There was a toor. A Big Red Blitz toor. Coaches from Nebrasky went to 20 locations all around the state – Alliance, Broken Bow, Chadron, Columbus, David City, Fremont, Grand Island, Hastings, Holdrege, Imperial, Kearney, Lexington, Loup City, Norfolk, North Platte, Ogallala, Scottsbluff, South Sioux City, Valentine, and West Point.
Nebraska media followed them around, wrote articles about them to give themselves something real for all of us to talk about, at least for a while.
I read their articles. Saw their tweets. These are five observations that stuck out.
These events appeared to be poorly attended.
The Huskers Facebook group posted photos from the Big Red Blitz tour and they seem to show that there was not many people at almost all of the locations.
There are a few ways to take this.
Number one, Nebraska football fans have moved into apathy.
Two, Nebraska football fans have moved to Missouri, the “Show Me” state. This is a terrible existence. It’s as if Coach Frost must win this year to free them from this hell, even if they’re not living in Missouri, it’s still a horrible place to be as metaphor.
Number three, the pandemic has left our state, our beloved state devoid of Kool Aid. No one is getting sauced on the stuff. Either the stock is dried up or our tolerance it will take a 5-to-1 ratio of vodka to cherry mix just to get us revved up.
Number four, the Husker athletic department was ignorant of how poorly it would be attended and went out anyway. They had to. They needed to.
I am working to build a writing career. It will take time. The first thing you need to do when you build a fan base is discover and understand who your main followers are. Then you must take care of them no matter what. Otherwise they’re going to think that you don’t care and go away.
The Husker athletic department needed to go on Big Red Blitz tour, no matter what the attendance or what reception they got. They needed to go out to their hardcore fans who will always be with them no matter what and tell them, “We still care about you.”
If they hadn’t done that, it would have been a sign that they didn’t care about their fans. I don’t think that’s our Nebraska athletic department. I think our athletic department is a jewel that we take for granted. We only bless them when they’re winning.
They are very well run and they always have been, because they have a lot of good people who do the right thing. They do the right thing, no matter the circumstance. Right now, there is a huge problem with enforcement of rules in college sports, especially football and basketball. Right now, it would be so easy for anyone to get away with cheating, but we haven’t done that.
That’s because we have the right people in the right place. So if you happen to see anything about a poorly attended Big Red Blitz, remember this, it needed to happen no matter what what the reception was going to be. I’m glad they did it.
I have faith that Scott Frost is going to turn this around and have winning seasons, win the division, win the Big Ten, and be in the College Football Playoff.
The bitterness of what we’re going through right now as a fan base will be made that much sweeter.
Mitch Sherman’s mention of Luke McCaffrey and a comment about the transfer portal and bad advice set off a small explosion.
Christian and Max McCaffrey took aim at Frost for having transferred himself, although they didn’t bother looking up that Frost won a national title because of his transfer while Luke is headed to Rice…
Frost didn’t mention Luke McCaffrey by name but Sherman chose to include it in his tweet. He has since given descriptions about why he included Luke McCaffrey’s name. I think they’re a little weak, and Mitch Sherman is being attacked on Twitter for this indiscretion.
To be fair to Mitch Sherman, you do have to decide if you’re tweeting a live event what goes into your tweets, and he certainly didn’t expect probably Christian McCaffrey to use his tweet to attack Scott frost.
All of the media is has to continue on a daily basis to fight for their careers. Sherman’s inclusion of Luke McCaffrey’s name will no doubt result in massive more article reads at The Athletic and maybe it’ll lead to subscriptions. I don’t fault the guy for that.
We brought the kerfuffle up and discussed it in the podcast that’ll be out tomorrow morning, but my God because could the McCaffrey’s brothers be more thin skinned? They have a brother who left Michigan for Northern Colorado where their father is the coach. They have another who left Nebraska to go to Louisville, then to Rice all in the span of a few months.
From the full remarks Frost could have been referencing any number of players. What he was focusing on bad advice. There is ZERO in his remarks that can be taken as a shot at anybody. ZERO.
Mario Verduzco’s praise for Logan Smothers.
Nebraska is going into the 2021 season with one proven quarterback. That sounds flimsy at best. It sounds as if Adrian Martinez gets injured we’re going to collapse the whole football season.
Verduzco had pretty decent praise for Logan Smothers. Watching the spring game I thought Smothers was very good at improvising on the fly. I thought that his decision making with regards to knowing when to take off and run struck me as something that was a pretty good asset for him. We haven’t seen him thrown the ball. We haven’t seen him running on offense.
Martinez, Smothers, Haarberg.
These are the quarterbacks who are going to live or die with this year. Again, I’m going to reiterate my faith in Mario verduzco. I like him. I’ve spoken to him on a couple occasions and he’s a very affable person, although it doesn’t take much because I’m a homer. I hope that we see Smothers in game action early in the season. Not because of an Adrian Martinez injury, but because we are winning. Kicking ass.
Or perhaps they could build some packages for Smothers to run like they did Luke McCaffrey, then we could all judge him on a very small sample size.
I love Will Bolt.
Fred Hoiberg seems to be building a basketball program that’s not just set to win a few games in the Big 10. It’s been impressive, the amount of talent he’s brought in, in a relatively short time to the worst power program in basketball history. He stated for the first time they’re playing together as a team, probably because they have more experience with each other. That is an interesting bit to note.
Unlike Scott Frost, Fred Hoiberg doesn’t need to win a whole lot of games year in, year out. Everyone knows that this program is a perennial loser and that it will take someone sent by God to turn it into a winner. It will take someone sent by two gods to make it into a perennial winner.
If you’re not excited about Nebraska basketball, you’re not a Nebraska fan. Yeah! Woooooo!
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