Pitchin with Pritch: I still have hope, I still think it can be done!
The first round of the Nebraska High School football playoffs is history and it appeared that everything went pretty much like expected as far as the seeded teams and the below 500 teams were concerned as far as winning and losing is concerned.
In Class A none of the 4-5 teams defeated a team with a winning record. There were 3 teams in Class A that got into the playoffs with losing records and they all lost and only scored 15 points combined and the winners combined for 100.
In Class B the five teams with losing records scored 130 and the five winners put up 201. In Class C-1 there were no teams with losing records in the 16 teams that made the playoffs but still some pretty one-side games. One 64-0 game and one 56-0 game but there were some close games also. C-2 was pretty much like C1, no teams with losing records but most of the games were pretty competitive just looking at the scores. In D1, there was only one team under 500 in the first round and they lost 45-6 but #12 seed Creighton at 5-3 upset a number 5 team 56-32. D-2 wasn’t too bad and had some run away games and some close ones. The winner in the first of the biggest mismatched teams had to be in D6, the 6-man division. In my opinion this had to be a nightmare game maybe for both sides. Cody-Kilgore defeated Sumner-Eddyville-Miller 100-0. Apparently that was not a misprint in the NSAA scores because I saw a number of places. Six-Man football seems to have higher scores than most but 100-0 is hard for me to grasp.
I don’t know how long the quarters are in 6 man and I don’t know if they have a running clock at some point or not but Cody-Kilgore must have scored every time they had the ball and SEM couldn’t have had many first downs or any offense at all to slow Cody-Kilgore down.
I went to a small high school in Kansas and we played Six Man the first two year I was in high school and then we went to Eight-Man the last two years and I played Eleven-Man in College and as I think back on those years in high school, I cannot remember having high scoring games those two years of Six-Man football.
It might be that I don’t remember much of what happen that long ago but if you are on the losing end of a 100-0 game, I would try to get it out of my memory as quick as possible.
One of the highlights of the weekend for the Huskers was the volleyball team that met another power house in college volleyball in Penn State and came away with a win after going 5 sets in the Devaney Center. Penn State and Nebraska have had some real battles in volleyball and Saturday that competition continued with the Huskers winning 25-18, 18-25, 25-21, 21-25 and 15-13. With another sell- out crowd watching the Husker women defeated Penn State for the 7th time in the last 10 meetings.
The math was the fourth straight meeting between the two teams that went the distance. This is the only meeting between the teams until possibly the Big 10 tournament. Both teams are well coached and play with a great deal of intensity. It was an exciting match to watch and great to see the Huskers have success against a really good program.
The other Husker program that a lot of people watched was the Husker Football vs Purdue. That game wasn’t so much fun to watch and in the end the Huskers let a winnable game slip through their grasp! Again at times the Huskers looked like they were going to take control of things and again they didn’t get it done. On offense the running game was almost non-existent against a team that was ranked 76th in defending the run. The Huskers only managed 47 yards on 20 carries from their two top running backs. The passing looked decent stat-wise with 22/39 and 247 yds and only 1 int., but of the 17 passes that were not caught, too many of them were uncatchable high, or were one hoppers that hit the ground without a chance to catch them.
You don’t win many games with that type of performance. I don’t even think for one moment that I know all the ends and outs of football coaching but I think that when you have a first and goal from the 2 or 3 yard line that a couple of power runs might have a higher chance of being successful than a couple of passes.
I wouldn’t have really liked to see the Huskers come out in the old I-Back formation at least a couple of times and try to cram the ball right over that 76th rated defense.
What we did get to see was the third string quarterback for Purdue, take his team and get the ball into the end zone when it counted and go 6-6 passing while doing it and pick up 62 yds passing on the drive. Nebraska had a chance to get a win on the road, which there hasn’t been many in the last two seasons (1), and instead there was more disappointment and more questions about where the program was headed.
I still have hope! I still think it can be done! I still think Coach Frost has the ability to get it done, but I would imagine that my kind of thinking might be losing a few people from the group.