Game Preview: Texas A&M vs. Nebraska

Nebraska is the Texas A&M of the Big 12 North: big expectations that were never lived up to this year. Facing Nebraska is like facing your retarded twin brother only to realize that you’re just as retarded as he is. Fuck.

I remember Nebraska during the Osborne glory-days of the 1990’s. They were flat-out, wet-your-pants scary. They had dominant lines, and they were going to run it straight up the gut, and there was nothing you could do as they just flat out mauled you. Guys like Tommy Frazier, Eric Crouch, and Lawrence Phillips weren’t college football players; they were Hessian mercenaries who formed Osborne’s Big Red Machine. I still remember when the Aggies faced Nebraska in the Big 12 Conference Championship Game when the conference had just formed. The Cornhuskers were at their peak, and the announcer said something to the tune of, “R.C. Slocum’s boys are just going to go out there with the attitude of nothing to lose and have some fun. Let’s see what happens.” Well, what happened was that we got spanked something like 54-15. It felt as if there were 20 Nebraska players out on the field vs. our 11, and the only word that ran through my head was the word helpless. And we were the Big 12 South champions! I’m inclined to say that those Nebraska teams were the greatest ever in the history of college football.

But oh how the mighty have fallen. Ten years later Nebraska is getting killed by teams on their own turf, the AD is getting fired, and Callahan and his fancy shmancy West Coast offense are about to get the boot as well. I watched the Nebraska vs. USC game earlier this year, and Nebraska was the team that looked helpless. Their QB, Sam Keller, put up over 300 yards, and back in the day a Nebraska QB would have been lucky to put up 200 yards (200 passing yards that is—Tommy Frazier might have ran for 400 yards for all I remember). But despite all those yards (which came in garbage time), Nebraska was just slaughtered by a USC team that’s now looking to be mediocre. They displayed none of the power running game and the dominant defense that were the hallmarks of past Cornhusker teams. In short, the same hallmarks of the great Texas A&M teams of the early 1990s.

The sad part is that even though Nebraska has fallen on hard times, I think this year’s Aggie team is worse. I think in tomorrow’s game we’ll see Keller put up yards and points against our hapless secondary, and our once high-powered offense will put up a disappearing act for the second week in a row. We’re in a tailspin folks, and we’re not coming out this year. Nebraska’s favored by 2, I predict a bigger rout of Nebraska 34, Aggies 10.