.

But I was never an insider, so to speak. And that’s a big reason why.

You think about the market of Lincoln, Nebraska, and it’s really nothing in the grand scheme of things. It’s certainly nothing compared to big markets like L.A., Dallas, New York and Miami. Not only is it your job to cultivate these relationships, but you need to do it quickly. The pressure to be first in those big markets is almost suffocating.

I am one who is of the opinion that even here in this local market which seems a generation behind the big city mind-set everywhere else, it’s still cut throat – a little too much so for my  liking.

But it’s nothing, and I mean nothing compared to what people in the media of these big markets have to endure. Your job literally hangs on your ability to get more stuff first than the other guy. Day in and day out, week to week – for as long as you hope to have a job.

But it’s present here, just like anywhere else.

But getting the connection is one thing. Maintaining it is another. And one of the easiest way to maintain it is to not piss off the person you talk to, and it wouldn’t hurt to be nice to them now and again.

Define nice?

Nice doesn’t mean everything you write about them is sunshine. Maybe it means that if something goes to hell, you won’t jump on that beckoning bandwagon to bury someone who might have it coming. When everyone else is calling a coach a raving lunatic, maybe you will describe them instead as passionate to a fault. There are lots of ways to curry favor. You want the Mayor to call you when something happens or at least pick up the phone if you call them? Not blasting them for being what you would refer to as a moron of epic proportions is a good start, even if you think  they are.

Well, it works the same in recruiting.

It was during the head-coaching tenure of Frank Solich, and there was a dual-threat quarterback from Arkansas, Will Hunt. He played at Springdale, which is a perennial powerhouse in the state, and is used to winning pretty much every game it plays.

Well, Will wasn’t the tallest kid, standing around 6-1, but he could run which he had to do most of the time as his offensive line was horrendous.

This was a kid who wasn’t just interested in Nebraska, he loved them. He had even written some poetry about them as an even younger kid when he envisioned himself an option QB at the next level.

I talked to him and his mom almost on a regular basis. On film I loved the kid. He wasn’t the best I had ever seen, but he sure fit what Nebraska did and this was a kid I knew they could get.

They never offered him. He would eventually go to Virginia Tech, where he among others, were looked at to try and fill the void left by Michael Vick, who was off to the NFL.

Now, he didn’t do much at Virginia Tech. Michael’s younger brother Marcus, eventually took over that team and Will ended up getting his degree and calling it a career.

So, maybe Nebraska was right, but I was still pissed they didn’t offer him, especially when you consider the shaky play at the position following the departure of Eric Crouch. Would Hunt not have been able to compete with players like Jamal Lord, Mike Stuntz and Joe Chrisman? I thought he could have, but that was just me.

Anyway, I thought they were idiots for not offering, but you can’t just go out and tell everyone who will listen that you think they are idiots for not offering. When you cover the team on a daily basis, that probably isn’t going to make your life all that pleasant, from the coaches who think you are the actual idiot to the players who think you might not be giving the current guys enough credit.

To me, that’s another way of being nice.

You don’t have to constantly say they are great. You just have to make sure that you aren’t constantly saying they aren’t, either.

Well, back to the recruiting rankings, if you have a connection with a coach, whether it’s the head coach, an assistant or maybe even a G.A., you might want to give them a little love now and again. Maybe a three star becomes a four star. Maybe this “tweener” who everyone else thinks is a waterboy, you do your best to make sound like a legit receiver.

I can tell you that had I the power to do that, meaning I was friendly with a Husker coach and also had an impact on the recruiting rankings, I would have done the same thing. It’s not about not biting the hand that feeds you. It’s about feeding the other hand in return.

You don’t want to be stupid about it. You can’t go ranking a one-legged kid a five-star running back. But maybe three stars? Yeah, maybe.

You do see what this scenic route on this topic is saying, don’t you?

It’s not to say Lemming doesn’t know what he’s talking about most times. He’s apparently seen enough film and been around enough coaches, he should have learned at least something if only through osmosis. And I believe that the majority of people will give you a good honest assessment of a kid’s talent, if they have something to reference.

But try this little experiment sometime:

Look at the commitment list of every team in the FBS the day before signing day. Nowadays those lists are probably close to complete. But look at them. Actually, take a screen shot. Yeah, that’s quality use of your hard drive. Take a screen shot of those lists, taking note of where everyone is ranked, height, weight, etc.

