Corona, the #FrostCurse, and the Cancellation of the Wisconsin Game
Perspective is hard to have when you’re too close to see the whole picture.
When you’ve got your nose pressed to the canvas, you can see the sloppiness of the individual brush strokes or the cracking of the paint, but you can’t see Mona Lisa’s famous waning crescent of a smirk until you turn your micro into a macro.
There is little doubt: most Nebraska fans are too close.
We’ve had our nose a precious few inches from our precious football team for so many years that we’re basically fogging up the glass like an ESPN exec whenever they see Tim Tebow.
I am including myself in this broad statement.
When it comes to my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, I’m a die-hard watching Die Hard for the 437th time; familiar with all the ins and outs, the recurring themes, but still too drawn to the explosions and the action to look away.
So, what then, do we make of the latest in a long line of catastrophically bad luck for a coach that once seemed like he had the Midas touch fingers wrapped around the laces of the football? How do we rationalize a local-boy-made-good — one who rose like his stock was strapped to the back of a SpaceX rocket on its way to the moon to score some delicious Moonwater© — that has inexplicably seen his luck implode in front of our very eyes like some kind of dying giant star?
Is the #FrostCurse real? How in the name of all things holy has Scott Frost’s triumphant return to his alma mater gone so terribly sideways?
Sure, some of it can be chalked up to culture issues, years-long struggles wrought from wrong hires at wrong times and infrastructure issues that bring to mind crumbling bridges and pockmarked roads. But some of it? Holy hell. It’s been inexplicable. It’s been bad luck. It’s been some serious Alanis Morrisette shit.
Lightning strike cancellations during the first game, quarterback injuries, the plague. We’re, two horsemen shy of a full blown apocalypse and Frost has only been here for three years.
He’s won 9 games. He’s had 5 cancelled. So far.
Nebraska will not be playing Wisconsin. They will not be playing Central Michigan. They will not be playing South Dakota State nor Cincinnati and it turns out that the ‘Jenga 41’ schedule has turned into ‘Jumanji 2020’ where all we’re trying to do is make it out alive.
SOMEONE BURN SOME SAGE AT THE FIFTY YARD LINE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!
Get me an old priest and a young priest and let’s dump some holy water from a giant Gatorade cooler onto Scott like he just won the championship game against the little girl from The Exorcist.
It’s probably a good thing, if we are able to zoom out a bit and find that “P” word — the elusive “perspective” that is harder for Husker fans to tackle than Ameer Abdullah in space — that we are not being allowed to play against Wisconsin.
It seems that, through bad luck or the stumblefuckery of not taking a global pandemic seriously enough, they are the first (and God willing) only Big Ten team to have Covid-19 bounce around their locker room like a game of particulate pinball.
I know that there are varying degrees (wildly penduluming between fans) as to what they were hoping to accomplish this season.
For me? I just wanted something to take the edge off of this brutal year and, more importantly, I wanted all of our players to stay as healthy as possible. The edge was taken off. We finally got a chaser to this shot of 2020 that I’ve been waiting for ever since Kevin Warren hemmed and hawed and botched his way through things a few months ago.
Now, skipping this game against Typhoid Barry (Alvarez) and his team makes sense, even if I desperately wish there was another way. The last thing we need is to put in all the necessary work — and make no mistake, there seems to be a tremendous amount of precautionary work being done — and then play another team that could open-mouth cough onto us in the huddle and put our players at risk.
There’s been a lot of Zooming this year. I’m going to try it one more time. Peel my bloodshot eyes off the microscope that living in Lincoln provides and I’m going to take a look at the big picture. Hell, I have to be six feet back anyway.
Now, if anyone needs me: I’m going to be contacting a voodoo priestess.
