Nebraska Links: Preview, The Podcast, FFFF Offense (chart), FFFF Defense (chart).

Something's been missing from Michigan gamedays since the free programs ceased being economically viable: scientific gameday predictions that are not at all preordained by the strictures of a column in which one writer takes a positive tack and the other a negative one… something like Punt-Counterpunt.

PUNT

By Bryan MacKenzie
@Bry_Mac

I undertook a really dumb thing this year. I killed my entire lawn. On purpose.

We moved into our current house in 2019, and the lawn has always been mediocre at best. It was green in the summer, but a lot of the green was weeds, clover, crabgrass, nutgrass, and dandelions, and the portion that WAS grass was a mixture of completely different grass types. Every year I said, “this is the year I do something about this lawn.” And every year, I did the same thing: nothing. I had too much work and too many kids to drive to various activities and too many football games to watch and too many dumb articles to write.

It reached the point where we clearly had the worst lawn on the street. Most of our neighbors either use a lawn service or are retired and spend inordinate amounts of time babying their (admittedly superior) yards. But I am young and stubborn (and cheap) enough to feel like I should be doing it myself. But then I made a mistake that led me down a fraught, painful path: I asked the Internet.

The Before

[After THE JUMP: DIY football programs.]

The Internet has been an absolute game-changer in the realm of do-it-yourself projects. There is a YouTube video demonstrating every installation and repair and tip and trick for literally anything you want to do. There is a forum discussing the very specific problem you have but can barely articulate. And you have Google tying the whole thing together. But the result is a rabbit hole of the most obsessed, detail-oriented, and insane practitioners of a given area. In short, I fell into Lawn Care Internet, a group second only to Swifties in terms of… uh… we’ll call it “devotion to the subject matter.”

As a result, the plan I settled was one of Total Warfare. I decided to kill every green organism on every square inch, rebuild the land beneath it from scratch, and start over from seed. Like Thanos at the end of End Game: no half-measures. Total annihilation, followed by a new lawn, a grateful lawn that knows not what it has lost but only what it has been given. A world born out of Round-Up.

It was a multi-month effort: aeration, thatching, more aeration, glyphosate, scarifying, raking, more glyphosate, more raking, spreading 10 yards of top soil, leveling, herbicide, seeding, fertilizing, peat moss, watering, watering, watering, watering, watering, watering, watering, watering. It was hard, hot, painful, work. But now, four weeks after seeding and probably 10 weeks after I started this whole thing, I have grass. Glorious green grass. A mix of Tall Fescue and Kentucky Bluegrass, and barely a weed to be seen. And today, before kickoff, I am planning the first mow.

Over the past two weeks ever since the grass really started to come in, dozens of neighbors have stopped to compliment our new turf, and to comment on the many many hours they saw me out toiling in the hot Tennessee sun, and to ask questions about everything I’d done. It is Dad Nirvana: getting to spontaneously talk about lawn care and use phrases like, “yeah, it’s coming in pretty nicely.”

However, for the six weeks before the grass came in, no one really talked to me about it. Because for weeks the “yard” looked like unmitigated crap. It went from “sub-par lawn” to “sub-par lawn that has been absolutely wrecked” to “are they ever going to do anything about this dirt patch” to “has anyone knocked on the door to see if the owners are alive.”

When Matt Rhule walked in the door on Day 1

But I know they were talking to each OTHER about it, probably with a mix of sympathy, curiosity, frustration, and schadenfreude. They privately wondered if I had any clue what I was doing (which, fair), and whether this crazy plan would ever actually work. And if it DIDN’T work, how monumentally screwed was I?

Nebraska Football under Scott Frost was in the weeds for a long, long time, to the point where, in 2021 and 2022, they were the worst program on the block. They had some bright spots, but those were few and far between amidst a field of taller, greener eff-ups. It didn’t get that way overnight; they got there through a long, gradual combination of mismanagement, lethargy, and baseless hope that things would just improve on their own. But finally Nebraska was forced to nuke the whole thing and start over.

And the early returns are extremely positive. You can see early signs of growth in lots of places, and the old bad habits are dying. And the neighbors are finally talking TO Nebraska again, rather than about them. Because HOLY CRAP have we spent the last few years talking about Nebraska. The conversation has shifted from “how much worse can this get” to “how quickly can it make the improvement we kinda think is likely?” And more than anything, they’re finally TRYING, which those of us who have to watch them appreciate.

