I'm sure nobody here cares, but...
Dec. 4th, 2007 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribalBreaking news of the week here in Nebraska is that Bo Pelini is our new football coach. Tom Osborne just hired him, and already t-shirts have sprung up with the oh-so-clever slogans: "Bo Big Red" and "Bo! Bo! Bo! Merry Christmas".
Of course, the gist of some of the snarkier comments on LITR has been: "And how long until we start calling for Pelini to be fired?" This is a tough place to coach. If you do well, you'll get a bronze statue, a seat in Congress, sporting stadiums named after you, and legions of followers who worship you like Innsmouth and Imboca worship the fish-god Dagon. If you do poorly, however - or rather, if you fail to have nine wins a season and play for the Big 12 Conference Championship in San Antonio - you'll get death threats. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen: football is life here - it's bread and God and beer. People cry watching press conferences. Old women wear little red N earrings. We own the national record for consecutive sell-outs at our games. We have actually gotten recruits from Los Angeles to commit to our program because we take them to a home game and this gigantic amorphous, nebulous, passionate sea of red will roar their name in welcome. The game's radio broadcast is played over grocery store P.A. systems on Saturdays, and as Regina Spektor might say, fall Saturdays in Nebraska mean red, red, red. There is no place like Nebraska.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to encourage everyone and anyone to vote for Tom Osborne in ESPN's Greatest College Football Coach of All Time competition. He's got 38%, and Bear Bryant has 42%, so unless anybody's really devoted to Alabama, please vote for Tom.
Judging by the comments left on the Life in the Red fan blog, Husker nation is very happy with this - after four years of supposedly revamping the program into some modern corporate entity, Pelini is seen to be a return to the old way of doing things - inclusive of former players and coaches, supportive of walk-on players, possessing of integrity and goodness and other upstanding heartland qualities, despite only having lived in Nebraska for nine months in 2003 when he was our defensive coordinator - we were sixth in the nation in defense that year, and he coached us in our bowl game after then head coach Frank Solich was fired, despite a ten-win season, by Steve Pedersen, the new athletic director. We won the bowl game 17-3 and the fans wanted Pelini to be the new head coach then, but Pedersen was into that "modernization" thing and wanted an overhaul of the whole program, so he hired Bill Callahan out of the NFL and effectively destroyed Nebraska football, both psychologically and in the national standings. Pelini went off to coach Oklahoma and LSU, both national title contenders. Pedersen is gone now, and so is Callahan. Tom Osborne, "President of Nebraska"/"Dr. Tom"/"TO", who can do no wrong, is back as God, and has returned Pelini to us like the Second Coming of Christ.
Of course, the gist of some of the snarkier comments on LITR has been: "And how long until we start calling for Pelini to be fired?" This is a tough place to coach. If you do well, you'll get a bronze statue, a seat in Congress, sporting stadiums named after you, and legions of followers who worship you like Innsmouth and Imboca worship the fish-god Dagon. If you do poorly, however - or rather, if you fail to have nine wins a season and play for the Big 12 Conference Championship in San Antonio - you'll get death threats. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen: football is life here - it's bread and God and beer. People cry watching press conferences. Old women wear little red N earrings. We own the national record for consecutive sell-outs at our games. We have actually gotten recruits from Los Angeles to commit to our program because we take them to a home game and this gigantic amorphous, nebulous, passionate sea of red will roar their name in welcome. The game's radio broadcast is played over grocery store P.A. systems on Saturdays, and as Regina Spektor might say, fall Saturdays in Nebraska mean red, red, red. There is no place like Nebraska.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to encourage everyone and anyone to vote for Tom Osborne in ESPN's Greatest College Football Coach of All Time competition. He's got 38%, and Bear Bryant has 42%, so unless anybody's really devoted to Alabama, please vote for Tom.
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Date: 2007-12-05 08:21 am (UTC)That's sort of interesting. Makes me remember when I was a kid and actually watched the games (in third grade, our back-to-back championship thing).
But then of course, most of this represents everything I hate about Nebraska...
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Date: 2007-12-05 08:30 am (UTC)Oh, man, you hate Nebraska? I'm so sentimental about it.
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Date: 2007-12-05 08:34 am (UTC)Well, don't hate everything about Nebraska. If I try to explain this one, though, I will just sound like, "Bah! Provinicalism!"
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