[Husker] Concerned

[STUART JONES]

My take on some of these questions:

>>Someone tell me what needs to be done.  Is the tradition of NU football
gone, will we become OU and change coaches for the next 10 years and hope to
get lucky and find a great coach, can Callahan adjust and use the talent
that he has and not his NFL playbook since he does not have NFL players,
will the mighty Coz ever come up with a clever scheme for shutting a more
talented team down?  I am very concerned for what the future of Nebraska
Football will be in the 1-5 years?
 
SRJ: I doubt that there is anything that can be done because we abandoned a
ball control offense built on strength and lost one of the top three
defensive coordinators in the country (my estimate of Bo) when Solich was
fired. The arguments have been made endlessly why Solich could not get the
job done (getting the job done generally defined in terms of contending for
national championships). Perhaps he could not generally get the job done in
those terms. So far the current bunch can't either. Maybe that was an
ephemeral dream that we should have recognized is unrealistic. Maybe
demographics have finally caught up with us and without the conjunction of a
miracle coaching staff and other circumstances, we will not see it again
soon. Now we are forced to compete with other top programs that run
variations of the same sort of skill-player balanced passing attack. Before
we had a unique niche and scheme that we could exploit better than any other
program in the country. It's only draw back was that we did not always seem
attractive to skilled passing QBs and receivers. That was no small problem,
but we sometimes were able to compensate by offering a program that still
managed to compete at a high level, had stability, and more loyalty than
some other places. In many ways, NU tradition is dead. I think we have an
above mediocre Defensive Coordinator but not a great one. He is loyal to
Callaghan and passed up opportunities out of that loyalty. Coaches being
loyal to each other is the beginnings of a foundation of wider loyalty. That
is an NU tradition. Still, I don't see any national championship soon and I
doubt we will out recruit USC and OU (though OU has only debatable or
marginal geographic advantages over NU--i.e. proximity to TX) while running
our current offensive scheme (though it may help us out recruit many other
programs at the skill positions). Maybe we don't have to revise expectations
down to mediocrity (I doubt that we were ever there during the Solich except
for maybe for one year). I still see no National Championships on the
horizon. Maybe Pederson believed what he was saying. I don't see it. This
may add fuel to the old tired debate. So what? That is now our NU tradition.

Stuart Jones