Burned Shirts & Sparty Sweep

Predictably, there's a lot of commotion about Harrison Beck's redshirt getting burned. Personally, I find it hard to criticize Callahan in this situation. I think he rolled the dice that he could get away with redshirting his top backup, and lost. Saturday, I don't think Callahan had much of a choice.

I do criticize Callahan for not putting Joe Ganz in at the tail end of the Missouri and Kansas games. Taylor took 3 or 4 unnecessary hits in those games after those games got to blowout status. But Saturday, if Callahan thinks Harrison Beck is his top backup, he has to play him in a 2 point game when Zac Taylor gets knocked out of the game. If it was a 3 touchdown game, that might be a different situation.

And it's a situation that critics like me have to expect. The heat is on Bill Callahan, and he really can't worry about whether Harrison Beck has any eligibility for the 2009 season. If Nebraska loses to K-State, and misses a bowl game, they lose 4 more weeks of practice. And if they continue to struggle in 2006 and 2007, there will be another head coach to worry about who will start in 2009.

And if we're talking what-if's, if you believe the recruitniks and Beck is as good as they say, he might declare for the NFL early anyway. Of course, those same people said that Zac Bowman would be declaring for the NFL after this season. More overhype from the recruiting crowd; I wonder what the NFL thought of Bowman's game on Saturday? He got sucked in badly on several plays, including chasing a Kansas State receiver down the length of the field on a draw play. The KSU receiver kept turning around to throw a block, but when Bowman kept following him, he just kept running.

And I neglected to throw some props towards the Mavericks. After starting the conference season 0-4, they rebound quite nicely to sweep #6 Michigan State at their barn. Driving back from Lincoln, I got to hear Greg Harrington and Terry Leahy describe the OT game winner by Bill Thomas on Saturday night. You could hear the folks in the MavPuck.com Road Banned going nuts as the shocked Sparty fans quietly exited Munn.