Promising, but super flawed

However ⁠— and this is a big however ⁠— Nebraska is nowhere near a finished product. At this point, they’re still objectively bad in lots of areas, even compared to some of the mediocre teams in the neighborhood. It’s still patchy, the roots are tentative, and there are areas that still look awful. It’ll be a couple of seasons before they’re a full, mature team. But as their neighbors, we’re still happy for them nonetheless. Michigan 35, Nebraska 7

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COUNTERPUNT

By Internet Raj
@internetraj

There is something uniquely sad about watching legends futilely battle the inexorable march of time, languish in the arena well beyond their prime, and slowly fade into obscurity. Hakeem Olajuwon on the Raptors. Joe Namath on the Rams. Blockbuster after Netflix. Blackberry after the iPhone. Whether it’s athletes or conglomerates, history is littered with once-proud titans reduced to brittle shells of their past glory. Sometimes it’s a failure to innovate. Other times it’s the inevitability of, well, time.

An absolutely mind-boggling player-jersey combination.

Nebraska football was once a titan in its own right. From 1969 to 2001, Nebraska finished ranked in the final polls every single year. And thirteen of those years, they finished as a top-5 team. There’s no mistaking it; the Cornhuskers were, for a gaudy three decades’ run, a veritable blue blood powerhouse. When Tom Osborne retired in 1997^[1], Nebraska hired one of its own: Frank Solich, a former player and assistant coach. Solich led Nebraska to an admirable 58-19 record over his six-year tenure, but he was unceremoniously fired by then-athletic director Steve Pederson. Why? Mediocrity.

“I refuse to let the program gravitate into mediocrity,” Pederson said when he officially announced Solich’s firing. Pederson, in retrospect, turned out to be right, but not in the way he expected. No, Nebraska did not “gravitate into mediocrity.” Instead, with the successive hires of Bill Callahan, Bo Pelini and Scott Frost, the Cornhuskers plunged into a gaping abyss of unceasing pain before finally drifting off into a numbing coma of obsolescence. Sure there were minor blips of success here and there, most notably during the Pelini era, but those were fleeting and usually punctuated by a big game blowout.

But one of the most beautiful parts of college football fandom is the eternal spring of optimism. The next coach. That five-star recruit. Those new facilities. That big time booster. When you’re a college football fan, you’re always just one tipped domino away from a chain reaction that is preordained to culminate with crystalline glory in January. Even Nebraska fans, after having endured the Geneva Convention-infringing one-score loss dong punches of the Frost-era, have had their dying embers of hope stoked by turnaround specialist Matt Rhule. And, four games into his inaugural season, it’s far too early cast any meaningful verdict on whether the program is trending in the right direction.

But part of me hopes Nebraska does get back on track. And it has nothing to do with my affinity for corn, creepily friendly fans, or ugly uniforms. Rather, it’s a deeply-rooted, visceral sense of empathy I have with Nebraska as a Michigan fan. Why? Because we were that close to being Nebraska. Two straight Big Ten Championships and Playoff appearances have gone a long way of washing the taste of Late-Stage-Lloyd Carr, RichRod (oh dear lord and Greg Robinson), clapping buffoon Brady Hoke, The Spot, and Don Brown versus crossing routes out of our collective mouths.

But don’t get it twisted: we were one more lackluster season away from begging at the feet of Matt Fucking Campbell to restore us to glory. Since 1997, Michigan and Nebraska had followed a similar trajectory­—consistent failure with a few sprinkles of mediocrity and quickly-dashed hope mixed in for good measure. But something happened in 2021 and just like that, Michigan was Back and Nebraska was, well, still Nebraska. The whims of the College Football Gods can be like that: fickle and merciless.

We were a JT Barrett spot away from this nightmare scenario.

College football fandom can be cruel, but Nebraska fandom feels particularly brutal. The program is marked by the lethal cocktail of outsized self-importance and expectations paired with being a geographic and commercial afterthought for the modern-day financial arms race that is college football. Not to mention, losing so many close games in the fashion of Lucy not just being content with pulling the football but also giving Charlie an atomic wedgie by hanging him from the goalposts.

And so, for that reason, I do feel for Nebraska. How can you not? And who knows, maybe today’s the day they turn it around. Actually, come on. You know how this ends. I know how this ends. Even Nebraska knows how this ends.

Michigan 20, Nebraska 17 but with Nebraska having a win probability exceeding 50% in the fourth quarter and the entire Nebraska fanbase collapsing with a crippling metaphorical testicular pain when the clock hits 0:00.

[1] After being gifted a fraudulent, sympathy share of the national championship.