A Post on Two Scholarly Tackle Football Teams

In a few hours Nebraska (3-4) plays 3-2 Minnesota in Minneapolis. Strangely, this is the biggest game of Scott Frost's tenure at Corn. There are good wins and bad wins in sport, there are losses and bad losses but there are no good losses. Nebraska must win this game. Win it, on the road against a well-coached but very mediocre team, and plausibly you can claim improvement. Win it and you will very likely get to five wins for the year. Five wins is likely your ceiling. But lose it and you've just been a tease the last month. 

Sports and war make for strange moments in strange venues on which the whole turns. "But for a shoe the horse was lost..." It was in search of shoes that two great armies came together in a small crossroads town in Pennsylvania in July 1863. Scott Frost and Nebraska are at a crossroads. On this humble game the future of the Frost enterprise will be writ large, for better or worse.

Pat Narduzzi: 'I still don't see much respect' for Pitt ahead of Virginia Tech game

Why do you think that is, coach?Maybe it's because there has been no football season, as the term is commonly understood, at Pitt in 2021? Because instead, we're seeing Pickett's Charge, the Kenny-Pickett-NFL-Draft-Season-Long Audition? Your games are played only as part of the Charge. You barnstorm around the small towns of the eastern seaboard--Next stop, for one day only! Blacksburg, Virginia, 3:30 today!--showcasing Kenny, having no running game and unable to stop the other guys from scoring. This is not a team with a quarterback, it's a quarterback with a team. 

Maybe you don't get much respect because you're the 59th-"best" rushing team in the country. Or because you have the 62nd-"best" scoring defense. 

Still, you're universally projected to win at least nine games this year, some have you at ten, and you're the consensus favorite to win the Atlantic Coast Conference title, not just get to the championship game, to win the ACC. ESPN's Power Index ranks you 11th in the country; some outfit called teamrankings.com has you 15th. But the gold standard AP poll violently disagrees. You got one vote for top 25 this week. So, you're right, you aren't respected. Know why?

Yep.That happened because you haven't changed your defense since a game six years ago!  The other coach "...watched that game three hundred times this week. I knew where they were going to come from, and how they're going to fit, and what our matchups are going to be, and what variety of matchups we're going to need..." 

You're not good enough, Duzz.

You can not escape that game. Its stench increases over time. In fact, the more games you win the worse that smells. Imagine if you go 11-1! It will stand out more. It's a tin can tied to your tail; the faster and farther you run the louder it bangs behind you. You're chatting with reporters about respect while trying to ignore a dead body in the middle of the room. 

So no, no respect. But on the other hand, however many games you win, Kenny is sure to be drafted higher for the Charge than he would have been without it. In that very limited, very strange sense 2021 will have been a success for Pitt football.