Norm Peterson

That Covid exists is a scientific fact. Falsely imputing anti-science beliefs to your political adversaries for the sake of impugning them with malign motives is not science. It's politics. The "number of people that are trying to deny the truth of those statements" is so infinitesimally small as to be statistically, practically non-existent. The fact you seem to think that number of people is somehow statistically significant is a reflection of your ideological blinders. Again, politics. If you cannot acknowledge that there's a political insinuation in the statement "Covid is real" then I cannot accept that you are capable of a good-faith discussion about this.

Palate cleanser. The best thing you'll see on social media all day:

Part of me wishes I had that excuse, but I guess I'll go and cheer on behalf of everyone who can't make it. Which, by the looks of the last crowd, was all but about 3,500 people.

To all you folks on this board who've had the 'rona, I share your pain and wish you nothing but a full recovery. For those like @kldm64 who had it bad, man, I'm glad you're on the mend. This disease has sucked in ways too many and too destructive to count.

What part?

Jones, this was a really perplexing response from you. Everything HB said was objectively reasonable, completely apolitical, and true. He shared an experience of having a bad case of Covid but, optimistically, that the Omicron variant is milder (this is MANIFESTLY true), easily transmissible (also manifestly true), and isn't prevented by prior vaccination, which I can personally attest to having had both the injections and Omicron. And that, therefore, it might help raise our collective immunity. How you turned that into something political is lost on me and frankly disappointing.

What a bizarre post. "Covid should never have been politicized. Except when I politicize it." Can you even hear yourself? "vaccines work, Covid is real." I mean, these are tropes that have a peculiarly vitriolic, political origin, and for you to invoke those tropes while simultaneously saying Covid shouldn't have been politicized is a work of mental gymnastics that rivals anything those Russian acrobats did at halftime the other night. Impressive. I guess.

Not life-threatening, but did you ever have kids?

I am forecasting. Would it make things more clear if I said "I think the things he has done this off-season are the kinds of things that will pay real dividends and are not just window-dressing, and these changes, which were necessary, I believe will translate into wins next season. Sufficient wins for him to keep his job." And I'll add this: I was not expecting the kind of off-season movement we've seen. Even when they did the restructure, my thoughts had been that it would be too little, too late, and that Frost would have difficulty enticing new assistants or quality transfers/recruits to come to a place where it looks like the current coach is circling the drain. The fact that lots of guys who could have easily transferred decided to stick around was an eye-opener to me. The fact that he landed some legit assistants was a further eye-opener. But pulling in the TX QB and the LSU receivers were legit coups. The players in the program, it seems to me, clearly believe they have something going worth sticking with. Compare that to men's basketball.

Bunga bunga?

Is this the Sweet Meteor of Death I've been hearing about?

Lil Red is my favorite mascot. Always has been.

@aphilso1, actually, I think Frost saved his job this off-season. I think the changes he made were not just window-dressing or rearranging the Titanic's deck chairs, but actual, structural improvements that will lead to success. And we have a bit easier of a path next season, in terms of schedule, to get to a bowl game. We still have a few needs, but we've checked some boxes. And if Frost wins 8 or 9 games and takes us to a bowl, it'll be impossible to fire him after NOT firing him this season and giving him another chance to fix things. If you give him a chance to fix stuff and it gets fixed ... So, I expect the O-line is going to look a bit saltier. We have a pretty solid receivers room. We just added a the best juco player in the country to our running backs room. And we replaced the turnover machine with the Big 12 leader in TDs, so the QB room should look better. The offensive coordinating will probably be just a bit better. And special teams could be night and day. I mean, it would be hard for our special teams to NOT be a lot better than they were a year ago. So, yeah. Anyway, Fred, not so much.

Oh, he heard alright.

