Nebraska...not feeling Frosty anymore

[entropy]

www.expandtheirexperience.com

Over $300M in projects going on right now at UNL, and I've been told they have funding for almost all of it, either through donations or bonds. I've been left with the impression they are 2-3% short, which is pretty amazing for a campaign that is about a year old.

[entropy]

http://www.bigten.org/sports/m-basebl/spec-rel/m-basebl-standings.html

BIG baseball standings. Losing to NW is killing UNL. No godd excuse for it.

[THE_WIZARD_]

NU has as good a chance of landing Okafor as a Oreo Earthquake Sundae has of surviving in front of liney.

0.0%

NU does/will have great facilities for hoops. But they need to start winning before an Okafor will go to Lincoln.

[entropy]

point is wiz.. he came. when was the last time a top 10 player came to Lincoln nebraska for basketball?

...try never.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Truedat. I like that Miles is at least courting big names. Might help down the road...but I just want to caution all those unrealistic NU hoops fans out there (all 3 of them) that it ain't gonna happen with Okafor. He is being recruited by UNC, Duke, and Michigan. This would be like seeing a football recruit being courted by Alabama, LSU, Florida and Western Illinois.

[entropy]

agree. I don't have any expectation he'll go to UNL. What I do HOPE is he goes back to chicago and talks. And maybe a kid who was thinking of going to Purdue or Minn might take a chance on UNL. That would be a huge win.

[THE_WIZARD_]

EFZ

[entropy]

Natter commits to UNL

[entropy]

http://recruiting.scout.com/a.z?s=73&p=8&c=1&nid=5782510

[entropy]

Huskers claim recruit out of Wisconsin

Posted by: Brian Christopherson on April 16, 2012 at 8:11PM CST

A.J. Natter lives only about 35 minutes from the campus in Madison, but the top recruit in the state of Wisconsin plans on playing his football for another Big Red.



The 6-foot-6, 230-pound defensive end told the Journal Star Monday night that he committed to NU during his visit over the weekend, giving the Huskers their fourth commitment.




Natter said he just felt at home. "It just felt right."




He knew when he came back to his hotel in Lincoln on Friday night that his mind was made up.




"I just felt like I couldn't play anywhere else. I wanted to play here," Natter said. "I wanted to be a part of something. I wanted to be a part of something great."




Much more coming on Natter in a story.

[entropy]

Hoops recruits feel the love in Lincoln

By BRIAN ROSENTHAL / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Monday, April 16, 2012 11:45 pm


Turns out, many Nebraska fans do care about men's basketball.
How else do you explain Jahlil Okafor picking up nearly 6,000 Twitter followers during his weekend visit to Lincoln?
Never mind that's more than attended most of the Huskers' nonconference games last season.

Get a heralded hoops recruit on campus, and watch the love flow.
Hey, it's not every day a guy with offers from Duke, North Carolina, Connecticut, Michigan State, Ohio State -- you get the picture -- sets foot in Lincoln.

In fact, it's likely never happened.

Walt Woghiren, assistant coach of the Mac Irvin Fire Under-17 AAU team, kind of got that impression when he and a group of his Chicago high school players stopped at a gas station outside of Lincoln.

People there watched as the 6-foot-9 boys emerged from the van.
"They put two-and-two together, realized they were basketball players and said, ‘Hey, we read about you in the paper,'" Woghiren said.

"You could tell they were kind of hoping to see them again." In a Nebraska uniform, no doubt.

That's down the road a bit for Okafor, a 6-10, 280-pound center. He's only a sophomore, and ranked by most recruiting services as a top-five recruit in the 2014 class.

Go ahead and put Nebraska next to Carolina and Duke on his offer list. Okafor got one from new coach Tim Miles over the weekend, as did Sterling Brown (6-4 shooting guard), Kyle Davis (5-11 point guard) and Josh Cunningham (6-6 power forward).
Brown (offers from Illinois, DePaul) and Davis (Marquette, Tennessee, Xavier, Northwestern) are juniors, part of the 2013 class. Cunningham is a sophomore, part of the 2014 class.
Also visiting Lincoln were Russell Woods (6-9 forward, 2013), Xzavier Taylor (6-8 forward, 2013) and Miles Reynolds (6-2 point guard, 2014).

