Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

It doesn’t look good unless you realize it might set us up for a pretty decent year.

This episode is mostly about Nebraska’s opener against the Ohio State Buckeyes. I talk with Ramzy Nasrallah, executive editor of 11Warriors.com about his Buckeye team.

Ramzy and I discuss:

• How badly did the Big Ten botch this season?
• Does Ohio State have any weaknesses?
• Game prediction
• An outsider’s perspective on Nebraska
• Should Kevin Warren keep his job?
• How long has it been since Michigan beat Ohio State in football?

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About the Transcript

Keep in mind that the following is a transcript. I use a service that automates the first draft. As much as “artificial intelligence” is included in the description of every bit of technology these days, it’s clear that computers understanding human speech is more artificial than intelligent. The transcript has been edited to take out human speech bites, you know, um, okay, uh, but it’s not been edited to be an “article”.

Transcription

Jon Johnston: Welcome to Jon’s PostLife Crisis, I am your host, Jon Johnston founder and manager of CornNation.com, your Nebraska site of hopefulness, especially since today we’re talking about the upcoming season opener against the Ohio State Buckeyes.

Jon Johnston: And to do that, I’m talking with my close personal friend, Ramzy Nasrallah, could I screw this up any more at the beginning? [I destroyed the annunciation of his name and stumbled through the beginning - sometimes I wonder why I do this.]

Ramzy Nasrallah: It’s the first time my name has ever been botched. I can’t believe it took this long in my life to get to a point where someone could pronounce it so seamlessly.

Jon Johnston: Since we’re such close friends. I’m just going to go with the first name. Ramzy Ramzy is the executive editor of Buckeye’s site 11 Warriors.com. Some guy in the White House claims that he brought back Big Ten football. Nebraska fans believe that Scott Frost and Nebraska brought back Big Ten football. I’m sure Ohio State fans believe that Ryan Day and the Buckeyes brought back big tent football. So who who brought back big tent football?

Ramzy Nasrallah: I think antigen testing and process that should have been ironed out as one of the disaster scenarios sometime in April, May, June, July, brought back Big Ten football, I think they did it under a fire drill when they realized that crossing their fingers and hoping that covid we just kind of go away. When that didn’t materialize, they had to spring into action and took them a month to do something that probably would have taken three in terms of scenarios. There should have been a path for the virus does end up dying out on its own, one where the virus is still a threat, but a small one that requires some degree of mitigation. And then what we have now, where there are still 700 to 1100 people dying daily from this and people in large groups who breathe heavily when they are smashing into each other, that requires a different degree mitigation. And so what ultimately happened between the ham fisted cancelation of the season and when it was brought back was a whole bunch of meetings, procedure, external pressures and ultimately health care experts coming together to say this is how we can do this in a manner that prevents each one of these football games from being a superspreader event.

Jon Johnston: You sound like you actually know what’s going on with all of this instead of just like grrrrr masks, what the hell,

Ramzy Nasrallah: You know, grrrrr masks and hoax that does much better numbers.

Ramzy Nasrallah: When I’m not obsessing over this ridiculous sport of teenage gladiators smashing into each other I work in health care. So actually, one degree further, I work in infection prevention. So just a little little bit of insight into how these things are contained, mitigated and ultimately measured so that we can get out of them. They are going to happen throughout human history as long as they’re allowed to stay on this little marble.

Jon Johnston: I could go somewhere with that, but we’re going to go back to football.

Ramzy Nasrallah: Sounds good.

Jon Johnston: Because because I have been talking about covid for months. I’ve interviewed an epidemiologist, a coronavirus researcher who was researching it before it actually was cool. Biomechanics. My last interview was with my neurosurgeon about CTE. This one. Let’s just focus on football, because we’re going to have football, right?

Ramzy Nasrallah: We are going to attempt to have football. I think we will have football. Yes.

Jon Johnston: Ok, all right.

Jon Johnston: And we’re going to talk about the Ohio State Buckeyes. Urban Meyer said you guys have like 11 NFL players on offense. Is he exaggerating?

Ramzy Nasrallah: 11? Yes, he’s within... His margin of error is maybe one.

