Lessons from the 90s when we remember ALL of the 90s

[The_CornTorch]

I'm not sure NU needs to necessarily "out recruit" those programs for the "skill players" to compete with them. Right now the problem isn't that our receivers, RBs or QB are not good enough. It's the consistency (which will come) and the interior line play (which will hopefully come) that hold this offense back from scoring sufficient points against the better teams. I doubt NU will ever have the depth of players like Stanley and JD that an OSU will have...injuries in the wrong spot will always hurt NU worse than those programs...but on the top line or two we will be fine.

The biggest recruiting hurdle IMHO is getting the bad ass d-linemen that we never seem to get.

We used to... wistrom, tomich, walker, etc.

 

[bilsker]

I will be the first person to admit I don't know jack about X's and O's so take this worth a grain of salt, but I thought the goal of the spread offense was mainly to spread the defense out, taking out extra blockers (like a FB) and put in extra receivers, the goal being to make the defense spread out for more man-to-man matchups or find holes in the zone.

"As far as personnel, you need a deep stable of pass catchers, as unless all the receivers are threats, the defense will have no need to spread out and defend them. You also need a quarterback with a good arm, and a running back who is adept at reading his blocks." (https://www.football-tutorials.com/spread-offense-101/).

Just my two cents. I think in a spread offense you lean more on your skill players, and in a power running game you lean more on your line and blockers. I'm probably out of my depth here though.

I don't think you're wrong about what's needed I just think that NU can get the skill guys needed to put points on the board on about anybody.

 

[bilsker]

We used to... wistrom, tomich, walker, etc.

For whatever reason it's been a problem lately. Even after Suh you'd have thought NU would have been able to reel in some guys off of that success and it's just been a beyotch.

 

[Middle-aged_Ball_Coach]

We used to... wistrom, tomich, walker, etc.

The guys you mentioned are worth digging into, so let's do that:

Kenny Walker was not highly recruited because he was deaf, and it was an open question as to how that would translate into playing at the major college level.
Jared Tomich was not highly recruited because he was a partial qualifier under the old Prop 48 rules.
Wistrom was highly touted and highly recruited, but he was from relatively nearby (Missouri), and that was in an era when Missouri, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa State, and Iowa were all NOT good. He came because he wanted to win, and he loved Coach Osborne. He probably would have went elsewhere if he were a senior in the recent past.​

 

[Middle-aged_Ball_Coach]

I thought the goal of the spread offense was mainly to spread the defense out, taking out extra blockers (like a FB) and put in extra receivers, the goal being to make the defense spread out for more man-to-man matchups or find holes in the zone.

JKinney, both of your comments above are excellent, and I've tried to address them several times today, but I keep writing multi-page treatises that are going to try everyone's patience, so I'm going to address this one comment first, and hopefully I can address your earlier, longer comment later when I have a little more time to expand on it.

There are at least two schools of spread offenses, and you're describing the one that most people think of when they think of the Run & Shoot or the Air Raid offenses. I could literally write a dozen pages on the history of that particular style of offense and how it made a quantum leap when it geographically was brought from Portland State in the 70s (under Mouse Davis) to first the University of Houston in the 80s and then the Houston Oilers shortly afterward. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia, start looking at all of the current top-level coaches who came out of that area during that time, and your mind will be blown. Suffice it to say that the high-powered offenses from recent years of Dana Holgorsen at West Virginia, Mike Leach at Washington State and Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, TCU, Art Briles at Baylor, Kevin Sumlin at Houston and Texas A&M, et al. were all from that coaching tree and its influence on its neighbors. Frost's offense is NOT from that coaching tree.

In the late 90s several coaches in several places began experimenting with running a spread offense that was designed for a running QB who was a threat to run and could throw relatively safe passes that basically took the place of the old triple-option plays of the 70s and 80s offenses, such as Bill Yeoman's Veer at Houston, Barry's Wishbone at Oklahoma, and Osborne's I-formation at Nebraska. Instead of having an option pitch-back, they had a receiver camped out near the sideline on or behind the Line-of-Scrimmage. The QB could do a read off of a FB dive that was basically the same as what Osborne ran out of his Ace package in the mid-90s, but instead of bringing a WB (such as Shevin Wiggins) around as a pitchback, there would be a WR already in place as the equivalent of a pitch-man. Gus Malzahn was a high school coach in Arkansas at the time, and he literally wrote the book on the Hurry Up, No Huddle offense that he ran that was built around this type of scheme. He's famous for taking the old Delaware Wing-T offense and stretching it out horizontally (by replacing the TEs with Split-Ends and replacing WBs with Slot-Receivers) while putting the QB in shotgun. Malzahn always loved the pass, but it was at Tulsa where he learned how effective it was to have a running QB out of the spread. Add in a Cam Newton and a national championship, and suddenly everybody was spreading the field to run more effectively.

