[Husker] Wish I Knew ...

[Steve Stone]

... how to get a bead on how good this team is at this stage of the 
season. Comparing scores is, as always, an exercise in futility: 
VTech beats the Huskers by one, then the following week tromps Maini 
which turns around and whallops Oklahoma. The Huskers  trample 
Arkansas State which comes to Iowa City a couple of weeks later to 
play the Hawkeyes who thumped Penn State a week earlier yet barely 
squeeze past the the Red Wolves. If comparative scores had any 
meaning at all, the Huskers should win their remaining games, even 
againt Oklahoma, by huge margins. Yet we all know this is less than 
likely.

The Tigers almost always play the Huskers tough in Columbia. My first 
inkling of this came in 1951 as I watched Bobby Reynolds and company 
being pretty much stymied in Columbia. (Attended MU as a Junior in 
the fall semester of 1951 because I had been led to believe it had 
the best Journalism department in the country; left in January 1952 
because that was hardly the case.) And who doesn't remember how the 
Tigers at Faurot Field would have blown NU's 1997 MNC had Matt 
Davison not made "The Catch."

Yet, as Carl Sandburg said, history is a bucket of ashes.

My  gut tells me that this years Husker squad may be capable of good, 
even great, things, but it doesn't tell me that it will do them on 
the day after tomorrow.

Steve Stone