There's scheme. Theres' talent. And then there's the process by which a coach applies his scheme to the talent he has. Those three things. Seems like I've talked about this recently. But you can have any two of those things and still not be successful. You gotta have all three. From the average fan perspective, I've heard Fred's scheme is really good. Top notch. It's hard to say from the results on the floor where the break-down is, but I'll grant for the sake of argument that his Xs and Os strategies are there. Talent? Sure seems like the talent is better than what the results dictate. So, let's just say it appears where things fall apart is in the area of transmitting the scheme through the players onto the floor. And I think that's clearly not happening. I remember watching warmups for the Colorado exhibition thinking I was a bit concerned by all the goofing around. Players did not appear to be taking seriously the task at hand. OK, fine, it's an exhibition, whatever. But they did the same damn thing against Western Illinois. And now it seems like a symptom of a bigger problem. So, I'm reminded of that program "Kitchen Nightmares" with Gordon Ramsey. He goes into dumpster-fire of a restaurant and tries to show them how to fix things. And, when he leaves, it seems like he's gotten most of them straightened out. But if you google the names of these restaurants, you find out they went out of business, most of them, not long after Ramsey was there. Why? Was it because he didn't show them how best to do things or make good improvements? No. It's because the people who were struggling were shitty at what they did and that's why they had problems to begin with. Mostly bad managers. Some just not very good cooks. But the reasons they were struggling tended to be obvious. One of the things that Ramsey used to constantly harp on was standards. You have to set a standard for excellence and then demand that everyone adhere to that standard. You never EVER send out a dish that you know doesn't meet the standard. Get it right. Make sure it's right. Every time. And you'll succeed. I can remember an episode of "Kitchen Nightmares" that ran in the UK. The chef-owner was a Michelin-starred chef (that's a BIG deal) and he was using the highest quality ingredients. But his place was empty. And he couldn't figure out why. This was actually a Ramsey success story because he got them turned around, but the problem this chef had was that he let standards slide. He'd lost the fire in his belly. He was letting dishes go out that weren't up to the standard, and you just can't do that. But that guy was able to fix it. Can Fred?

Lil Red does the women; Herbie does the men's games.

Your wish is my command. Seriously, I just threw out a title because I wanted to get something up and all I could think about was when the sprinter for Belarus criticized her coach in social media and she had to defect to Poland because they were going to throw her butt in jail. Matt's title is admittedly better than mine. But I am a food guy, so ...

As it turns out ...

For real, bro? Or are you implying Doc ain't around much?

The "wins" will come during the next seat-yourself process when all those guys who scooped up extra lower-bowl seats during the last seat-yourself process look at their ROI for those seat purchases, see that we're stuck with this horrid team dynamic for at least the forseeable future since we have a buyout like a giant millstone tied around our necks, and decide to dump their extras, and, without a lot of energy or passion among the remaining fans, lower bowl demand reduces to a trickle and NORM FINALLY GETS TO MOVE INTO THE GOOD SEATS. At least that's the story I keep telling myself so I don't cry myself to sleep each night. Oh, and finding free parking should be a breeze.

And when he says it, he doesn’t come across sounding like he’s doing it to call anybody out. He comes across sounding like he’s trying to be fair but still answer the question honestly. You can tell he’s even trying to downplay some of the problems when he says things like “as soon as we get our personal agendas out of the way it’ll get better“ and things like that. Regardless, it was very disconcerting to listen to that. But it sure does explain a lot!

@throwback Go listen to the whole hour if you have time, because there's other stuff, too. Lot's of stuff they're not doing. First question was basically do they even care how bad things are going? And Webster basically said, well, yeah, it might not look like it, but as soon as they get over their own personal agendas, things might turn around. Like WTF? But I'm particularly troubled by that last 10 minutes or so. Vershan Jackson gives an illustration of how a conversation between teammates holding each other accountable might go. "I need you to do a better job of boxing out." "Yeah, OK, gotcha." "Because I'm tired of losing." "I got you." And Webster's like, um, that kind of nice back and forth? Yeah, that's not happening with us. And Vershan Jackson mimics players saying like "You're not the boss of me!" And Webster responds, yep, that's pretty much what it is. The culture in this program is deep in the shit. And the head guy, who's getting $3.5 million this year to BE the head guy, needs to pull his head out of his butt and quit tolerating what he's getting. I'm just beside myself here. I ain't that damn old yet, but I ain't getting any younger, and I want to be around when the monkey comes off this program's back. So I'd appreciate a little sense of urgency by the guys who are in charge. I'm just so disgusted RN I don't even know what to say.

@hhcmatt Request permission to treat this like a game thread and swear.

The question, specifically, was who is the player that is holding his teammates accountable. And the answer was nobody. They're not working on the little things and they're not being held accountable for failing to do the little things. And Kobe said he told the coaches that the players can't hold each other accountable if the coaches won't. And it just makes you wonder, if this is the stuff happening on the practice floor, what accountability is there for things away from the practice floor? I listened to this and I was just gobsmacked. It ain't no wonder that ppl like @tcp are saying they don't like this team. Because what you see on the floor on game day is a reflection of who they are being off the floor. There's a place where the buck stops. But it's apparently in Trev Albert's office because it sure doesn't appear to be in Hendricks.

OK, I'll start this off: Nobody is being held accountable for not doing what they're supposed to be doing on the floor. True or not true?