Who was the head coach at Tulsa? Todd Graham, who until recently coached at Arizona State, but before Tulsa coached at West Virginia under Rich Rodriguez. Rodriguez probably did as much as anybody to popularize the spread-to-run concept, and he had a 70% winning percentage at WV to show that it was effective. He was already doing his spread-to-run offense in the early 90s at NAIA level in WV, then at Tulane, then at Clemson, and then at UWV in 2000. One of the guys in his neighborhood who was doing something similar at Bowling Green was a young coach named Urban Meyer. Tebow at Florida was the third iteration of spread-to-run after he'd had success doing the same thing at Bowling Green and then Utah.

In the 90s there was a guy in New Hampshire who started out coaching RBs then coached O-line and in the process saw new ways to simplify zone blocking schemes to allow elusive players to get loose in space. When he was named the OC in '99 at UNH, Chip Kelly was combining the Hurry Up/No Huddle ideas of Malzahn with his simplified zone blocking schemes to spread teams out to run. Mike Bellotti was trying to build a Nike-trademarked program in Oregon based on speed, and he liked what Chip Kelly did at UNH, so he brought him in to make everything go faster. They both brought in Frost, and that's where we get interested.

Frost combines elements of ALL of the spread-to run offenses listed above, and he's been saying for nearly a decade that he dreams of the day when he can combine all of that with the power running game of his glory days at Nebraska. If you saw Ohio State use a spread-formation version of Osborne's old Counter Tray to pummel Oregon in the 2nd half of the 2014-15 NCAA Championship Game, you can imagine what it was like for Scott Frost to be sitting up in the Oregon booth, waiting to call plays while watching Urban Meyer and Tom Herman literally doing what he'd been wanting to do for years.

Frost doesn't need star athletes for this system, though he will need to have a star QB about every other year to make it work,... so he's basically in the same boat as Osborne in the 80s and 90s when it comes to recruiting the offense. They need fast backs and receivers who can catch the ball, but those aren't that hard to find. He'll need Nebraska kids to commit to beefing up and re-incarnating the O-line from the glory days of the Pipeline, and I think that there will be Nebraska kids lining up to do it. It's poetic that Cam Jurgens--who is as high of a recruit that Nebraska has had from in-state in a long, long time--just signed on to become one of those guys by switching to Center. It's still possible to build O-linemen like the glory days, and this is where the state of Nebraska can contribute.

 

[Paramus]

JKinney, both of your comments above are excellent, and I've tried to address them several times today, but I keep writing multi-page treatises that are going to try everyone's patience, so I'm going to address this one comment first, and hopefully I can address your earlier, longer comment later when I have a little more time to expand on it.

There are at least two schools of spread offenses, and you're describing the one that most people think of when they think of the Run & Shoot or the Air Raid offenses. I could literally write a dozen pages on the history of that particular style of offense and how it made a quantum leap when it geographically was brought from Portland State in the 70s (under Mouse Davis) to first the University of Houston in the 80s and then the Houston Oilers shortly afterward. If you want to down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia, start looking at all of the current top-level coaches who came out of that area during that time, and your mind will be blown. Suffice it to say that the high-powered offenses from recent years of Dana Holgorsen at West Virginia, Mike Leach at Washington State and Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, TCU, Art Briles at Baylor, Kevin Sumlin at Houston and Texas A&M, et al. were all from that coaching tree and its influence on its neighbors. Frost's offense is NOT from that coaching tree.

