Dylan Widger-USA TODAY Sports
Tad Stryker: Statesboro Blues
The mood of the crowd as it filed out of Memorial Stadium and made its way home late Saturday night was strangely familiar, and completely out of place.
As someone who’s covered hundreds of high school games in outstate Nebraska, I recognize the lighthearted-conversational feel of folks who know not to take their football team too seriously this year. Have you walked away from an eight-man game with parents who dutifully followed, and even enjoyed, the efforts of their kids, but know in their hearts that their team isn’t a threat to win many games? Never in the world did I think I’d experience that from thousands of fans on the campus of the University of Nebraska.
For someone who covered Cornhusker football when it mattered, who was there during Tom Osborne’s Age of Stability in the 1970s and '80s, and his Golden Era of the '90s, it was an eerie feeling to see fans making light conversation, some of them laughing, as they left the scene of a 45-42 gut-punch loss to Georgia Southern. For crying out loud, Georgia Southern! But then again, there’s really no reason to take the Husker football program seriously right now, It’s 1-2 with a loss to Northwestern (which went on to lose to hapless Duke), and to a Sun Belt Conference team. The easy part of the schedule is gone now.
For the first time ever, a Nebraska team that scored at least 35 points in Memorial Stadium lost the game. The defense gave up an incredible 642 yards, 34 first downs and six touchdowns to a team with virtually no significant history whose brand-new coaching staff is only two games into making a radical transition from an option-based offense to a fast-paced passing attack. Presented with those unpalatable facts, it’s hard to conceive of a scenario where the Huskers win even two more games, let alone the five that it would take to make them bowl eligible.
The Husker football program is so irrelevant now that ESPN’s website didn’t even mention on its College Football homepage the Huskers’ loss to one of the lowliest BCS programs in the nation. Maybe because some editor at ESPN didn’t consider it a surprise? If so, it’s hard to argue with that logic.
Indeed, the Huskers under Scott Frost have reached Bill Jennings-era irrelevance, when there’s really more reason for college football writers around the nation to talk about Kansas University than there is about Nebraska. In fact, even in the unlikely event that Frost and his team pull a stunner against Oklahoma next Saturday, why would it amount to much more in the scheme of things than Jennings’ Halloween 1959 upset of Bud Wilkinson and the Sooners, a head-scratching result that meant relatively little in the backwash of a 4-6 season? It’s a shame, because the new offensive coaches and special teams coordinator that Frost belatedly hired are starting to make a difference. This year, it’s the defensive side of the ball, which has all the coaching stability you could ask for these days, that’s frittering away any rapidly dwindling reasons for athletic director Trev Alberts to seriously consider retaining Frost, who in his fifth season in Lincoln has yet to string three wins together.
Frost’s tenure will be remembered as the the Uncomplementary Era, the time when the Huskers had enough talent to win well over half their games, but instead captured only about a third of them, because if the offense played well enough, the defense did just enough to lose, or vice versa, and if both the offense and defense held things together, the kicking game found a way to blow it. Last year, defensive coordinator Erik Chinander and his super seniors kept Nebraska in every game. This year, Chinander’s unit looks likely to play the Huskers out of them.
The main story of this loss to the little team from Statesboro, Georgia, was the utter inability to get a pass rush against a journeyman quarterback who, one year after failing to engineer a single touchdown drive with the Buffalo Bulls, returned to the same stadium and looked like Tom Brady throwing to NFL-caliber receivers who Travis Fisher’s defensive backs simply couldn’t keep up with. Whether names like Derwin Burgess Jr., Jeremy Singleton and Khaleb Hood will find their way to the National Football League is questionable, but there’s no question those wideouts looked more athletic than the Huskers’ back seven when it mattered.
The Blackshirts couldn’t slow down Georgia Southern with soft, “bend-but-don’t-break” defense. They couldn’t slow down Southern with blitzing, hard-pressing man-to-man coverage. Even two interceptions by Marques Buford Jr. and two favorable video reviews that somehow kept NU’s impressive fourth-quarter 98-yard touchdown drive alive were not enough to get a win for the Big Red, who simply couldn’t make stops on defense when they needed them. In fact, the entire game had an eight-man-football, “defense-is-an-afterthought” vibe to it.
I know there are angry fans out there. They were the ones hammering the Husker radio call-in shows and unloading their frustration. But there was none of that angst from those folks walking away from the stadium in the coolness of the evening. It was a night for quiet resignation, which is probably the best way to reduce the pain of seeing yet another winnable game go into the loss column.
We’re only at the quarter pole. The season is still young, but it’s a frightening omen when a large section of the most loyal fan base in America starts to emotionally check out of something that once meant so much.
- Related: HuskerMax game page
