Irish Times Columnist Googles “Nebraska Scandals”, Scrolls Twice, Kicks Nebraska Fans (and Nuance) in the Junk
(*Author’s note: today, Irish Times columnist Dave Hannigan wrote a story pissing a full bladder of Irish whiskey onto the Nebraska Cornhusker Football program. {I will not be linking it. Google it, if you want.}
I’m not here to kink-shame, but I also had to clap back, even if I know I really shouldn’t.)
Look, some of this shit “we” just have to own. We really do.
We, of course, being Nebraska Cornhusker Football fans and people involved in the program.
We have to wear the fact that our program has flirted with and — at times — gone to bed with being really, really shitty.
Some of our successes (of which there were many, especially in the far, far away universe known as the 1990's) came with a full set of human errors, misanthropic missteps, and downright criminal behavior and this was sanctioned and enabled from the top down in many damning ways.
When the Nebraska Cornhuskers were on an un-fucking-believable tear in the mid-1990s, we had players credibly accused of rape. We had players getting DUIs and assaulting women and we had some dudes literally charged with murder. Tom Osborne essentially hid the gun that was allegedly used. TOM OSBORNE HID THE GUN. Five words that seem utterly insane when you type them out.
To say Frost’s program has made some mistakes is to minimize things to a degree which I am not fully comfortable, either. Maurice Washington was suspended a half game, as we let due process play out in his revenge porn case. Not great.
Mark Whipple did pop off at the mouth with some horrendous shit when he was at Umass in 2018, by using a term that shouldn’t be lightly tossed around and in a way that makes it seem normalized. Here’s what he said about that.
And, unfortunately, Hannigan’s not wrong about Ron Brown and the same sex marriage comments he made, notoriously telling people that his address was “1 Memorial Stadium”.
I vehemently disagree with Ron Brown’s stance on this subject. So did a whole potato-pile of Irish people until 2015. Am I glad that they legalized same-sex marriage? Yes. Do we have bigger fish to fry in the battle for equality than the 18th most important assistant who unfortunately reflects the ideology of a wide swath of people? Probably.
I’m not here to cheer for Ron Brown. He doesn’t care about what I think. We can all do better. So, so much better.
There’s not a right way to talk about all the fucked up things that have occurred in and around our program without sounding unnecessarily defensive and like I’m trying to minimize things that legitimately hurt human beings in many, many ways.
So, even when a guy like Hannigan comes at us with a hatchet and a strange literary bloodlust in his beady little eyes, we have to take some of that beating and understand that it was earned; that it was deserved.
As a fan base, we can be obnoxious and tribal and impossibly mean, but we can also be charitable and kind and supportive. In short, Nebraska fans are all of the descriptors that make sports good and bad. And that fact doesn’t even necessarily make us exceptional, much to our chagrin.
In fact, it makes us pretty damn normal.
Hannigan and his editors decided that what would get our already obsessive fan base clicking the link to his piece trashing the Huskers, what would have us shattering the proximal phalanxes on our mouse-fingers with reply-rage, was a piece with none of the nuance that is required when you talk about sports fandom in America or — yes, I’m looking at you, soccer fans — anywhere else.
Instead, he googled a few things, read a couple articles, and played our asses like an Irish fiddle. It worked, too. I clicked the link. I burned one of my two free articles for the Irish times.
Got to hand it to him, or whoever the head of their search engine optimization team is, y’all did your thing.
But, something a writer of Hannigan’s ilk should be well aware of is that Nebraska story, because it is a human one, rife with fucked up mistakes and bad choices and jam-packed with stories of beauty and hope and inclusion.
He doesn’t owe us anything and, in Nebraska, we’re not about accolades anyway. But just for the sake of a small, minuscule piece of nuance let’s see if I can list some shit off, too:
I could mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars the football program has raised for pediatric brain cancer research, or the 14 full-time employees of the athletic department who work with athletes on getting their degrees, or a few of the 122 student-athletes who graduated last year with degrees.
(*Author’s note: Guys like Ben Stille, a football stud who was “chewed up and spit out” to a lowly masters degree in Health and Nutrition. Poor guy. He doesn’t stand a fucking chance out there.)
Speaking of having your body chewed up and spit out.
I could speak about the 40,000 kids who have been mentored through Tom Osborne’s Teammates Mentoring program. That’s half of Limerick, Ireland.
There once was a writer named Davey
To be him? You couldn’t pay me.
He wrote black and white, my guy’s full of shite,
Sunk his ass, like the Irish Navy.
I could go on and on, but this kind of overwrought handwringing is exactly what this River Dancing dipshit wants.
In 2022, it’s cliché as hell to call anything clickbait, but there is no other term for the kind of gleefully venomous listicle style rap sheet that he laid out.
Tom Osborne is not a saint. He is not a deity. He did not turn the Gatorade he was so often bathing in into wine or walk across the Atlantic ocean after beating Miami.
He was a football coach and a human being and, as such, his decisions were riddled with the kind of dumbass self-covering and regrettable choices that most of us make every day. They were just on a grander scale, with more money at stake, and impacting more people.
Scott Frost it’s certainly not a saint. He would not claim to be. Nor would he say that his beloved program is flawless.
You know who knows this? Nebraska fans. You know who else knows this: everyone else with half a brain. To pretend that we think otherwise is less an insult to Husker fans than to your own self-important windbaggery.
Frankly I’m pissed at myself for even writing a response.
May the road rise up to meet you, just like my middle finger.
