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Who do you MOST want to see Nebraska beat in 2019?

If Nebraska beat only one of these teams in 2019, which game would you MOST want to see them win?*

  • Sept. 21: at Illinois

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Oct. 5: Northwestern

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Oct. 12: at Minnesota

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Oct. 26: Indiana

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Nov. 2: at Purdue

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Nov. 23: at Maryland

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    116
  • Poll closed .
Interesting almost 50% want to beat Wisky and I could not agree more. Love to wipe the smug smarmy smile off their fans faces. Love to beat Barry again again and again. They started our conference play with a total beat down and have embarrassed the Huskers more then any team in the BIG imo.

If we could only beat one team this season it's got to be Wisky imo...........

I believe we're going to win 9 or 10 games and Wisky will be one of them! :thumbsup:
 
Umm, yeah,... I think you may want to go check out the baseball page? or the basketball page? or the women's soccer page?

If you're looking for Nebraska versus Creighton in football, the Bluejays have apparently never gotten over that 102-0 thrashing we gave them back in '05 ... that would be 1905.


It was a joke about NU, Creighton (and UNO) all advancing to the baseball post season.

Yes, I realize Creighton has not fielded a football team in a century.
 
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I'm a little surprised that Wisconsin is getting such a high percentage of votes. I expected Iowa to get more, but the rest are about what I would have assumed. I thought there might be someone from western Indiana who is tired of putting up with Purdue's b.s.. :thumbsup:

I don't know about anybody else, but Bucky humiliated us in the 2012 CCG, and we're still long overdue to pay them back for that one.

Add in the fact that Barry Alvarez ripped off the NU blueprint, headed North and built his own version of the Bizarro Huskers, put in a good word for SE as Athletic Director (thanks for nothing, Barry) and their logo stinks and their fans care more about the drinking than the game – and voila – we need to put the Badgers back in their place ASAP.
 



If you've read what I've written elsewhere in this thread, I'm not asking this as a coach or even as a fan; I'm asking it more as a way of understanding how we think about things like opponents. I don't really care who ultimately gets the most votes, and I definitely don't care if everybody else disagrees. I'm pretty sure that nobody here would be okay with finishing 1-11 either. If I'm trying to find out which team(s) our fans most want to beat and why, I had to phrase the question in such a way as to remove as many variables as possible. Fwiw, I absolutely agree with you about the focus should be on the next play, but that's how (good) teams think. Even to the players, some games will always matter more than others. When they asked Tommie Frazier sometime during the '95 season who he would like to play in a bowl game, he said Washington because he was still annoyed that they had beaten Nebraska when he was a freshman. I thought that it was interesting at the time that that loss bothered him more than the two losses to Florida State, especially considering how the last one had been controversial.

When this survey has run its course, I think that I might do something similar from the other end of the spectrum, such as this: "If Nebraska were to finish 9-3 in the regular season, who would you choose to be the three teams that beat us?" I've been thinking about that specific question a lot because I think that that's a likely outcome for our season based on the number of games that we'll be playing against teams that could beat us unless we play close to perfect, and then figuring out the likelihood that they'll play close to perfect. I actually think that we will beat Ohio State, yet lose to a couple of teams that (right now) none of our fans expect to beat us. I can't really even guess which ones, but as a coach I know the patterns for how teams gain and lose focus. For example, if we're looking good but still making too many mental mistakes, losing to Illinois the week before we play Ohio State would greatly increase our chances of beating OSU. As a fan (or hypothetically, as a coach) would I make that trade? I've decided that, yes, I would. Again, if we beat Ohio State--and especially if we would be undefeated--I think that it would greatly increase our chances of losing to Northwestern the following week. I think that this happened to Purdue last year.

You mentioned the 2010 Texas game, which is exactly the sort of scenario that I expect to happen this year because this year's team and the 2010 team are somewhat similar in that neither had gotten over the hump yet as far as mental preparation for games, big and small, and so they lost to Texas, who was clearly worse, yet whipped Missouri, who was probably better. We whipped Washington during the year, then looked like trash when we played them again in the bowl game. This is what happens in football when teams aren't properly focused, ready to play every week.

