College football 2013 running discussion thread

The all-timer is when Ron Zook suspended Channing Crowder for the season-opener against Middle Tennessee State in 2004. The game got pushed to mid-October due to a hurricane, but Crowder played in the "new" season-opener vs. Eastern Michigan and in several games after that.

He then sat out of the Middle Tennessee game in mid-October.

 

Agree with all of this.

And to answer your question, Cam Newton. I'd take him over any college QB in the 2000s.

 

I wish I took my own advice sometimes. I always, ALWAYS get sucked into the teasers and parlays. I can't help myself. I may have a problem, so the lesson, as usual, is....don't listen to anything I say.

 

Zooker's a man of his word.

I wonder if the UGA/A.J. Green fiasco is a cautionary tale for other schools, like TAM this year.

 

A&M did the exact same thing for the same reason last year.

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/aggies/2012/08/jenkins-matthews-suspended-for-oct-13-louisiana-tech-game/

 

UNC/USC should be fun tonight. SC/Hawaii will keep you up til the wee hours...points galore.

Speaking of points galore......Texas Tech @ SMU. This game may last 8 hours.

O/U on combined passing attempts. 130

 

If they don't reach a BCS game, this may be the final year of the Pelini Era.

 

Nebraska is a little bit like Tennessee. When it left the Big 12, it lost a Texas recruiting pipeline. It went from 20 percent of its recruiting classes coming from Texas in most years (partly helped by the promise of "returning home" to play Big 12 games), including some high-end players, to a trickle -- three in 2013 -- all of whom are a bit of a stretch.

I like the RB they got, Adam Taylor out of Katy. But let's face it, he's damaged goods. The A-list schools that were interested, like LSU and A&M, were a bit spooked by his knee injury. The other two guys were marginal. Bo also used his Louisiana ties to go get a couple of marginal guys out of Louisiana, but it's not like he was beating LSU head to head for them. Both were guys LSU was either not interested in (Dixon) or came back to at the last minute (Carter, who Nebraska got on towards the season's end, then held off LSU in February).

Bottom line: You aren't going to win the Big 10 with the players they are now getting out of Texas and the gulf states, two areas they have traditionally done well in. And I don't see many kids out of the heart of Big 10 recruiting country -- Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania kids in particular -- passing on Ann Arbor and Columbus to go live and play in Lincoln.

It's going to be one of those schools were expectations are high, but I don't know if they can recruit well enough any more to live up to those expectations.

The Osborne teams really exploited southern black antipathy toward SEC schools in the aftermath of segregation. This is now a generation or two later and that is pretty much gone. No more talking a HIGH-END player from Florida or Louisiana to go up there.

 

Brian, wasn't there a period, too, when Nebraska absolutely owned New Jersey?

 

I think you are right about New Jersey -- Irving Fryar, Mike Rozier, Jason Peter, to name a few -- but they've probably had double the players from Texas that they've gotten from New Jersey. And even New Jersey kids have less of a reason to leave than they once did with Rutgers' climb to respectability. Although with Schiano in the NFL and Rutgers banished to this American Athletic Conference, maybe Jersey is ripe for the picking.

Question is, how many players can you get out of Jersey?

 

Rutgers will be in the Big 10 next year.

Nebraska doesn't have a huge in-state recruiting base and they don't really offer anything to Big 10-region kids that is better than what they'll find in Ann Arbor, Columbus, Madison or even State College at this point. Top-level Texas, California and SEC-footprint recruits have no reason to flock to Lincoln either.

The Tennessee comparison fits better than anyone in Lincoln would like to admit. Basically, they're close to reaching point where they need a couple of the traditional Big 10 powers to start sucking at a high rate of speed if they want to contend for championships on a regular basis.

 

Nebraska has never had a huge in-state recruiting base. Lots of strong, white, farm boys but not enough speed on the whole.

I do think recruiting is different today than it was a generation ago. Many more people are far more transient with not as many deep roots in one place. Plus almost every game is televised now, when that didn't used to be the case.

Thus, it's far more likely for players from distant places to go far away to play. Look at what Kansas has done in basketball over the last 20 years. How many of their elite players grew up in Kansas or surrounding states? The biggest drop-off with Nebraska is that they simply aren't winning 10, 11, 12 games a year like they did in the Bob Devaney/Tom Osborne eras. But, in the broader picture of things, they'll be fine.