Bowling for Squalors

With a worthless bowl season upon us, and fewer than a handful of good games ahead, PYB provides its commentary on Bowl Season 2012-13. The myriad of pools we've entered does little to make it interesting, and the fact that Nebraska will be annihilated on January 1 lessens our interest even more. Here goes:

Gildan New Mexico Bowl: Wasn't Gildan the activewear that Wal-Mart sold in the 1980s?

Idaho Potato: Somehow, this name has become unremarkable amongst

 the slate of shittier bowls.

SD County Credit Union Poinsettia: Name says it all. Who knew it was POIN-settia and not POINT-settia. Not us until five years ago.

Beef "O" Brady's St. Petersburg: This reminds PYB of someone taking a big, nasty shit.

R+L Carriers New Orleans: There's a bowl game in New Orleans? Bet there's a lot of jambalaya eaten and Pat O'Brien's hurricanes consumed by the fans in attendance....insert other awful cliches here...

MAACO Las Vegas: Perfect sponsor. When thinking of Vegas, we too think of dented cars, white trash, ugly scenery and other vile things.

Little Caesar's Pizza: Last time we ate this pizza (20 years ago), it was so fucking bad they gave you two for the price of one -- every day. The WKU vs CMU matchup this year is likely worse than that pizza.

Military Bowl: A meaningless bowl game, in a professional sports town (Washington DC), in cold weather. Sounds like a recipe for success.

Belk: How does a white-trash department store from the southern United States sponsor a bowl, considering it's lower on the retail shopping chain than Kohl's is? At least we can buy white Jockey t-shirts at Kohl's. Only Texans who think it's still 1988 can benefit from Belk.....guess we've answered our own question.

Bridgepoint Education Holiday: Sponsorship of this game has been passed around more than Alyssa Milano at an ESPYs after party....

AdvoCare V100 Independence: Anyone else driven by the Independence Bowl? PYB did this fall, right after surviving a harrowing experience at the ghetto-assed Whataburger a mile down the road.

Russell Athletic: The rich man's Gildan. We thought Russell went out of business once they quit making sweatpants with elastic at the bottom of the legs.

New Era Pinstripe: Pro town, cold weather, two awful teams rekindling old Big East rivalry. Awesome. Do New Era hats still stick up three inches too high unless you smash them under a dictionary for two weeks? Oh wait, we think the little fags these days like wearing them like that now because they have dirty, shaggy hair and are enormous pussies who don't have any idea how to wear hats -- for baseball, leisure, or otherwise...

Kraft Fight Hunger: What doesn't say blood rivalry like Navy vs. Arizona State in San Francisco?

Buffalo Wild Wings: Worse food: Hooter's or Buffalo WW?

Hyundai Sun: I don't know how they do it down in Juarez, Peedro.....

Chick-fil-A: One of the most laughable names a few years ago is now one of the most established. Chicken minis are legit....

TaxSlayer.com Gator: No clue what TaxSlayer.com is....but we are certain that this bowl would be our favorite if it was the PoonSlayer.com bowl.....

Heart of Dallas: What does this mean? Awful fucking traffic? Poorly designed roads? Dirty streets? Poorly dressed citizens with 1980s hair? Fill us in.

Outback: For the record, you assholes who say Outback is a great steakhouse because: 1. You've never been to a good one or 2. They have a $14.99 deal for a skirt steak and tasteless vegetables can 1. Kiss our ass and 2. Feel free to shell out $150 once in your life for a proper steak dinner. No offense if you can't afford $150, just don't tell us that Outback is edible, then.

Capital One: The Cap One ads of Vikings raping & pillaging on television are fitting, considering the asskicking Nebraska got last year from a mediocre South Carolina squad and the one they're going to get from a soft Georgia team. But hey, we don't "think about stuff."

Rose: College football's most meaningless phenomenon this side of the Heisman Trophy. Nicely painted field in a piece-of-shit stadium between irrelevant teams.

Discover Orange: How the mighty have fallen. Always one of the best games between highly ranked teams that capped New Year's Day....live from the Miami ghetto. Now, Northern Illinois vs. Florida State. Where do we sign up?