You mentioned Osborne and his lack of caring about rivalries, and, again, that's (mostly) how I see things, but even to this day most Husker fans don't grasp how much he focused his efforts as a coach on remaining focused on the next play, and the next play only. Some articles were written about him and that focus in the late 80s/early 90s when most of the country still thought that he couldn't win the big games, so most people ignored what he had to say. As a Nebraska fan in college, I ate it up and never forgot it. He believed and taught that the opponent doesn't matter (to the players, anyway; the opponent's tendencies matter very much to the coaches), and that everything should be focused on the steps of execution for the next play. He taught the players to evaluate what had just happened on the last play as they walked to the huddle, but the moment that the QB or defensive captain made the call for the next play, the last play needed to be wiped from the mind, and all that mattered was focusing on the steps of execution for the next play as you lined up. You weren't thinking about the opponent. You weren't thinking about the moment. You weren't thinking about the score. As a Guard, for example, all that you were thinking is "My first step is forward and to the right while I shoot my hands to the left pectoral of the D-lineman to my right, etc." As a high school player, nobody had ever stressed that enough to me ... except when it came to shooting free-throws in basketball. I was very good at that, and I knew that it was because it was all routine, repetition, and focus. I knew that that was the way to teach and coach everything else in life. I've had successes and failures in doing that as a football coach at different age levels and with players with very different abilities. My alma mater has dominated football in our small-school conference for this century, yet was never able to win a championship before that. Why? Focus and execution. I've coached for them and against them, including with teams that had more talent, but they're tough to beat because they almost never make mistakes. Why? Focus and execution. To my knowledge, they don't have a playbook, but every player knows almost every play that they'll run in high school before they finish 7th grade, so for their next 5 years, it's all about more focus and better execution. It works.

On the other hand there was Barry Switzer. Barry could always get Oklahoma to play at their peak against Nebraska, whether Nebraska was clearly superior, clearly inferior, or roughly equal. His teams also had a habit of laying an egg against terrible teams, like Kansas. Barry's philosophy of coaching wasn't that different from Osborne's in a lot of ways when it came to the X's and O's, recruiting, and coaching the details of execution, but he was never able to get his teams to stay as consistently focused, so he had to have superior talent to make up for these lapses. They usually had it, and it usually did make up for it.

So, how do we choose the games that matter most to us? Players typically take the fans' passions with them, but then they also usually have personal connections with some of the players on some of the other teams, and they also have experiences of having played most teams on their schedules. I think that that one dirty play by Colorado last year did as much to doom their chances this year as almost anything else because the Nebraska players are NOT going to forget that it happened, and as long as that's channeled properly, it will lead to better focus, which should lead to better execution. It also should lead to both an expectation of winning and probably a lack of a let-up when/if Nebraska gets ahead. Fans love to hear that. If Nebraska drills Colorado, which I think that they are going to do, it opens them up for a let-down the following week against Northern Illinois, which right now nobody expects to be capable of playing with us.

This is the stuff that I think about in the off-season when I'm lying awake in bed at night, whether it's focused on the guys that I'm coaching or Nebraska or whoever. That's why I asked the question, and that's why I phrased it that way.
TL / DR

j/k; good post.

First when I saw your OP, I thought you had had a few too many beers. But I understand the point.

I don't know that we have a "Texas" in the B1G yet (or hopefully ever). By that I mean a team that always seems to have our number even when we're the better team. A team that we hate so much that it blurs our focus on performance. I'd say Wisconsin is the closest to that, followed by Iowa (the last four years). But the big difference there is, we haven't been that good lately. Personally, I feel the same way now that I did when we joined the B1G: We should be dominating everyone in this conference, and no one is worthy of being our rival. So that's my jaded viewpoint. Never mind that the level of play has gotten a lot better, across the conference, over the last 7 or 8 years.
 
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I'm a little surprised that Wisconsin is getting such a high percentage of votes. I expected Iowa to get more, but the rest are about what I would have assumed. I thought there might be someone from western Indiana who is tired of putting up with Purdue's b.s.. :thumbsup:
Actually, Purdue is as high as any on the list for me. My first move out of Nebraska was to Lafayette in 1999; lived there for most of the Joe Tiller years. To me, their fans are as bad as any -- never really won much, but they tasted a little success and think they're the world's greatest. When I lived there I got a lot of "Yeah, Nebraska wins a lot, but we play in the BIG TEN!"

So I just want to crush them and shut them up. Same as any fan base that gets mouthy: Wisconsin, Iowa, etc.
 
Colorado and the hatred for them running deep from the Big 8 Days, followed by Iowa, and Wisconsin.
 



Going with Colorado...first game of the season and need to start off well and build momentum. No other reason than that!

EDIT: First REAL game of the season, though RedinIowa would be more correct as back to back 4-8 = no sure things for modern day Huskers. GBR!
 
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I want us to beat Wisconsin, because if we do you get a win against the top dog in the West, and it also sends a message to Iowa that the days of beating Nebraska are over. More bang for your buck.

I would say Ohio St, but you've got to win the division before anything else.
 


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