Leo Adam Biga's My Inside Stories

The more the University of Nebraska football program’s woes continue and indeed only get worse, the more capital I believe my semi-mock diagnosis of the program’s mental imbalance has actual traction. But I’ll let you be the judge.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE HUSKER FOOTBALL PROGRAM-
MY OLD FRIEND, YOU ARE BADLY IN NEED OF A 12-STEP INTERVENTION RECOVERY PROGRAM
Offered in the spirit of satire or don’t take any of this too seriously.

Dear Nebraska Football Program:

It is with great concern and compassion that I appeal to your better angels and ask you to accept a therapeutic regimen that can address your chronic mental illness. Please consider letting those who have your best interests at heart intercede on your behalf so that you can get the help that you need in order to return to health, which is to say sanity, sobriety and serenity.

Let us not mince words but rather state the obvious – you are sick. There is no use in denying it. You have all the symptoms. Low self-esteem. Depression. Performance anxiety. Paranoia. Anger issues. Irrational, inconsistent decisions and behaviors. Inability to develop trusting relationships. Doing the same thing over and over again and failing at it and yet expecting a different result, which as any rational person knows is a classic marker for insanity.
But, my troubled friend, you are so deeply lost in your illness that you cannot see these things for yourself.
The first step to getting better is to admit that you have a problem. Simply going about business as usual and acting as if everything is normalt is a self-deluding proposition that will only keep you right where you are at – in the depths of your addiction.

I can hear you protesting already – I’m no addict…what addiction? Your addiction my friend is to self-inflicted pain. Since 2004 and even before then, you have struggled to find your way as one by one the caring, supporting, guiding figures in your life left you and the infrastructures that once made you strong began falling away. You have had trouble adjusting and transitioning to the succession of leaders who have followed because of your profound abandonment and identity issues.

The near constant scrutiny and criticism directed at you have weighed on you and frayed your nerves and impaired your decision-making.

So much has changed in your environment from those days when you were well and robust and the envy of so many others. As that landscape has become increasingly competitive and pressure-filled and as you have lost what few supports you had around you, you have more and more come to interpret the world as a cruel, harsh place. Negative thoughts have replaced positive thoughts. You live in fear and doubt that the next shoe will drop or that the current regime will let you down just as surely as the previous ones did.

When you get in close games, you freeze up or, well let’s just say, have difficulty doing the right thing.
You have endless rationalizations for why these things happen, but that is only deflecting the problem from the true source: yourself.

Just when you need stability, one leadership team is replaced by another and you have to learn new ways of dong things before you even mastered the old ways.

All of this feeds your insecurity. Little problems get inflated into big problems. Your sense of isolation is increased. You revert to unhealthy old habits and patterns that become ever more entrenched the more you act on them. You have trouble investing in the present or the future because your sense of being all-in is not there. Hope is dim.
When all those around you share the same mindset and tendencies, well, then bad attitudes and behaviors only get reinforced.

In short, your confidence is shattered and your ability to make sound decisions compromised. The more you act out, the more hard wired that becomes, thus making it even harder to enact positive changes.

Making matters worse, many of the decision-makers behind Husker Football and many of your fans, friends and family members are enablers. Out of good intentions they actually fuel your mistaken belief that you are whole and well, when in fact you are broken and sick.

A sure sign of disturbance is when your relationships suffer as a result of your acting out and there are untold examples of how as a program you have alienated, embarrassed, insulted the very fan, alumni and media base that helped give you life and that sustains you. What’s worse, you don’t seem to care that you have caused injury and estrangement. And yes I know that elements of that same base have said and done hurtful things to you, but this is where balance and forgiveness must prevail. Making amends.

Another sign of illness is, of course, impaired job performance. Here, the record of shortcomings speaks for itself.
Furthermore, you have continually resisted, ignored or criticized genuine efforts to offer you advice and counsel. You must acknowledge that your affliction is unmanageable and that you cannot handle it alone. Your only recourse is surrendering to a Higher Power. But you get highly agitated and defensive when remedies and assitance are broached.

There is also a decided tendency to overreact to things. In the name of progress, you have recklessly trampled on and discarded tried and true traditions that gave the program an identity for new systems and styles that have repeatedly proven a poor fit. You keep trying to be something you are not and were never intended to be and that disconnect only causes you more internal confusion and cognitive dissonance. The more separated you become from your true self and the resources available to you, the less resilient you become to change or challenge.

The longer this crisis has gone on the more you have become used to conflict, chaos, failure, despair and even hopelessness. Oh, you put on a good face, but it is clear that you no longer believe in yourself or in what you’re doing.
Things have come to the point where an intervention is called for. Since the board of regents, university administration and athletic department leadership have effectively failed to act responsibly, which is to say without due diligence in making the three most recent head coach hiring decisions, I am proposing that legislation be enacted to take the football program out of their hands and be given to an executive committee comprised of rank and file fans as well as past and present players, coaches and university officials. The majority members would be fans. In so doing, the voices of Nebraskans who are both close to the situation and who have the perspective of outsiders looking in would not only be heard but would have a definite say in things.

Our money, after all, is funding the entire athletics apparatus as taxpayers, season ticket subscribers and boosters. The program would not be what it is without the fans. They should be a part of determining whatever direction the program takes and whatever hires and fires it makes.

Radical? Unrealistic? Never happen? Probably. Then again, Nebraska Football is a unique phenomenon in this state for the disproportionate impact it has on the collective psyche. There is nothing else in the state to unite its disparate, geographically isolated populations the way the program does. The program’s crisis and failure, if left unchecked and unmitigated, is likely to get worse before it gets better, that is if it ever does get better. It is the considered opinion of myself and others that the program is actually heading for rock bottom right now. Rather than let another scenario play out whereby the current coaching staff manages to give the program a fix to prop the program back on its feet only to see it fall back into relapse again, I propose a more dramatic and thorough treatment plan that undoes the current model and gives fans a real say in what happens now and moving forward.

Call it crazy if you will, but I prefer to call it recovery.

Then again, it is only football.

Sincerely,

A Fan in Search of Solutions and with Clearly Too Much Time on My Hands