Jon Johnston: Don’t you think that’s a little unfair? It’s like wage inequality,

Ramzy Nasrallah: Unfair to whom?

Jon Johnston: To everyone else except you.

Ramzy Nasrallah: I mean, I’m OK with it. The idea that Urban brought to what was already a pretty good program when we won’t count the 2011 self nuke year.

Ramzy Nasrallah: It was already a pretty strong program. But he only wanted to recruit guys that were going to get drafted on the first day in terms of talent. Now, there’s other bit of variable evaluation that goes into the kind of guy that comes on. They’ve they walked away from some five star talent. It’s basically the combination of talent and culture and coach ability.Does Urban Meyer want to coach a certain guy mattered when they were recruiting people. At the same time Brian Day, I think, subscribes to that as well, having spent some time in the NFL and it comes back to bite you on rare occasions when you have someone like Antoine Winfield, Junior doesn’t really fit the measurable that someone like Urban Meyer would want. And you pass on a guy that’s the current NFL rookie of the class who was a game changer, a program changer at Minnesota. And I’m not obsessed or upset about it. I’m fine.

Jon Johnston: We could go into that, too, because I think they’re going to struggle a little bit. I think that one guy missing on their defense is going to hurt Minnesota quite a bit. But that’s not your program. I’ll bug the Minnesota guys about that.

Jon Johnston: Justin Fields, is he the best quarterback in college football?

Ramzy Nasrallah: Yeah, I think he and Trevor Lawrence are 1A and 1B. They when they faced off against each other in the Fiesta Bowl, if you get rid of all the other noise from that game, you saw a couple of guys that just really were a generational talents leaving their teams back and forth. I couldn’t believe that Lawrence moved as well as he did. He reads the field well, he’s got the size. He’s got the arm. Obviously, he’s got some help around him. But those guys, it reminds me of I mean, we have hindsight now, but it reminds me of the whole Ryan Leaf Peyton Manning debate from a little over 20 years ago. They both collegiate like they had every bit of the measurable that you would want. I hope neither of them get the Ryan Leaf legacy, but those guys are going to be quite wealthy for a long time playing the sport that hopefully will be able to get to see Justin Fields play, well, this month. My gosh, it’s October.

Jon Johnston: Let’s take a side track on that. Justin Fields and Trevor Lawrence, they both speak well. Peyton Manning, obviously over the years he’s become, you know, the commercials and the funny guy and stuff like that. Our quarterbacks in our college football players now are much they seem much more articulate than they’ve ever been. You do find that also?

Ramzy Nasrallah: Yeah, I think that there’s a there’s an element of them being groomed for media, which doesn’t stop. When Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf were playing there was no YouTube. There was I think there was Friendster. Napster hadn’t been invented yet. So when you said something on TV, if you want to be recording it onto a voice, tape, kind of went away or it was read in print. Now, when you fumble, it’s forever. And that’s something that programs have to their credit try to accommodate for. And they use that as a recruiting tool. Ohio State is very good at that. Like, look, if you come here, this is a this is a business decision for you. We become a marketing agency for your brand.

Ramzy Nasrallah: By the way, you need to develop a brand, which means you need to be able to complete a sentence without spitting all over yourself when someone with a microphone is talking to you. So, yeah, I think that’s the case, I also think that they’re both exceptional people and by the way, they’re from like 10 minutes away from each other in Georgia. So they came from the same spot.

Jon Johnston: That seems unfair too.

Ramzy Nasrallah: Ohio State’s starting running back Trey sermon is from there, too. So you’ve got a couple of district backfield in Columbus.

Jon Johnston: Let’s go back to the offense. I mean, you guys have the you guys have everybody. Are there any holes or any weaknesses whatsoever on the offensive side of the ball?

Ramzy Nasrallah: No, they have no weaknesses on the offensive side of the ball. They don’t have any weaknesses. They don’t have offensive line weaknesses. They could use maybe one more healthy body in the backfield from a running back standpoint, because they are dealing with Master Teague that has an injury which really helped create urgency behind getting Trey Sermon is a grad transfer. Marcus Crawley got an injury last year.

