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1) If Lincoln, Nebraska was a place worthy of College GameDay starting the weekend, it's good enough for us. They're exactly what most of us (that don't have a vote in the AP poll) thought they were. Yes, Nebraska was ranked to start the season. Which shows all the idiocy of preseason polls. As Ohio State raced to a 38-0 halftime lead and then simply coasted to a 48-7 win that could have been much, much, much worse, everybody that didn't know how dumb it was to rank Nebraska five weeks ago figured it out rather quickly.
Ohio State looked like it might be the best team in the country last night. The Buckeyes have clearly been one of the best in college football for quite a while now. That's what Nebraska used to be. That's what the fans want to be and think they will be again. But Nebraska is never getting back to what it was. It might get better. It might even get to the point where it can win a division or a conference and play for a national title again here and there. But not regularly. Not in an era where everyone is on TV and the Huskers can't fund 20 walk-ons as scholarship players and where they have no natural recruiting base. On most weekends, I would have turned this game off in the first quarter. But there weren't really any good games on and I, like everyone who grew up a fan of any Big Eight team that wasn't Oklahoma, thought back to what the Huskers used to be and what they never will be again. And it made us all feel pretty good.
"I thought we had a puncher’s chance if we came out and played a really good game, and we didn’t, so that’s the result," Scott Frost said after the game.The coach of Nebraska said that if his team played really well, it "had a puncher's chance."
This is your reality Nebraska. Even with the prodigal son returning home fresh off his undefeated "national title" at UCF, you're begging for help that just isn't there. Frost is 7-10 at Nebraska. Here are the wins:
South Alabama, Northern Illinois, Illinois, Minnesota, Bethune-Cookman, Illinois, Michigan State.
If the Huskers can just keep scheduling teams from Illinois, they'll be all right. Otherwise, welcome to the way most of college football lives, where you'd better be happy with winning enough games to qualify for an also-ran bowl game and hope once every few years you catch lightning in a bottle and have a chance at more.
2) Speaking of teams that are never as good as people think they are, Texas A&M won yesterday, but...The Aggies beat Arkansas 31-27. But they gave up four sacks, averaged 2.7 yards per carry and needed Arkansas to drop a fourth down pass that should have been caught to end a potential game-winning drive. I have said this for about ten years in a row now: If I could buy A&M for what they're actually worth and sell them for what everybody seems to think they're worth, I'd never have to work a day in my life. Sure, they have a lot of money and they're in Texas and on and on and on. They haven't won a national title since 1939, haven't won so much as a division since 1998 and have exactly one top 15 finish in the last two decades. They are also in the toughest division in college football and are the fourth best team and the fourth best program in said division. They're usually going to be able to win seven or eight games, but there's really no reason to lump them in with the group of teams that has a chance to actually win something important. At least not until they actually go do it for the first time in a quarter century.
3) As far as escape acts go, the biggest one on Saturday belonged to Clemson.