In the late 90s several coaches in several places began experimenting with running a spread offense that was designed for a running QB who was a threat to run and could throw relatively safe passes that basically took the place of the old triple-option plays of the 70s and 80s offenses, such as Bill Yeoman's Veer at Houston, Barry's Wishbone at Oklahoma, and Osborne's I-formation at Nebraska. Instead of having an option pitch-back, they had a receiver camped out near the sideline on or behind the Line-of-Scrimmage. The QB could do a read off of a FB dive that was basically the same as what Osborne ran out of his Ace package in the mid-90s, but instead of bringing a WB (such as Shevin Wiggins) around as a pitchback, there would be a WR already in place as the equivalent of a pitch-man. Gus Malzahn was a high school coach in Arkansas at the time, and he literally wrote the book on the Hurry Up, No Huddle offense that he ran that was built around this type of scheme. He's famous for taking the old Delaware Wing-T offense and stretching it out horizontally (by replacing the TEs with Split-Ends and replacing WBs with Slot-Receivers) while putting the QB in shotgun. He and his co-offensive coordinator are believed to have accidentally come up with the Read-Option while coaching together at Tulsa when they told their QB to keep it if the DE kept crashing down hard on the RB during their hand-off mesh. Malzahn always loved the pass, but it was at Tulsa where he learned how effective it was to have a running QB out of the spread. Add in a Cam Newton and a national championship, and suddenly everybody was spreading the field to run more effectively.

Who was that other OC at Tulsa? Todd Graham, who until recently coached at Arizona State, but before Tulsa coached at West Virginia under Rich Rodriguez. Rodriguez probably did as much as anybody to popularize the spread-to-run concept, and he had a 70% winning percentage at WV to show that it was effective. He was already doing that in the late 90s, and one of the guys in his neighborhood who was doing something similar at Bowling Green was a young coach named Urban Meyer. Tebow at Florida was the third iteration of spread-to-run after he'd had success doing the same thing at Bowling Green and then Utah.

Before that though, there was a guy in New Hampshire who was combining the HUNH ideas of Malzahn at about the same time and spreading teams out to run, also. Mike Bellotti was trying to build a Nike-trademarked program in Oregon based on speed, and he liked what Chip Kelly did at UNH, so he brought him in. They both brought in Frost, and there we are.

Frost combines elements of ALL of the spread-to run offenses listed above, and he's been saying for nearly a decade that he dreams of the day when he can combine all of that with the power running game of his glory days at Nebraska.

He doesn't need star athletes for this system, though he will need to have a star QB about every other year to make it work,... so he's basically in the same boat as Osborne in the 80s and 90s when it comes to recruiting the offense.

Wow… great post.

MABC, I have a hunch you could tell us who will win between NU and NU and between Wisconsin and Michigan. It will be a fun and interesting Saturday with those two games on the slate. 6/7 hours of CF bliss. We also have LSU/Georgia, Iowa/Indiana, UCF/Memphis and MSU/Penn State.

NY pizza always goes well with CF Saturday's. I'm getting ready

 

[anotherdumbprediction]

Yep, another dumb prediction.

How many years has Nebraska had a dominant defense? The mid to late 90’s were great and when we had a generational player in Suh. That is about it. If you are talking every once in a blue moon, yeah we can have a dominat D, but you have to have great players that don’t need to be convinced to go to a state they may never have heard of. Not gonna be easy.

 

[Paramus]

How many years has Nebraska had a dominant defense? The mid to late 90’s were great and when we had a generational player in Suh. That is about it. If you are talking every once in a blue moon, yeah we can have a dominat D, but you have to have great players that don’t need to be convinced to go to a state they may never have heard of. Not gonna be easy.

Yes, it will not be easy. Everybody is on TV now, and the facilities arms race is evening out. Also, it seems like everyone has a good HC these days.

Raw talent is essential. The competition for it is at an all time high.

Army just went on the road and took Oklahoma into overtime. From this we know we can fall back on the I-Bone (with zone read added) if SF cant draw enough talent for his scheme (unlikely). Sometimes what goes around comes around.

If Scott has any trouble figuring out what will work well at Nebraska all's he has to do is ask me. Been there, done that.

​

 

[Vinosker]

For the record, I was drinking a beer while I typed that, and I don't exercise enough. I'm a spade, and I know it, so don't take that one personally.

