Calinger: Wisconsin is the new Nebraska
By J.W. CALINGER
ISL Correspondent
OMAHA, Neb. — So, I told the guys at the sports bar: Old-school Husker football is alive and well. It simply moved to Madison, Wis.
The student surpassing the teacher is almost a cliché. While the Wisconsin Badgers aren’t exactly students of the Huskers, they’re pretty close. Barry Alvarez, a former Nebraska fullback, whipped the Badgers into shape as their head coach, and keeps them going strong as athletic director. They look a lot like the Huskers, even down to the two stripes on the sleeves and on the pants, and the “W” on the helmet might be a little more stylized than the plain old “N” on the Nebraska headgear, but the fact remains that the two letters are only one line apart.
For a number of years, the Nebraska Cornhuskers stayed true to a very old style of football when everyone around them either went pro-style or adopted what eventually became the spread. To be sure, those fancy teams smacked us around in bowl games for a bit. Eventually, though, we used combinations of speed and power to beat the likes of Miami and Tennessee, and if not for a hooked field goal, we’d have added Florida State to that list. As a letter writer wrote to the Omaha World-Herald after the Florida game: “The Fun and Gun met the Run and Stun”.
Now, the Huskers are the ones who are experimenting with different styles. We tried a West Coast offense and a zone read, and now we’ve got something that’s a pistol-zone read hybrid in theory but, in reality, mainly consists of handing off to Ameer Abdullah, a few quarterback keepers, and occasionally chucking the ball to Kenny Bell or depending on Jordan Westerkamp to make an acrobatic and unbelievable catch – which, to be fair, he often does. Our entire offense depends primarily on one player, a very dangerous situation in football.
Wisconsin, in the meanwhile, still plays the Run and Stun, and it usually works to perfection. They can’t always beat the likes of Ohio State – such is life in a conference with multiple solid teams – but they generally run over their opponents, and when they had future Super Bowl QB Russell Wilson, they had one heck of a change-up when it was time to pass. Their offensive lineman run over people the way the likes of Steinkuhler, Zatechka, and Wiegert used to pancake the Oklahoma defensive line. Even scarier, their defense is becoming another “Blackshirts.” If the Huskers’ starting running back goes down, as we’ve seen, we’re toast. If the Badgers’ starter goes down – look, he’s good, but the fact remains that the second stringer will come in, and it won’t be that big a deal; they could pull a fan out of the stands to start at halfback for them, and he’d be good for 150 yards a game.
I still remember the week before Nebraska’s first game against Wisconsin as part of the Big Ten. Most fans around Omaha were saying that the Huskers would give the Badgers a run for their money. I said: “Forget that. I’m cheering for Nebraska, but the Badgers are fixing to clobber us.” I was right. Part of this was because the Huskers were transitioning from a nickel defense tailored to stop the spread offenses of the Big 12 South, but the other part was because the Wisconsin O-line was just that good.
Wisconsin humiliated us that night, they humiliated us in a more recent Big Ten Championship, and I leave it to the reader to guess what they did to us this past week. It wasn’t personal, either. Aside from an upset by Northwestern and another hiccup at LSU – maybe they, too, have to learn about beating teams from the South – they’ve clobbered everyone else, and like Nebraska way back when, they’ve done it with seven-man fronts or lining up with a stout fullback or two, and pounding the rock.
So far, unlike during the tenure of Bill Callahan as head coach, I haven’t become disgusted enough to give away all my Huskers gear and to start cheering for someone else. I’ll tell you what, though: I’m tempted to cheer for Wisconsin every time I see them play. Shoot, I was tempted to cheer for them against the Huskers. I watch the Badgers, and I see what Nebraska used to be. A Badgers game is a welcome respite from football that looks as though it belongs in the backyard, in the recreational flag football league, in the arena, or in Canada. Those men all but tell their opponents they’re going to run, and dare the folks across the line of scrimmage to stop them. They play like men.
Many teachers are loath to learn from their students; the reversal of the dynamic simply is too much. I especially don’t expect Bo Pelini to learn anything; if he were disposed to do that, he’d have learned something by now. Nor do I expect his assistants to do any good, though part of that is because, after all, he is their boss. Maybe we’ll get lucky over the next few years, and bring four Ndamukong Suhs to the defense, or maybe quarterback Tommy Armstrong, Jr., will learn to throw, even without a backup who can throw a perfect touch pass threatening his job, as another Nebraska quarterback named Tommie once had. Short of that, I don’t see Nebraska doing any better than we’re doing now.
And so, we’ll continue to see Wisconsin embarrass us, year in and year out. We fans will watch those games, and go back to time when folks in red and white would rack up yards on the ground that most college football teams would be lucky to have through the air. Only, we’ll be on the receiving end. “On, Wisconsin,” indeed.
