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Nelva Deeke won a contest from the ESPN TV show "College GameDay" and Home Depot.
She was given the choice either of tickets and all expenses paid to the Rose Bowl, or the show's three hosts: Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso would come to her home for a barbecue.

"I could've gotten tickets, with all the amenities, to the Rose Bowl, but since Nebraska wasn't playing, I decided not to use that one," she said. Instead of a barbecue in Hubbell, Deeke and some friends met the GameDay crew for lunch at a Lincoln restaurant, May 21.

Okay, okay: USC-Illinois did not exactly go down in the lore of the Rose Bowl, but it's not like Nebraska was busy on January first. You've been given a choice between a free junket to sunny California in January or lunch with Lee Corso in Lincoln, Nebraska, and you pick Corso?

I say we excommunicate the entire state. It'll be like Lesotho, except the Basotho would have the damn sense to go to the Rose Bowl.

(Via Get The Picture.)

The Big 12's annual meetings are currently taking place in Colorado Springs and league commissioner Dan Beebe has a lot on his plate. But one agenda item that he is pushing strongly is a fifth year of eligibility for football players. He hopes the proposed change will get some attention from the NCAA rules committee.

The proposal for a fifth year of eligibility would eliminate redshirting, instead giving college football players five years to compete on the field. Under current rules, players have a five-year window in which to complete four years of playing time. This isn't the first time this change has come up, but opponents have argued that eligibility rules need to standard across sports. Big 12 commissioner Beebe, disagrees.

Beebe, however, said he thinks football should be seen as unique because it has a high rate of redshirts and injuries.

"Injuries happen and coaches have players who could contribute, but they don't want to play someone on a limited basis and burn a redshirt year," Beebe said. "And you have kids during their redshirt year who are getting the heck beat out of them in practice every day with no hope of playing."

The rule change would certainly eliminate the need for coaches to agonize about redshirting decisions. In addition, it would seemingly end the need for athletes and schools to file medical hardships in the wake of injuries. Lastly, given that the average college football player takes around 4.7 years to graduate, the five-year eligibility window could help improve graduation rates.

I earlier discussed Bo Pelini's role in laying the groundwork for Nebraska's reconciliation with Frank Solich. Now word comes that Solich himself, is making moves toward such a resolution. As this article notes, he recently began the process of reinstating a scholarship in his name to the Nebraska athletic department.

"The concept of Solich's $350,000 post-graduate scholarship was the brainchild of three close friends, Bob Sawdon of Austin, Texas; Tom Rodeno of Castle Pines, Colo; and Mick Ziegler of Dallas. The scholarship was established shortly after Solich took over as Nebraska's head coach in 1998. In 2004, in the months after his firing, he moved the scholarship out of the athletic department to the NU College of Law.

Perhaps Solich didn't appreciate that the plaque in South Stadium recognizing his scholarship recipients was taken down."

Perhaps you're right. The scholarship fiasco was another unfortunate by-product of Solich's firing, and the way it was mishandled by former athletic director Steve Pederson. But this seems to be more evidence that we're getting closer to some type of reunion. Fortunately, Steve Sipple agrees that bringing together the old and the new isn't a panacea for what ails Husker Nation.

"As for the old wounds, it's probably shortsighted to think they're going to magically heal, even with Tom Osborne back in the fold. Bottom line is, the program has endured massive tumult - almost unimaginable, if you think about it - and the healing process will require a lot of more time and patience. No need to rush anything."

via The Wiz

"Old School" is the College Football FanHouse's irregular look back at the rich history of college football, usually through the medium of embeddable flash video. Check out the Old School archive for more famous plays and infamous hair.



Heisman Trophy winners often falter in their team's bowl game appearance following the award ceremony. But when they do play up to their potential, we are occasionally rewarded with an amazing performance like that of Nebraska's Johnny Rodgers in the 1973 Orange Bowl.

Nebraska's head coach Bob Devaney moved Rodgers from wingback to I-back for the Orange Bowl match-up with the Fighting Irish. The move paid off as Rodgers finished his collegiate career by scoring four touchdowns and throwing for another in a 40-6 Nebraska victory.

In what remains one of the greatest bowl performances ever, Rodgers:

· Rushed 15 times for 81 yards or an average of 5.4 yards/carry.

· Scored three touchdowns on runs of eight, four and five yards.

· Caught a screen pass from quarterback Dave Humm and ran 50 yards through the Irish to score a fourth time, establishing a new Orange Bowl record for total points and touchdowns scored.

· Threw a 52-yard touchdown pass to Frosty Anderson.

Overall, Rodgers personally accounted for 30 of Nebraska's points and clinched a dramatic and impressive final victory for retiring coach Bob Devaney.

It was an messy, messy breakup when Nebraska fired Frank Solich in 2003. So messy that it led to the failed Bill Callahan experiment and the darkest days in the history of Husker football. Now Bo Pelini - a member of Solich's final coaching staff in Nebraska in 2003 – is back as the head coach. So too, are the painful memories of the way in which Solich was let go. What is perhaps surprising, however, is that it is Pelini who is banging the drum on Solich's behalf.

Pelini first mentioned the way Solich was treated in a 45-minute speech to a crowd in Columbus, Nebraska. During that night, Pelini responded to a question about not being named head coach in 2003, by stating that Frank Solich should not have been fired in the first place.

More recently Pelini, expressed his views even more clearly.

"He [Frank Solich] played a big part in me being where I am tonight," Pelini said.

