How Much More Can Husker Fans Give?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So how are we doing? Huskernation found all of the
pieces of our broken hearts on the field in blooming Bloomington, Indiana.
Yet fifty six to seven that wasn't a defeat. A
defeat is thirty five, thirty one or twenty four seventeen?
This one may have been life altering by nightfall Saturday.
Surely it had to be. Asking Husker Nations, sometimes under

(00:20):
its breath, sometimes out loud, sometimes with both thumbs, how
much more can we give? An entire generation has given everything,
from our time to our money, all the way to
our prayers, to be good again, to be relevant again.
Across now six coaches we've traveled since our football messiah retired,

(00:40):
the program has slid down. Oh, we had a couple
of good years in there, some fun wins, but this
is now the longest stretch between conference championships in the
one hundred and thirty four year history of football, twenty
five seasons. We forget about the ingredients to our success
and how we don't have them to ourselves anymore. Doctor
Tom was He's the best coach of his generation, unmatched

(01:02):
in preparation, no peer on game day, and he was
an innovator the walk on program, strength and conditioning, academic
support were all light years ahead of the competition. They've
caught up. We had the resources and used them, and
the old Big A Conference was not the weekly grind
of today's Big Ten. After the Indiana beat down, a

(01:24):
program that's only won two conference titles total in one
hundred and thirty seven years of football, I went on
a mental speed lunking tour, crawled back through the twenty
five years to look for clues as to how and
why find the villains and the Charlatan's well. Failure has
lots of siblings, myopic chancellors picking the wrong athletic directors

(01:48):
who picked the wrong coaches. They all looked and sounded good,
but really brought profound incapacity to recognize the importance of
intangibles and vet coaching candidates d deeply enough to keep
looking for or worse, by passing the right guys. Matt
Ruhle gets slack while he's all of ten and ten

(02:08):
in his first twenty games and the Indiana disaster notwithstanding,
his story is far from written here. Hopefully he's the
right guy, but somehow we've made winning harder here. Back
in the late eighties, when some high school jobs were
more attractive than Kansas State Thoughtful athletics director Steve Miller
blew past a boat load of better looking applicants to

(02:30):
take an assistant from Iowa might have heard of him,
Bill Snyder. And how about Indiana athletics director Scott Dolson.
In picking Kurt Signetti, who is quite likely the national
coach of the year, Dolson threw out every contemporary metric
except one in getting Signetti wins. All he's ever done

(02:51):
is win as a head coach. Look at his blueprint.
Brought in thirty one transfers twenty two by the end
of last December. Didn't we bring in transfers to sure
guys from Texas, Georgia, Oregon, lsu, USC, Florida. How come
Indiana's transfers in seven games look better, at least in

(03:12):
one game, than all of ours from the last two years. Well,
try this theory on for size. Indiana went into the
boondocks for their guys, the FCS level schools Ohio, James Madison, UMass, Austin,
p Old Dominion, Louisiana, Monroe. Sure they got a few
from Power for schools, but most from places that were

(03:34):
not glamorous, did not have the trappings of big time,
so the nil price tag was comparatively low, and most
of them had just one year of eligibility, which means
every snap brings them closer to the end of their careers,
and that's pretty motivating. Conversely, if you're coming from a

(03:54):
big time program, you're in the portal, probably thanks to
a coach change, depth chart position, or more importantly cash. Look,
it's human nature. Comfort is corrupting, God knows Philippians four.
I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry,
both to abound and to suffer need and il. And

(04:15):
the transfer portal, especially with teenagers, take away both the
hunger and the need. Nebraska isn't unique. Every elite program
is battling. These forces will battle through. It just hurts
a little more here