I am drinking a beer as I am reading this

 

[N2FL]

Ball Control Offense vs Tempo Offense
There has been a lot of discussion about the merits and the problems of running a tempo offense versus a ball-control offense, and there have been a lot of comments about the value of the Time-of-Possession statistic. There really are two sides to this question, and you can find both by looking at Nebraska's teams in the '90s. Be careful what you think that means, though....

Whenever we talk about the Nebraska teams of the 90s, pretty much everyone is thinking about the teams from '93 onward. What about the '90, '91, and '92 teams? We weren't so fond of our ball-control offense back then. If you really want to drive the point home about the limitations of a ball-control offense, go watch some of the bowl games from the 80s and early 90s. Year after year after year, Nebraska would come into the bowl game with the leading rushing attack in the country, future NFL players in the O-line, studs at I-back,... and we'd get beat ... over and over again. When it was Miami, it was not even a close game. A ball-control offense is great if you have the following

1. a defense to stop the opposing offense;
2. a lead.

When a ball-control offense gets behind early, especially by multiple touchdowns, they're as helpless as a walrus climbing Mt. Everest. If you go back and watch those games, you'll have to be focused to notice, but Nebraska usually did wear out the defenses of Miami, Florida State, et al. in the 4th quarter, but it was meaningless by then when Nebraska was already down by multiple touchdowns.

Is Wisconsin copying Nebraska's 1990s script?
Wisconsin sincerely looks like Nebraska ... from 1990 or 1991. They have a great offensive line, NFL running backs, great TEs, muscled up FBs, and defenders that want to knock your helmet out your bunghole.... They also have a QB who isn't a threat to make plays when they get off the script. They also lack team speed. They also have difficulty on both sides of the ball with teams that have playmakers across from them. The one year with Russell Wilson at QB was the only time that top-level defenses were overly stressed about stopping Wisconsin's offense. For the life of me, I can't understand why they don't do a better job of recruiting top quality dual-threat QBs, but I'm thankful that they don't. Once Osborne plugged in Tommie at QB, defenses suddenly had to defend the whole field. Those Schlesinger FB traps that everyone remembers weren't so effective in the early 90s when defenses had 9 guys in the box and 2 other D-backs ready to fill.

Wisconsin also doesn't have enough NFL caliber talent/speed on the back-end of the defense. Nebraska had some very good d-backs in the 80s and 90s, but rarely did they have 4 on the field at the same time. They had to move Tyrone Hughes to CB in the '92 Orange Bowl because they didn't have enough speed to cover the Miami receivers. Wisconsin looked a lot like that on Saturday. I bet that their D-backs coach would have liked to raid a couple players from their offense, too.

The same was and is true for pass rushers. The switch to the attacking 4-3 defense in '93 and the recruitment of NFL caliber rush ends made that Nebraska defense into the nasty Blackshirts that you remember, but they weren't very good at stopping aggressive, attacking offenses before that (in big games, at least). Nebraska had a lot of good defenders before that--Broderick Thomas, Neil Smith, Kenny Walker, and many others--though they seemed to always be a step slow against the top-level teams. Also, those teams could simply gameplan around them and attack somewhere else--where the speed and talent didn't match. Once Nebraska changed that and all of the above, the table was set to feast. Wisconsin also is now able to produce a JJ Watt, but they presently aren't able to put together a front 7 that strikes fear in the hearts of Ohio State, Clemson, Alabama, or Oklahoma.

What to think of Nebraska's defense?
Anybody remember when Nebraska fans wanted Osborne to fire his defensive coaches in the late 80s and early 90s? Tom Osborne was steaming mad because Nancy told him about how the fans sitting near the coaches' wives were telling George Darlington's wife that her husband was an awful coach, and that he needed to be fired. Apparently they said it with a little more color than that. They also verbally abused Charlie McBride's wife. Almost every week there were letters to the OWH calling for the heads of McBride (DC) and Darlington (DBs), and sometimes John Melton (LBs until his retirement) and Kevin Steele (LBs after Melton). There were times when I thought the same ... and then they switched their base defense, changed their DBs' coverage techniques, recruited better and faster athletes, and went on a holy terror through the mid-90s' opposing offenses.

Give Chinander some time. I was at the Huskers high school coaches' clinic in the spring, and I got to hear him explain what they're doing and why, and I got to see the defensive staff dive into some of the basics of what they coach, why, and how. These guys are really good coaches, but even a legendary coach can't make chicken salad out of ... you-know-what.

