Will Nebraska Ever Kick Ass Again?

A week-long vacation in Kabul.
A sausage milkshake.
The 2007 Husker Football Season on DVD.
Lice.

Which of the gifts listed above will Nebraska football fans most want for Christmas this year? If you picked the third option -- the 2007 Husker football season on DVD -- then you don't know Nebraska football fans.

A dark cloud of despair and confusion has descended upon Lincoln. How did it happen? Last year the Cornhuskers went a respectable 9-5. A few lucky bounces could have easily made them 11-3. They won their conference division. A studmuffin pro-style quarterback named Sam Keller came to town in 2006 and adapted nicely to Coach Callahan's high-tech offense. On September 1, 2007, the Huskers were set to roll. And indeed they did by waxing the WAC's Nevada Wolfpack by 42 points. It was an auspicious beginning to "a season of optimism".

Fast forward to nine weeks later, Keller is out with a career-ending injury having valiantly fought losing fights in an astonishing five out of nine games. Steps in back-up QB Joe Ganz. The result, a career day against a Top 10 Kansas Jayhawks squad.

The only problem -- and it's a big one -- is that for no reason explainable to man, the Nebraska Blackshirts play defense like a foos ball team lying vertical. They simply cannot stop anything or anybody. And Kansas took advantage of these prone defenders to the tune of 76 points. The most ever scored against the University of Nebraska.

Time was when Nebraska once administered the very style of punishment it got Saturday on teams like, well, Kansas, among others. They used to kick ass.

Ask Husker fans what they want most out of their team right now and many will say simply a win. It doesn't have to be pretty, just go out and pick up the "W". But deep down, burning somewhere between their 3rd and 4th chakras is a desire well beyond that simple wish. No, Husker fans don't care about simple wins. What they need more than anything right now is to see the likes of Kansas State and Colorado mashed into the everloving ground.

The last time Nebraska kicked ass was on December 30, 2000 when it demolished the Big 10's #3 team, Northwestern, 66-17 in the Alamo Bowl. Eerily in retrospect, it was the last Husker game of a century in which the program dominated the final 30 years. Despite playing in a national title game in 2001 and beating defending champion Oklahoma 20-10 mid-season, Nebraska has never once kicked ass in the new millennium. The 2001 campaign was capped by events that would become all too familiar in the years to follow. Blow-out losses to Colorado and Miami set the course for a nauseating future.

Back in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the Nebraska Cornhuskers were like Grendel unleashed with no Beowulf around to stop it. Each season of those 30 years were littered with Saturday afternoon slaughters. There were low-key dominations of quality opponents like the 38-6 pasting of second-ranked Alabama in the 1972 Orange Bowl. And the wanton butchering of lesser foes like Minnesota, scoring 84 points on the Gophers in '83. Nebraska's own unique way of saying "there's always next year". And, of course, there was the best kind of ass-kicking of all. Those games in which Nebraska turned Top 10 teams into weak-kneed Pee-Wee leaguers like what they most famously did to second-ranked Florida in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl. That score was 62-24 for those who have forgotten.

Now some people have called me "mild-mannered" and, indeed, I've meandered through most of my life with a certain emotional restraint. But is it really too much to ask for a Nebraska football team to once again put its boots on the necks of Cyclones, Jayhawks and Tigers? To disembowel Red Raiders and pin Buffalos and Aggies to crucifixes of cornstalks like Linda Hamilton in "The Children of the Corn"?

I guess you might say that the Huskers' woes have created something of a mean streak in me. Each Nebraska loss is like another blast of gamma rays into the soul of Bruce Banner. As therapy, I've taken to watching Big Red videos on youtube. My favorites are a highlights reel set to the song "Some Bodies Gonna Get It" by Three 6 Mafia and a series of video blogs by a California Husker fan known as nwo4rice which, with a torrent of wonderful vulgarity, encapsulate my own angst at the state of affairs. (See links at lower left of this pages.)

Nebraska football currently sits at a crossroads. There are two ways it can go. It can either follow the steps of Oklahoma and Miami, two traditional ass-kickers who had miserable ruts as ass-kickees for much of the 90s, but who pulled out of it to once again be the administers of pain. Or they could go the Minnesota route. This was a team who won four national titles in the 1940s only to spend the proceeding six decades getting punched in their buck-toothed faces.

But I think there is hope that Nebraska football will choose the right path. Permit me, if you will, an analogy. Remember when Marcellus Wallace was carrying a box of donuts across the street in "Pulp Fiction"? Well, Marcellus represents "Husker Tradition" and Butch Coolidge represents the Nebraska Athletic Director. The moment Butch guns his car, sending Marcellus and his donuts in 26 directions, is when AD Steve Pederson sent Husker Tradition reeling into the concrete by firing Frank Solich. As the AD's acerbic style continued to grapple with tradition, the program soon found itself bound and gagged in the basement of a hill billy pawn shop. Or, what we in Husker Nation have come to call, staring up the ass end of mediocrity. The Gimp in this analogy represents the entire coaching staff from Callahan all the way down to Keith Heckendorf. The Gimp is not the primary menace in this situation. Just a hooded, giggling idiot, basically. The real menace is Zed. Allegorically, Zed is a mix of things -- confusion, a lack of team chemistry, blown confidence, disillusion. All those implements that have sent the 2007 season spiraling into the abyss.

The turning point in the film is when Butch manages to escape the watch of the Gimp. The question is have we reached this point within the program? I think we have. The firing of Steve Pederson and bringing in Tom Osborne is that moment when Butch gets away. So where are we now with two games left in the season? Well, the AD is standing in the pawn shop, listening to Husker Traditions' muffled cries from below and he's looking around the shop weighing his choice of weapons.

By season's end, Osborne will, hopefully just like Butch, choose a katana and save Husker Tradition from those elements of disarray. I will let your imaginations fill out the rest of the analogy, but Nebraska will finally reach the end of this pickle when Tradition calls in its pipe-hitting cohorts to go medieval on the Program's ills. By my estimation, it will take two or three more seasons for it all to play it. A long time to wait, sure, but when the halcyon days return it will have all seemed worth it.

I wish Coach Callahan and Coach Coz all the best. I think they came into their jobs with earnest intentions, but somehow this Big Red locomotive got away from them. Truth is, for all the pain and heartache, I often loved watching Callahan's offense with its seemingly limitless possibilities. The 2005 Alamo Bowl versus Michigan ranks as one of my all time favorite Husker victories. It was a strange, exhilarating, wonderful game and it could only have happened in this keystone Callahan era. But one game to be proud of in four seasons just isn't enough. So good luck Kevin and Bill. It's time to put The Gimp back in its box.