Paul Turner (6-4 guard, 2014) and Paul White (6-8 forward, 2014) were also scheduled to visit, but unable to make the trip, Woghiren said.

Why the group visit to Nebraska?

Credit Ron Coleman, a member of Miles' staff, albeit without an official title, as of yet. Coleman formerly coached with the Mac Irvin Fire program in Chicago and convinced the players to pay their own way to Lincoln.

Neither Woghiren nor the players expected the overwhelmingly positive reception.

"Going into it, we didn't realize it, but as we got there and were on our way there, we heard the buzz and read the buzz about it," Woghiren said. "We started to understand how big of a deal it was."

Tom Osborne told them as much, too. The NU athletic director visited with the recruits.

"He was very genuine with them," Woghiren said. "He expressed interest in the players, told them they've never had anything like this on campus before."

Equally as impressive as Nebraska's welcome mat was the program's state-of-the-art practice facility. The $18 million Hendricks Training Complex opened in August.

"I've been to a few schools, and I haven't seen anything like that," Woghiren said. "Everything is above what they had to do."
The recruits also visited the construction site of the Pinnacle Bank Arena, set to open for the 2013-14 season, and played pick-up games with current Husker players.

Will any of the visitors eventually sign with Nebraska? Nobody knows, but getting them on campus was a victory in itself, in many peoples' eyes.

Turns out, this wasn't a token visit, either. The players were impressed and are genuinely interested in Nebraska, Woghiren said.

"One, they do like the facilities. They've never seen anything like that before," he said. "Two, they like the relationship they have with Coach Miles and Coach Coleman.

"And three, they see the chance for immediate playing time. They like that."

Reach Brian Rosenthal at 402-473-7436 or brosenthal@journalstar.com. You can follow him on Twitter @HuskerExtraBR.

[entropy]

Nebraska needs more of this on offense:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VykWmBkhBzc"]Joel Makovica leveling Dat Nguyen - YouTube[/ame]

[Wild Hoss]

Testing the old brain cells here, but I believe that was a 41 Belly option...with a side-order of whoop-ass.

[entropy]

I noticed on Huskers.com there are some new pages about the expansion, with photos and more:

http://www.huskers.com/ViewArt...p;DB_OEM_ID=100

http://www.huskers.com/ViewArt...ID=205396187%A0

http://www.huskers.com/ViewArt...p;db_oem_id=100

[entropy]

Three things to ponder

Posted by: Steve Sipple on April 17, 2012 at 11:09AM CST

Three things to ponder, and one wild prediction.

1. Maybe all those Chicago hoops stars made what amounts to only a token visit to Nebraska. Or maybe not. The players are genuinely interested in Nebraska, said Walt Woghiren, assistant coach of the Mac Irvin Fire Under-17 AAU team (the Mac Irvin Fire rapidly are becoming a household name in our state).

"One, they do like the facilities. They've never seen anything like that before," he said. "Two, they like the relationship they have with Coach Miles and Coach Coleman. And three, they see the chance for immediate playing time. They like that."

Yeah, facilities are important, especially the shiny new ones at NU. But the latter two reasons from Woghiren are gigantic in this discussion. This could get interesting.

2. So, Missouri is the latest team to join the college football uniform frenzy. Wonderful. The large block "M" that has been on the helmet for years was replaced by a Tiger head logo. MU will have 24 different uniform combinations. No biggie, I guess, since Mizzou is sorely lacking in football tradition. I'm just a little weirded out that many college teams are taking on the look of arena football teams.

According to The Kansas City Star, Missouri coach Gary Pinkel reiterated several times over the past few months the importance of the uniforms to recruits. Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. It's all about recruiting.

3. The crystal football Alabama won for beating LSU in the BCS championship game in January was shattered on A-Day when it was accidentally knocked off a display by the father of a current player.

I can't believe this accident doesn't happen more often. I'm always sort of freaked out when I see players and coaches hoisting the crystal in the air and passing it around amongst themselves after winning all the marbles. Don't drop that thing! It'll shatter!

Turns out, the incident at Alabama wasn't the first time.

Prediction: The momentum is growing in the college game. By 2015, Nebraska will be wearing alternate uniforms at least three times a season. Deal with it.