Allstate Sugar: Shawn Twatson on the big stage against the overrated Florida Gators.

Tostitos Fiesta: Always pulls a solid matchup. Look what happens when you mix a desireable location with a little corruption. A fucking moneymaker.

AT&T Cotton: aTm vs. OU. Look what they have to do to fill this game.....invite the locals. Apparently, outsiders aren't jumping at the chance to come play golf in 50-degree weather on dead grass....

BBVA Compass: Nothing like playing a bowl game on the same field as the Division III championship game was---a month earlier.

GoDaddy.com: Kent State and Arkansas State play five days after most of the BCS games. Huh? And GoDaddy either needs to get it's semi-nude sponsors to dyke out or quit with the fake sexy theme they throw out each year for the Super Bowl. It's the 2000s, and we see more than your "risque" ads show at an average night at a Scottsdale bar...

Discover BCS National Championship: Can you feel it? That's the excitement of a mid-week bowl game played six days after the rest of the good games between a Notre Dame team that beat BYU by three points and an Alabama team that lost a game. Fuck yeah!

Enjoy the yearly bowl installment, we will make sure to.....in fact, we are rushing out to get a bottle of CIROC right now. Because judging from the commercial we just saw, it's so powerful that it makes Puff Daddy and Jesse from Breaking Bad best of buddies....magic....and stuff.

PYB

Speed Kills

PYB starts out with a good breakdown from the OWH's Sam McKewon. It reminds us all that Barney Cotton, who went largely uncriticized this season because of NU's other glaring problems, is an idiot.

We love to see Nebraska show its current recruiting clout this week: losing a commit from the South, while adding one for Big 16 territory. Tremendous work, coaches. We're sure it'll all be fine if NU can pluck another couple Ohio recruits before signing day.

Pete Carroll ran a fake punt up 30 points in the 4th quarter Sunday. He's a crook and shows why he's making his name as the Lane Kiffin of the NFL.

All we have to say to this is: what the fuck? Kill a teammate, but enjoy the next home game from the sidelines.

That's all we've got. Apologize for the poor formatting -- blogspot was fucked today.

Pin-Sanity

PYB checking in, wishing all our readers a happy holiday season, hoping that you're enjoying the propaganda campaign trying to convince us all that Nebraska stands a chance Jan. 1 against Georgia...

--Here's the latest version, and we're sure that PYB-favorite Jon Nyatawa loved this assignment. We expect the same performance that Private Pinelli and Company blessed us with in last season's Capital One bowl: start out with some early spark, turn the ball over, panic, Taylorina shift into full-meltdown mode.....bottle blasted. Surely, the Dawgs are salivating at the thought of a panicky, fidgety, scatter-armed, pea-brained, error-prone QB coming their way on New Year's Day....

--We've seen and heard it all before...but Bo says his troops are ready to go. They'll be focused and ready to go, he says. Apparently, for the first time in five years.

--The Nebraska volleyball team logged its yearly choke job to a more athletic team. They are the Kansas Jayhawks of women's volleyball.

--No recruiting season would be complete without Pinelli venturing in to Ohio to steal a lightly regarded recruit from Big East also-rans and Big Ten cellar dwellers. He didn't disappoint us this year. Faced with the daunting prospect of replacing Porky Meredith, a defensive end so fat and ineffective that he was moved to defensive tackle mid-season, Pinelli snatched this gem from the clutches of West Virginia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Purdue and Indiana.

After further analysis, PYB thinks he'll do just fine after gaining 35 pounds of fat in the next 18 months. That should allow him to be ready to play pattycake with offensive linemen, let the play pass him by and waddle behind the action just like the DEs before him. We're fine.

--Switching gears to the NFL: The Texans and Falcons both exposed as frauds in Week 14. It was just a matter of time.

--Bobby Petrino gets another job....huh?

Gotta run for now....we're going to go plow a co-worker, crash a car and quit on our teammates at the office in hopes of getting a better job.....

PYB

Rickie Fatler

Seed of Rickie rears his head again....

Pic of the Day -- Blake Street Edition

Courtesy of Mouse, following the Denver Broncos win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday...