We don't have the weapons on defense, right now. Look at the handful of guys that UCF put into the NFL over the past couple drafts and show me where Nebraska has similar talent, right now, on the field. I don't know whether it's accurate, but there was some talk that Tre Neal would not have started at UCF this year had he stayed for his senior year, yet he is one or our top safeties. Caleb Tannor, Cam Taylor, and their fellow freshman class will hopefully raise the bar, but they'll need more of all of the above types of players (and a lot more) to get where we all want to go. Unless they're really good at camouflaging their talent, I don't see any high NFL draft picks in the current starting lineup. Barry and a couple others will probably play some on Sundays, but they're not 1st round draft picks.

Chinander's defensive principles are built on doing four things very well: lining up correctly (which includes understanding their leverage and responsibilities), tackling (especially in space), forcing turnovers, and getting sacks. They took a beating at times against an Auburn offense that took both Alabama and Georgia's defenses to the woodshed last November, but they came up with sacks, turnovers, and stops on crucial plays when needed. Nebraska doesn't have those kinds of playmakers on the field, right now.

I have a ton more to say, but I've already written a novel, so ... fire away.

One of the better posts I've read lately.

 

[Middle-aged_Ball_Coach]

MABC, I have a hunch you could tell us who will win between NU and NU and between Wisconsin and Michigan. It will be a fun and interesting Saturday with those two games on the slate. 6/7 hours of CF bliss. We also have LSU/Georgia, Iowa/Indiana, UCF/Memphis and MSU/Penn State.

No, I really couldn't tell you that. I would have been wrong for at least 3 Nebraska games so far, possibly 4. Unless you have no need of the money, it's a fool's errand to bet on what people who aren't even legally able to drink are going to do on a given Saturday with a ball that bounces funny when you drop it.

 

[The Big Red Lebowski]

JKinney, both of your comments above are excellent, and I've tried to address them several times today, but I keep writing multi-page treatises that are going to try everyone's patience, so I'm going to address this one comment first, and hopefully I can address your earlier, longer comment later when I have a little more time to expand on it.

There are at least two schools of spread offenses, and you're describing the one that most people think of when they think of the Run & Shoot or the Air Raid offenses. I could literally write a dozen pages on the history of that particular style of offense and how it made a quantum leap when it geographically was brought from Portland State in the 70s (under Mouse Davis) to first the University of Houston in the 80s and then the Houston Oilers shortly afterward. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on Wikipedia, start looking at all of the current top-level coaches who came out of that area during that time, and your mind will be blown. Suffice it to say that the high-powered offenses from recent years of Dana Holgorsen at West Virginia, Mike Leach at Washington State and Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, TCU, Art Briles at Baylor, Kevin Sumlin at Houston and Texas A&M, et al. were all from that coaching tree and its influence on its neighbors. Frost's offense is NOT from that coaching tree.

In the late 90s several coaches in several places began experimenting with running a spread offense that was designed for a running QB who was a threat to run and could throw relatively safe passes that basically took the place of the old triple-option plays of the 70s and 80s offenses, such as Bill Yeoman's Veer at Houston, Barry's Wishbone at Oklahoma, and Osborne's I-formation at Nebraska. Instead of having an option pitch-back, they had a receiver camped out near the sideline on or behind the Line-of-Scrimmage. The QB could do a read off of a FB dive that was basically the same as what Osborne ran out of his Ace package in the mid-90s, but instead of bringing a WB (such as Shevin Wiggins) around as a pitchback, there would be a WR already in place as the equivalent of a pitch-man. Gus Malzahn was a high school coach in Arkansas at the time, and he literally wrote the book on the Hurry Up, No Huddle offense that he ran that was built around this type of scheme. He's famous for taking the old Delaware Wing-T offense and stretching it out horizontally (by replacing the TEs with Split-Ends and replacing WBs with Slot-Receivers) while putting the QB in shotgun. He and his co-offensive coordinator are believed to have accidentally come up with the Read-Option while coaching together at Tulsa when they told their QB to keep it if the DE kept crashing down hard on the RB during their hand-off mesh. Malzahn always loved the pass, but it was at Tulsa where he learned how effective it was to have a running QB out of the spread. Add in a Cam Newton and a national championship, and suddenly everybody was spreading the field to run more effectively.

