The Weekly Buzz

1 comment so far September 27, 2009 by Tom Cudd

Living in the Kansas City, Missouri metropolitan area, I get a lot of sports talk radio geared towards Missouri, Kansas, and Kansas State. On Wednesday, a story about the Jayhawks was the topic on point. Not really much of a surprise, it was also a major topic all across the nation. So in case you haven't heard by now, there was a scuffle between Kansas basketball and football players on campus, with lots of eyewitnesses, photos from cell phone cameras, and police trying to sort everything out.

For those wanting to catch up, check out a couple of the popular stories out there from the major media news outlets, like Fox Sports, Yahoo!, ESPN, or the Sporting News. Of course, if you want the real dirty details, you'll need to turn to the not so major media like the Kansas City Star, The Kansan, and Story One or Story Two at KUSports.com.

Normally I don't comment on these type of situations, but it got me thinking about the culture of the athletic program at Nebraska, the type of players who are Huskers, and if a situation like this could ever happen at our school.

I'm not going to get into the details of what happened in Lawrence the past few days, as most of it is speculation or stories with very few facts to go on, and I just don't want to put something out here that I can't verify is the truth. New pieces of information have been sneaking out of Kansas this whole time, and stories have changed on an hourly basis. Basically, the football team and basketball team don't appear to like each other and have used various excuses to get into scuffles. Word on the street is that this is not the first incident, just the first one to hit the major presses.

The KU football program has been seen as an "upstart" program in the eyes of those fans who only really follow the basketball team. It's always amusing to me when the KU graduates I know ask me who their football team is playing the upcoming weekend. In our case, our upstart program that is coming along is basketball, and the Nebraska fans don't even care to ask me who are basketball team is playing next. Would our football team ever pick a fight with the basketball team for any reason? Maybe, but I think most of them fear the wrath of Bo too much, but maybe it's something else.

I don't know if scholarships are going to be affected there, but I can't imagine the majority of the basketball players and a handful of the football players risking their scholarship by getting into a fight at Nebraska. Of course every program has a stray couple of people getting into trouble on occasion, but that's everywhere. There's no way to get every player on your team to be perfect off the field. These are young guys in the middle of growing up. They just happen to have the microscope of media on them while doing it. But this type of behavior is unheard of as long as I've been paying attention to college athletics.

The likelihood of fights breaking out between various Husker athletic programs is probably pretty low. I imagine that our coaches don't just pay lip service to the statements saying they are not just recruiting players, but want kids that are a good fit for the program. It doesn't just mean they want someone who is good at their position, but also someone who believes and understands the tradition of what it means to be a Husker, including doing everything that they can to bring Nebraska to a good light. The pride that our University takes in our athletes with good academic records, a background of volunteering, and good decision making should also be spotlighted right along with the Win/Loss column of their sport.

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