Ramzy Nasrallah: Other than that, not they have no weaknesses offensively at all.

Jon Johnston: So how many points a game do you expect them to score?

Ramzy Nasrallah: Last September, which included the game with Nebraska, which is an ESPN college game to game if memory serves. The Buckeyes won September, which had five Saturdays by an average score of 49 to 9. I think that the wild card this year is the lack of a spring training period, the spring game.

Ramzy Nasrallah: Covid, which everyone deals with, but I think you’ll you’ll see Ohio State comfortably north of 30 points a game in Big Ten play in the sprints that they have and also depends on I mean, there’s a lot of self preservation that’s going to go into this, especially with such a sprint. When are you going to pull the starters out and give the depth, the chance to stretch its legs? I mean, there are games that the Buckeyes could have gone into - this is going to sound so arrogant - into the 80s and 90s. But we put it up, put the guys that I’ve been talking about that you brought up, Justin Fields, the on the bench. I don’t think that Chris Chugunov is going to score 49 points a game. He came in and just sort of held serve. It really depends. I don’t think Ohio State is going to have trouble scoring points at all.

Jon Johnston: Yeah, one of those games, they could have scored 80 points was against Nebraska last year. Thanks for bringing up the college game day debacle.

Ramzy Nasrallah: If Nebraska is going to come back, first you’ve got to get Kirk and Corso and Rece Davis on your campus. It’s not going to happen everyone’s campus this year in the same traditional way. But it’s not just having the guys and the coaches it’s having the hope and the belief. And Nebraska took a big step for that last year.

Jon Johnston: You think so?

Ramzy Nasrallah: I do. I don’t think that you’re going to get back to like 94 levels, but that’s a high bar to clear. You can get back to 93 levels without hitting your coach. You’ve got the guy that you like already.

Ramzy Nasrallah: So we have we’re an instant gratification society. And Nebraska is not the same old college football, I should say, is not the same as it was in Nebraska, his 90s heyday, so accommodating for environmental circumstances. I think the ceiling is double digit wins. I don’t think you’re going to be world beaters. It’s very difficult to do that. There are only a few schools or programs that are capable of doing that Or allow themselves to do it right?

Jon Johnston: Nebraskans focus so heavily on on the old days in the 90s and stuff like that. And I went to school in the 80s because I’m old and crusty and even the 80s were full of ass kicking. Really great teams. Didn’t win a national title in any season, but had the go for two team in 83 that should have.

Ramzy Nasrallah: That’s a weird call. That’s a tough call, a tough play to make at the two yard line.

Jon Johnston: I wonder sometimes if we’re to the point that we’re going to accept the fact that maybe eight eight wins will be a good season. We beat up Iowa so much about how average they are, even when they’re really actually pretty decent. But it’s a constant question in the back of my mind of where we’re going and where we’re going to get back to. And what what the ceiling actually is, is you if you as you brought up.

Ramzy Nasrallah: There’s a few things in there, though. Iowa has pretty much the same identity since 1979. The coach changed. They play the same kind of football, they get the same kind of athlete. They were the same kind of uniforms. I think about Nebraska, the transition from the old guard Callahan into Solich into... I won’t mention his name, but there was a brief foray to the spread. Your listeners follow Nebraska football. There was a brief uniform shift. And then just from a cultural standpoint, it gets a bit of a muddled story. Even when Ohio State went from Woody Hayes to Earl Bruce to John Cooper to to Jim Tressel, the style of football still punch someone in the mouth. Football and Urban Meyer came and people freaked out about, oh, they’re going to be a spread team. They were a power spread team. They were spreading the field up and doing the same. Carlos Hyde, Ezekiel Elliott. It was the same sort of thing, but different formations than once. The crusty types like yourself put in Columbus realized that they were like, OK, this is it. We’re not losing our identity. We’re not we’re not having a complete abdication of what Ohio State football means, whereas Nebraska had a bit of an identity crisis and I think it’s now coming back. But that scab that you can see them for a while before they fade and it’s going to it’s going to take some time. This is the bottom of Nebraska football right now. This is a postseason drought. Those don’t exist.