Checkered Past

Fool's gold. PYB has been saying it for weeks, as NU racked up meaningless wins against poor competition. We thought once Private Pinelli and the Cornhuskers played a good team, they'd take a bottle blasting for the ages. Turns out, they played a mediocre team without a quarterback and took it straight up the ass.

Where the fuck, exactly, would someone start dissecting this atrocity in Indianapolis? And how many times can we re-invent the wheel by describing how shitty Taylor Martinez is, pointing out the myriad of major coaching gaffes and lamenting the lack of speed and talent on a lifeless Nebraska Blackskirt defense?

70-31. At least Texas Tech and Kansas were Top-15 teams when they broke the 70 mark against NU. Now, everyone gets a shot....the same way every fraternity member got a shot at the house slut. If it's fucking inevitable, just sit back and enjoy it. Enjoy the fact that maybe the Pinelli Era is one game closer to an end and that Taylorina is one start closer to starting his career as a Canadian Football league backup. (As a side note: if Coach Bro doesn't open a legitimate quarterback competition next fall, then he should be fired on the spot.)

So, that said, we couldn't devise a way to make sense of last night's abortion. And we damn sure aren't watching that game again. Watching a second time is for analyzing what went right and what went wrong. It's not for watching a band of quitters let a pedestrian offense and its running backs waltz untouched into the end zone time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time after time. That's ten times, to be exact. A team that finds it acceptable to put forth that pathetic a performance doesn't deserve cogent, coherent analysis. So, we decided to just go down our list of Twitter rants and expound accordingly.

S&M, let the beatings begin....

--Last night's Big 16 Championship Game started off in amateurish fashion, with the end zone lettering adorned in 18-point Helvetica and thousands of empty seats apparent throughout the arena.

--Wisconsin raced right down the field on the opening possesion, after winning the coin toss and opting to take the football instead of deferring to the second half. This should have been a red flag on its own, as the Badgers were so confident they were going to kick the shit out of NU that they didn't care about getting the second-half kickoff.

--As UW scored its first touchdown on a 56-yard reverse that made Sean Fisher look like he was nailed to the turf, it's apparent that Fisher has a 4.0 GPA and a 5.0 40-yard dash time.

--We were glad to see the Blackshirts' big-game missed-tackle form rear its head after a few weeks in the closet. We hadn't see such horrible pursuit angles and open-field tackling since the Ohio State game. At least against UCLA and the Buckeyes, there were mobile quarterbacks making the task tougher. Last nite, just a statuesque non-factor calling the signals.

--After falling behind 7-0, PYB predicted a Taylorina turnover within three plays. We were too generous. After one offensive play for NU, T Vag racked up an interception, UW ran it back for six and it was 14-0 Badgers. Game over.

--On the ensuing kickoff, Ameer Abdullah showed us all why he should have been taken off kick and punt returns two months ago, when he dropped the ball in the endzone. On his following attempt, he tried to catch the ball with him arms above his head. Holy shit, apparently the "Special-teams-by-committee" coaching is not working after all. Hard to fathom.

--After three early completions to the tight ends, Tim Beck made sure to break out his "I'm too scared to attack in a big game unless we're down 28 points so let's go sideways" passing game.

--PYB loves that NU still can't figure out how to blitz a defender from closer than 15 yards from the line of scrimmage.

--People expected Wisconsin to exploit Nebraska's soft interior on the defensive line. So they ran outside -- about 50 times. Everyone noticed it except Privates Pinelli and Papadapolis. As was the case in 2011 and in the first half of the 2012 game, Bert Bielema was playing chess and Bo was playing checkers.

--Rex Burkhead carried the team to victory last week against Iowa. He looked great early on Saturday, so naturally, he got 11 carries. After falling behind 14-0 early and having a vulnerable defense, who wouldn't decide to strap their chances to a notoriously shaky quarterback and a hurry-up offense. Trying to slow the bleeding and build momentum with the running game would be much too risky.

--Frank Solich called in during the first half, and said he loved the Huskers' mettle in big games. He also chimed in on the SEC championship game between Alabama and Georgia, and said he loved Mark Richt's clock management on the final drive.