Who was that other OC at Tulsa? Todd Graham, who until recently coached at Arizona State, but before Tulsa coached at West Virginia under Rich Rodriguez. Rodriguez probably did as much as anybody to popularize the spread-to-run concept, and he had a 70% winning percentage at WV to show that it was effective. He was already doing his spread-to-run offense in the early 90s at NAIA level in WV, then at Tulane, then at Clemson, and then at UWV in 2000. One of the guys in his neighborhood who was doing something similar at Bowling Green was a young coach named Urban Meyer. Tebow at Florida was the third iteration of spread-to-run after he'd had success doing the same thing at Bowling Green and then Utah.

In the 90s there was a guy in New Hampshire who started out coaching RBs then coached O-line and in the process saw new ways to simplify zone blocking schemes to allow elusive players to get loose in space. When he was named the OC in '99 at UNH, Chip Kelly was combining the Hurry Up/No Huddle ideas of Malzahn with his simplified zone blocking schemes to spread teams out to run. Mike Bellotti was trying to build a Nike-trademarked program in Oregon based on speed, and he liked what Chip Kelly did at UNH, so he brought him in to make everything go faster. They both brought in Frost, and that's where we get interested.

Frost combines elements of ALL of the spread-to run offenses listed above, and he's been saying for nearly a decade that he dreams of the day when he can combine all of that with the power running game of his glory days at Nebraska. If you saw Ohio State use a spread-formation version of Osborne's old Counter Tray to pummel Oregon in the 2nd half of the 2014-15 NCAA Championship Game, you can imagine what it was like for Scott Frost to be sitting up in the Oregon booth, waiting to call plays while watching Urban Meyer and Tom Herman literally doing what he'd been wanting to do for years.

Frost doesn't need star athletes for this system, though he will need to have a star QB about every other year to make it work,... so he's basically in the same boat as Osborne in the 80s and 90s when it comes to recruiting the offense. They need fast backs and receivers who can catch the ball, but those aren't that hard to find. He'll need Nebraska kids to commit to beefing up and re-incarnating the O-line from the glory days of the Pipeline, and I think that there will be Nebraska kids lining up to do it. It's poetic that Cam Jurgens--who is as high of a recruit that Nebraska has had from in-state in a long, long time--just signed on to become one of those guys by switching to Center. It's still possible to build O-linemen like the glory days, and this is where the state of Nebraska can contribute.

Great post. I believe it was actually Rich Rodriguez who accidentally created the zone read while at Glenville State.

 

[Middle-aged_Ball_Coach]

Kind of think we’re in a similar boat now. What’s the best way to survive the meat grinder that is the B1G conference schedule, and prepare for whoever you’ll face in the postseason?

I think that they're going to stockpile D-linemen and LBs so that they have the types of guys needed to stop Wisconsin--meaning a NG with his own zip code and buddies at DE to match, plus ILBs who can stop Mack trucks (both require years in S&C)--plus havoc-wreaking speedy types. It'd be great to find some more guys like Suh, but I don't know of any program that has ever had more than one of those in its entire existence. Tennessee had one Reggie White. Miami had a bunch of studs, but only one Jerome Brown. Nebraska had one Suh, and we should always be grateful.

If you look at the guys that Frost recruited, I think that he was hoping that Vainuku could be that kind of NG, and Jean-Baptiste and Caleb Tannor would be the 3-4's equivalent to Randy Gregory. I'd buy stock in Nebraska having a lot more D-linemen and top-quality CBs in the next couple recruiting rounds for defense.

 

[Middle-aged_Ball_Coach]

Great post. I believe it was actually Rich Rodriguez who accidentally created the zone read while at Grenville State.

I've heard both, and I believe Malzahn and Graham because Malzahn is a nice guy, and Rodriguez is ... not. But you could be right.

 

[Middle-aged_Ball_Coach]

Great post. I believe it was actually Rich Rodriguez who accidentally created the zone read while at Grenville State.

Seriously, if anybody can find online video of Rodriguez's offense at Greenville State in the early 90s, I'd microwave some popcorn and watch that stuff all weekend.... Or until my wife says I have to stop and do something productive with my life.