Jon Johnston: You think it is?

Ramzy Nasrallah: You hit the bottom.

Jon Johnston: So right now I’m waking up out of the ditch hungover as hell.

Ramzy Nasrallah: That’s pretty much the case. I just wish you had a better opponent to start the season with. By better, I don’t mean more talented. I mean a better one for Nebraska.

Ramzy Nasrallah: We’ll come back to that question. Let’s go to the defense. You guys have to replace seven starters, including seven of last year’s top 10 tacklers. Any holes, any weaknesses on the defense,

Ramzy Nasrallah: Weakness has an asterisk because you just don’t know. You’ve seen guys coming off the bench in mop up time for players that are NFL, Jordan Fuller, a really good NFL safety right now. David Arnett’s hurt, but also very solid. Jeff Kalakuta, third pick in the draft, replacing those guys with guys who’ve only come in in garbage time. I mean, they’ve done all the reps. You just don’t know what’s going to happen when they’re going against another team ones.

Ramzy Nasrallah: The coaching is great. The players are unproven. There’s a huge amount of new guys on that side of the ball, so it’s a different story from the offense. The offense, I think, is just going to be a lead to the defense. Could be. We don’t know yet.

Jon Johnston: How big is the return of Sean Wade?

Ramzy Nasrallah: It’s huge. He’s a the lockdown corner. He could be playing in the NFL right now.

Jon Johnston: We’ll go back to Anton Winfield. Is he to Ohio State’s defense, what Winfield was to Minnesota’s defense last season?

Ramzy Nasrallah: That’s a really good question.

Ramzy Nasrallah: I’m also should recuse myself because I have antoin senior members that probably cloud my judgment of junior. Sean Wood is Elite. Antoin Windfield was generational at Ohio State just because he’s like maybe 5-10 on with lifts. So you get a lot more like, wow, that’s... pound for pound Antoine Winfield is the best Ohio State football player I’ve ever seen in my life of watching them just because the law of small numbers, he shouldn’t have been as good as it was. Sean Wade is came out of a factory. Physically he’s what you want from a performance standpoint. You just kills it now that Fiesta Bowl against Clemson. He got ejected and I think part of that was emotional, but also part of it was from a personnel standpoint, you lost Sean Wade. He went to take a form tackle and Trevor Lawrence kind of ducked and turned it into a targeting penalty. That shows you how important it is on the field. Now, he’s he’s great. He’s going to line up on the other side. What’s the safety situation like having replaced Molik? Harrison, who was the biggest freak on the defense last year, not named him. How do you get that one pain in the ass rush end to replace Chase Young? There’s questions there. Nothing but talent. But, you’re only as good as what you’ve actually shown on the field. We haven’t seen them.

Jon Johnston: Anything else about the defense, I haven’t asked.

Ramzy Nasrallah: I think Jonathan Cooper being there, coming back for a fifth year, he played he had to choose one game to play, whether it was the playoff, actually not one game. But he chose to play in the Michigan game instead of playing in the Big Ten championship or in the postseason just so he would be eligible to come back this year. That’s a very senior type guy who’s also really talented, just Chase Young, because not many people are. That helps shore up some of the newness on that side of the ball, along with Timbaland (?) And Pete Warner. There are some really veteran guys there. They’re going to be playing with some non-veteran guys. So if they can gel really quickly, because it’s a sprint season. Yeah, they’re going to be OK.

Jon Johnston: So going back to that... You said earlier you wished Nebraska had a different opponent to start the season with you, what was your reaction when you saw the schedule?

Ramzy Nasrallah: I mean, I chuckled like anyone else, because you saw I mean, I know my tribe. I know what it’s like being from Ohio. I know Ohio State fans are like me. A lot of them get upset with me when I get pointed with criticism because it’s very difficult when you’re dealing with affairs of the heart like this, when you say something like why the pass defense could use some help or the offense to play, calling it you confuse critique with hate. Like, why do you hate this team so much? I don’t hate them. I’m not state media. I don’t have to tell you everything is fine. When I saw that Ohio State and Nebraska were leading off against each other. First it was I mean, this hopefully this kind of year will ever happen again. It’s the third opening opponent of the season that they’ve had. They were going to open with Bowling Green before they’re going to go out to Eugene, Oregon. And they were going to open at Illinois on a Thursday night and now they’re opening at home against Nebraska.