--NU got fooled by a QB throwback play that developed as quickly as a glacier. Eric Martin jogged behind the play.

--Kenny Bell absolutely annihilated a Badger defender. It was the best hit we've seen by a Cornhusker since Mike Rucker's punt-return hit against Kansas State years ago. The referees called Bell's hit a penalty. It was the worst call ever, and another in the long line of calls that makes fans wonder about the future of football. Didn't all the pussies enroll in soccer at age 10, while the ones with balls got their first helmet and shoulder pads?

--PYB was criticized on Twitter for blaming the team's "slow" start on Martinez. It wasn't his fault, the critics said. Taylorina fumbled the ball away to Wisconsin on the next play. Pinelli is glad Martinez is his quarterback. The rest of Husker Nation is not.

--Since when did Nebraska's strength program mean making guys fat instead of muscular and explosive? How 'bout that Big 16 Smashmouth culture?

--Taylorina got his leg swept on one of Wisconsin's six sacks, reminding us all of Dutch and Johnny Lawrence. "You're the best, Taylorina! You're the best!"

--Taylorina also got body slammed on another sack. None of his teammates did shit about it. So much for the code of protecting your quarterback at all costs.

--Tommie Frazier listed his Rose Bowl tickets on craigslist.com early in the third quarter.

--Jon Vedral called and loved the Huskers' adjustments to Wisconsin's run-game nuances and loved the team's tackling.

--Beck waited until Nebraska was behind 49-10 before using the Diamond formation for the first time. It gained 12 yards.

--Why does Pinelli insist on allowing Beck to try to force the issue when Nebraska gets way behind and is clearly going to take a dick in the ass? Can't they taking a 42-17 beating in stride rather than continuing to turn the ball over and take an entire broomstick up the butt on national television?

--T Vagic ruined any comeback hopes NU had by lobbing a rainbow into the flat early in the third quarter, allowing a Badger defender to lope under the ball and return it for six points. Great pocket presence. Great football IQ.

--Dan Marino and Bernie Kosar were more mobile in the pocket than Martinez. Marino may have a lower IQ, though.

--Barney Cotton's unit was finally exposed as another fraudulent group.

At some point in the third quarter, we quit watching. We've seen this movie before, probably more times than we've seen The Shawshank Redemption on TNT. NU starts timidly. NU gets behind. NU exacerbates the problem with untimely turnover. NU gets further behind. NU panics. Bo gets mad. Taylor the Elf gets jittery in the pocket and makes more turnovers. NU quits. Bo points the thumb.

Most shocking was the lack of difference makers on the Nebraska defense. Outside of occasional solid efforts by Will Compton and Ciante Evans, NU has nobody capable of making a play against a high-powered offense. Evans himself got mauled by Montee Ball -- the same guy who got his ass beat on the streets of Madison this summer.

The offense has its moments, but as we've said for two years, until a QB change is made, nothing will improve. Wasted will be the talents of the Burkheads, Abdullahs, Heards, Bells, Reeds and Turners.

NU loses 29 seniors, most of them shitty. Are we supposed to be comforted by Pinelli's past recruiting catches and his future pipeline into the heart of the Rust Belt's Catholic schools? Please forgive us if we're not sold.

It's quite apparent that a school with as many natural disadvantages as NU can't turn over coaches every five years. Just ask Bo about those disadvantages, he whines about them every February. The last thing PYB wants is to have to start from square one for the third time since 2003. If Private Pinelli can't prevent shellackings like last night's in the near future and forever, it will be a very necessary evil.

So, strap on your Husker hat for one more game. Another visit to the flavorless Capital One bowl, against an SEC opponent that will be much better than the South Carolina squad that throttled NU last season in the same game. Wisconsin's lead-footed defense made T Vagic sweat like a whore in church. One can only imagine what the LSU defense would do to that wimp. Tiger Bait.

For now, we wonder how long NU will piss into the wind with the carnival act that is Private Pinelli.

"Private Pinelli, your pending promotion to Corporal is hereby: DENIED."