Then, the day after signing day, go look at those lists again. Take another screenshot and compare.

Now, with the big schools you are likely not to see a lot of change as everyone who is good enough to even play at that program, has probably been covered ad nauseam.

But sometimes, just sometimes you will see names on that list the day after that just a couple days prior, weren’t.

I’m not talking about kids who made up their mind on the last day either, though, that will be how it’s billed to you to make it sound like someone knew it all along and couldn’t say anything until now. I’m talking about kids who weren’t even in the database until the school they committed to and signed with, released that PDF regaling everyone about their latest recruiting class.

It will be a name, where they are from, what school, height, weight and stats. You shouldn’t be shocked to see that they are curiously similar if not exactly the same as the measurables on the release from their future school. But wait, there’s no film. Oh, and there is no story. So how in the heck are they three stars? How did they get four?

Of that list of players, whatever school has the most nobodies with no stars who became some bodies with three or more, they probably have some pretty decent connections or at least, are trying to develop some.

Welcome to the media. Welcome to rankings. Welcome to how polls are treated.

So, the ultra-long-winded message here is that there are a lot of common sense reasons why you shouldn’t buy into rankings and that kind of thing. Nobody can predict the future. But there are also other reasons, most if not all of them you realize, but conveniently ignore as long as your team looks good.

There are guys like Steve Sipple and Brian Christopherson, both with the Lincoln Journal Star, who I KNOW will put their best foot forward when it comes to voting for who they believe is the best player when they vote for the Heisman each year. They both have a vote, and I truly believe that they will give it a fair shake.

But just as convinced about that I am equally certain that there are others who will vote for someone who played at their former school, in their former conference, in the region of the country in which they played or played for a coach whom they know – before they finally get around to sort of, but not really evaluating just who has done what that year.

And if there is that kind of bias when you know that everyone will find out who of the over thousand voters for the Heisman, picked, to assume it doesn’t exist in any other area not nearly as focused upon or publicized – well, it’s kind of naive.

I would never take away from the ability of legit analysts to evaluate talent. I know I couldn’t do it. I don’t see what they can see. That’s not what this is about. it’s about all the other stuff, and it’s the other stuff which makes me take rankings, polls and anything requiring an opinion, with a huge grain of salt.

I’ll still talk about the polls though.

But not recruiting.

I’ll wait to figure out how good a player will be in college, the day after they depart it.

Nobody again

After about a decade in the realm of the media, I now find myself liberated, so to speak. Now don’t get me wrong. The experience was wonderful, and I had a chance to meet and get to know a lot of great people, some of whom I still talk to every now and then.

But there is something that is nice knowing that my opinion is truly my own.

After all, you can’t just go and blast the team whenever you feel it needs blasting, if you are covering them on a daily basis. It makes life a little difficult if you do that. Interviews might not be easy to get, and the interviews you do get might not be as fruitful.

But It’s not like I want to sit here and just go nuts and say a bunch of stuff that is negative. After all, there is a lot of positive when it comes to the future of this team. But let’s just say that now versus before, those invisible handcuffs that may or may not have existed prior, don’t exist anymore.

So, there’s that.

Also, there is no deadline for anything, which is AWESOME. There is no direction for anything in regard to trying to maintain some theme. That’s nice. And there is no mandate that tells me I have to talk about football and nothing else.

Nobody is paying for anything. I don’t have any advertisers. So, I go from being a hack with a semi-official title to being an unabashed hack.

This will be, for all intents and purposes, a blog. Yeah, like the location of it didn’t give it away.  I don’t promise that it will be timely. I don’t promise that it will even be relevant to anything that may be going on at any particular time. And it sure as heck won’t be from an editorial standpoint, blissful in its construction.

There may be times that reading it may actually cause you a certain amount of physical pain.

So, take an Advil (maybe more) and be prepared for stuff that has one purpose and one purpose only:

Getting crap off my chest that ultimately means nothing, probably isn’t all that insightful and more often than not isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know.

Oh, and because I am firmly and mostly desensitized from a lot of fan-prone bias, you can expect that some things I say you simply won’t like.

Well, if that isn’t the sales job of the century I don’t know what is.

But that’s the thing about this. I’m not selling anything. I’m not even asking that you read the crap I happen to write.

I was, for a time, a nobody pretending to be somebody. Now I’m back to being nobody at all.

And that works just fine for me.

So, you’ve been warned.