Ramzy Nasrallah: That happened within the course of a couple of months, just. All over the place, I mean, it’s a neat traditional rival match up, but from a personnel standpoint. Nebraska could have used a different opening opponent. I think Ohio State is going to come out with the kind of energy and talent and execution that you just don’t want to have under these circumstances of your opponent.

Jon Johnston: So you don’t see a Kansas State- Oklahoma happening here?

Ramzy Nasrallah: I really don’t.

Jon Johnston: Oh, my God, I have heart issues. And you’re not helping.

Ramzy Nasrallah: I mean, I love JD Spielman. I don’t know who from the Nebraska side is going to be able to cover Garrett Wilson or Chris Olavi or contain Justin Fields, who can run, but also give it to any one of a couple of backs. They’ve got great tight ends. The offensive line is solid there. If you can hold Ohio State to a field goal or obviously scoring every drive of the season, but that’s a big deal, stopping them from moving the ball down the field. That is a machine you need to score every time you get the ball against Ohio State.

Jon Johnston: Right, so minimize mistakes. You don’t see and you don’t see anything happening like the Kirk Ferentz saved his game plan for 25 years for one game. [Remember Iowa’s bashing of Ohio State in 2017?]

Ramzy Nasrallah: Which he did in 2017 and it was masterful. Well, they have different defensive coaches now. That was something we talked about that season coming mean. So to be honest, being an Ohio State you remember the losses more than the wins, because there’s like one a year, right? And so it sticks.

Jon Johnston: I remember how that used to go. It was it was really fun. And you kind of just went, wow, this will go on forever, because pretty much Tom Osborne ensured that it did kind of go on forever for very long. And then when it ended we’re all like, oh, my God, what is this? Why me? Why am I in this ditch? You wake upone day? And you’re like, oh, shit, where do we go from here?

Ramzy Nasrallah: That’s happened with the Ohio State fans when Woody Hayes got himself fired, not so with Earl Bruce because people were ready to get and no one wanted to be the coach to follow it, to quote Lou Holtz, you want to be the coach to follow the coach who followed with Coop, with Tressel and with Urban. There’s a bit of anxiety about what happens now, do we lose to lose this golden era?

Ramzy Nasrallah: No, The golden era has been the entire millennium thus far for Ohio State. I mean, their worst seasons. We’re either something like the 2011 nuke, self-nuke, which kind of a pause in 2004, they beat the hell out of Michigan and that’s all just about anyone cares about the state. That was their down year, they beat the Big Ten champions like a drum and then won six straight titles back when you can share them.

Jon Johnston: So you don’t see any fallout from Ryan Day whatsoever? I mean, even in the next three, four years, this is just something that’s going to keep going and going and going.

Ramzy Nasrallah: Ryan Day brings the best elements of what Urban Meyer brings to the program and uses some concealer for some of the pimples that he brought.

Ramzy Nasrallah: It became... Urban Meyer’s program is a bit of a cut throat, like, you know, what you’re signing up for. And you can either become one of his favorite people, one of the best guys ever been around, or you can just be a stranger in that facility if you’re not at a certain level. And I think about like Jack Welch Jr., punting 10 percent of the workforce, just constantly getting rid of the bottom 10 percent. The bottom 10 percent in that program, it’s not the bottom 10 percent of every other program. So it ends up I mean, if you still subscribe to amateurism, which I don’t really, but they are college kids, I think that Ryan Day does a better job of taking care of all 85 scholarship guys. Then Urban Meyer did, and that’s not because Urban Meyer was trying to be mean. That’s how that’s how he wired his program to be. Ryan Days is a little bit different. They go by the mantra of tough love. So it’s you’re still part of the family. You just need to contribute and to do your job to the best of your ability, because not every guy pans out.

Ramzy Nasrallah: It’s a different sort of spirit there, and I think it’s with one season and then th