Skull Session: Bucks Crater Lincoln, Dobbins Tombstones Huskers, and Barrett Plants His Flag

By D.J. Byrnes on October 16, 2017 at 4:59 am
Jerome Baker knocks a mouthpiece out of the October 15 2017 Skull Session
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The local team looked froggy Saturday, and our goal is to bring that mentality to Monday. Walk into the office and disrespect your boss like Jerome Baker baptizing two cornfed adult sons in one play.

Good night, good fight

You might not have caught it live, but Baker hit him so hard I'm still surprised he wasn't wrongfully ejected by an incompetent replay official.

From Jerome Baker's Instagram:

like fight night

Shoutout to our Andrew Lind on the pic. It is spooky season, and it culminates Halloween weekend when Penn State, fresh off a night game with an ostensibly tough conference foe, comes to Columbus.

Can't wait.

ICYMI:

Word of the Day: Welkin.

 DISPATCHES FROM THE ASHES. I respect the noble Husker people. By the end of that beating, I almost felt as bad as watching 37-year-old Josh McCown labor through repeated waxings as a Browns QB. These people have families!

This site would be hellfire and brimstone if we were on that wrong end of that score, especially if it were the latest game in an era of mediocrity.

I mean that literally, too. Satan would open Earth's crusts to deposit his hot take under the alias "SoulOfBucknut" on why we must hire a pagan mystic to get right the program's culture.

Even their columnists and decade-long season ticket holders are recalibrating their moral compasses.

From Dirk Chatelain of The Omaha World:

For the sake of all those national champions and All-Americans, for the millions who planned 55 years of fall weekends around a football schedule, for the thousands who grew up and grew old on the planks of Memorial Stadium, for the pride and dignity of a state and its flagship university.

Make. It. Stop.

[...]

“I’m a booster. I’m a season-ticket holder. But doggone it, this hurts,” said an Omaha fan named Scott, who hasn’t missed a home game since 1993. “You can’t come into our stadium and run us out of there. C’mon.”

Huskers fans deserve better. They deserve better leaders than ones that thought Mike "Four Guaranteed Losses" Riley would restore them to glory with a better resource network in Lincoln.

That hire has gone worse than everyone else thought it would be. Incredible.

 THE OL' TEXAS ONE-SHOT. I didn't bet on the Bucks. Though I rued not putting ONE BILLION DOLLARS when J.K. Dobbins went on a 52-yard stroll to the end zone after the Huskers went three-and-out on the opening drive.

The game was over when...

We associate stiff-arms with guys getting their noses pushed in, but I love that effort from Dobbins. Like a father tapping his son's hands at the dinner table to remind him to keep his elbows off the table, which used to be a point of etiquette for some reason.

Judging by player reactions, they knew the rout was on, too.

From Tim May of The Columbus Dispatch:

“I think it settled us down a little bit,” Barrett said of the TD, the first of what would be touchdowns on their first eight possessions at Memorial Stadium. “It settled the crowd down because it was definitely rocking.”

[...]

“That’s something we did talk about, understanding we were coming to a place with a lot of tradition, a lot of pride here in Nebraska,” Barrett said. “They were going to take their best shot at us and we had to be prepared and ready to go.”

The play showcased everything that would become evident over the rest of the game: The resplendent canyon currently separating the two programs.

But Mike Riley wants you to know his players didn't quit, though it looked that way from everybody not named JD Spielman (whom I think Ohio State should pursue in the November transfer window). They just got their asses kicked.

From Dan Hope of Eleven Warriors:

"Ohio State, when they are rolling and have the running back going, the quarterback going, the run-option stuff going and the quarterback’s going like that, that’s kind of, like I’ve said for a while, the standard," Riley said. "They have both the talent and the execution to make it look like that and we had an impossible time, it looked like, getting them off their flow, which we didn’t."

"I don’t think anybody on our team quit, I think we had just a hard time tackling them, stopping them, catching them."

Any time I hear coaches blame execution without mentioning coaches primarily responsibility is training their players to execute, I take it as blaming the players. 

Riley makes $2.8 million a year, and those checks clear regardless of outcome. Eventually they'll pay him millions of more dollars not to coach.

But yeah, Nebraska would have been right there if only the players he didn't recruit executed his genius plays. Sure.

 BARRETT HEATING UP. J.T. Barrett wasn't a popular man amongst the local fanbase after the debacle against Oklahoma. And while nobody would confuse Army, UNLV, Rutgers, and Maryland, it's impossible to deny Barrett's and the offense's improvement.

Terry McLaurin even dusted a dude:

Throw of the year so far?

Best throw and catch of the year? Yes. It can't stay that way, though. They're going to need multiple throws like that to beat Penn State, Michigan State, and Michigan. But we've known that since Baker Mayfield tried to plant a flag in turf.

All credit to Barrett for planting a flag in Lincoln like only he could.

From cleveland.com: 

On a weekend of upsets, the No. 9 Ohio State Buckeyes played as well as any team in the nation in Saturday's 56-14 destruction of Nebraska, the program's first win in Memorial Stadium after the disastrous Lincoln debut of 2011.  

Barrett, while completing 27 of 33 passes for 325 yards and five touchdowns and running 10 times for 48 yards and two touchdowns, played as well as any player in the nation. 

And then he walked off the field, celebrated privately in the locker room, waited his turn at a news conference and then talked, again, about how well the Buckeyes are practicing.

I'm content with where the team is heading into the open week and ready to let the chips fall where they do. If Barrett roasts Penn State, I may send a hand written apology to the WHAC.

Credit, too, by the way, to Kevin Wilson and Ryan Day. Their card dealing is befuddling opponents.

 WHO'S GOT IT WORSE THAN US? The local team's enemies don't recognize it as the No. 1 team in the country. That's okay, because it's not coronation season and a lot of teams have it a lot worse than ours.

We start in Champaign, where Chris Ash broke out the champagne after dumping the Illini for his first Big Ten win. Turns out Lovie Smith leading a Rex Grossman-led team to the Super Bowl doesn't mean much in the big boy world of Big Ten football.

Looks like those revenue streams are right on track to pay Smith $21 million over six years.

Down in Knoxville, things reached another previously unlocked level of rock bottom when it lost a shootout of #JimTresselFieldGoals to South Carolina.

And they already had a Vols fan don a Cracker Barrel bag before the final whistle.

Can't blame him. Better to commit southern seppuku than watch Will Muschamp take your team's chain with five field goals again in two years.

And please, please, somebody send some flowers to Lincoln. They have embraced a nihilist philosophy and are wondering the streets like dejected zombies as if they're Browns fans.

Tweet it out, Big Kevin. Tweet it out. Your team gets its next shot on Nov. 3rd, 2018. That's a mere 384 days away.

That Pennywise meme had me rolling, though.

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