"I do know this: The one person I feel sorry for in the whole thing is Coach Solich," Pelini told a crowd of 525 Thursday night. "I wish he could be back here with us. Just through the whole thing, I thought he was the one who got the short end of the stick, and that's too bad."

"Old School" is the College Football FanHouse's irregular look back at the rich history of college football, usually through the medium of embeddable flash video. Check out the Old School archive for more famous plays and infamous hair.

It's hard to imagine how dominant Nebraska was in 1996. The gold standard for excellence this millennium, USC, has won a couple national titles but has only one undefeated season in the Carroll era. Even when they were obviously the best team, they weren't flat unbeatable.

Nebraska was. After a crushing 18-16 defeat against Florida State in the 1994 Orange Bowl (about which more here), the Huskers went on the warpath. 1994: 13-0, national champions, no team within two scores save Miami in the bowl game. 1995: 12-0, national champions, no team closer than 14 points. Obliterated Florida 62-14 in the bowl game. They opened the 1996 season by hammering Michigan State and Oklahoma State by a combined score of 114-31. Nebraska was never going to lose again.

Enter Arizona State. Enter Derrick Rodgers. Exit streak.



(via EDSBS.)

Fans for every school occasionally claim that their team is being slighted by a particular announcing team or media talking head. At Nebraska, however, the suspicion runs much deeper. So deep, in fact, that it's become an obsession.

"On occasion, they are critiqued almost as much as the game itself. Once in a rare while, you will hear a sports announcer/analyst receive praise from a fan. But more often they are called terrible or - worse than that - biased: Announcer X hates Nebraska.

Some might call it paranoia. Some are sure of its truth. There are those out there who are quite certain Brent Musburger has it in for Nebraska. Or that Mark May plots out his lines with the intention of making some guy in Omaha shout foul words at his television."

This type of thinking has gone on for as long as I've been a Husker fan, although I've rarely understood it. The claims of bias range from seemingly innocent comments from announcers to the number of College Gameday visits or even the length or number of highlights shown on national media outlets.

For instance:

"Announcers are always against Nebraska," one Big Red fan from Colorado recently opined on the Journal Star blog. "I think it started out as an East Coast bias and blossomed when we kept beating the (tar) out of all their precious East Coast schools."

Quite frankly, Nebraska hasn't been beating the tar out of anybody lately, but that certainly hasn't diminished the banging of the conspiracy drum. Fortunately, not every Husker fan is buying into the sensationalism.

"Parsing each and every word the announcers utter for any hint of bias against Nebraska is an absolute waste of energy," wrote another fan. "Nothing takes the fun out of watching a game like listening to your companions whine incessantly about something that has no bearing whatsoever on the game's outcome."

Ah, common sense, a breath of fresh air.

And, Nebraska fans would contend, their program. It doesn't take a shrink to diagnose some of the troubles: mania, control freak behavior, lone wolf efforts to thoroughly undermine hired hands. It's all there.

Former coach Bill Callahan was obsessive about his offense; he made the game plan and called the plays. Sources say before the Texas game -- and at the height of Nebraska's failures -- Callahan let his assistants build the game plan and said he wouldn't call one play.

After the first series, Callahan not only called every offensive play, he called the defensive sets, too. The Huskers gave up three touchdowns in the fourth quarter and lost, 28-25. Then they allowed 172 points over their final three games.

Ever see a kids' community league basketball game where one kid basically hogs the ball on offense, doesn't pass, and whose teammates basically hate his guts and more or less quit on the court? That never works out, and then everyone says nasty things about that person when they're out of range. Or they snipe from the digital pages of The Sporting News.

(Via: Double Extra Point)

"Old School" is the College Football FanHouse's irregular look back at the rich history of college football, usually through the medium of embeddable flash video. Check out the Old School archive for more famous plays and infamous hair.

The 1994 Orange Bowl was a classic between Florida State and Nebraska -- and yes, envisioning those schools as long-ago national powers does make me feel old, thank you for asking -- that came down to the final second, twice. Nebraska took a 16-15 lead on a 27-yard field goal with 1:16 left; Florida State made it 18-16 just 55 seconds later.

A 15-yard celebration penalty ensued. Florida State is kicking off from the 20 with 21 seconds left in the game. Those 21 seconds take nearly ten minutes, with the final second occupying the vast bulk of those minutes as the referees accidentally let the final second tick off and the teams flood the field, thinking the game over. It is not:




...all that, and he missed. Favorite moment is ABC cutting to a sideline camera just in time for that camera to get told to get off the damn field.

Florida State won the national title. Eventually.

A recent editorial in The Daily Nebraska, the University's student newspaper rised the ire of first year Nebraska head coach Bo Pelini. So much so, that Pelini banned the newspaper from attending practice for a few hours on Monday. The op-ed, which ran in Monday's paper, centered on Pelini's handling of disciplinary problems amongst team members. More specifically, it criticized Pelini for downplaying incidents involving current players and refusing to comment about the recent arrest of an incoming recruit.

"Josh Williams, a highly-ranked defensive end recruit out of Denton, Texas, was arrested last week for assault and robbery. He stands accused of approaching a Denton man as he sat in his pickup, punching him in the face and then robbing him of $900.

Despite Williams being released from jail Thursday, Pelini has had no comment on the situation."

The piece continues by noting:

Pelini began his trend of downplaying altercations involving football players early on in his tenure when quarterback Patrick Witt was arrested after showing up in a dormitory intoxicated and belligerent, shoving an RA and then fleeing from police.