Ruined Reputation

When the 2007 college football season ended I could not help but think that Nebraska Cornhuskers' head coach Bill Callahan would not be getting hired for a head coaching position anytime soon.

It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that in six years of being a head coach (2 with the Oakland Raiders) he has coached a team with a losing record three times. It simply has to do with the fact that Bill Callahan has developed the reputation as a head coach who has players on his team who quit.

Quit: give up; throw in the towel. You name it, Callahan's players do it.

Just look back at the records. A year after losing the 2002 Super Bowl 48-21 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Callahan's Raiders went 4-12 in 2003.

4-12! Cornerback Charles Woodson said things got so bad in the locker room that he feared for Callahan's life! Okay so that was one bad time Callahan had with his players, give him a break.

Wrong!

This past year the second team he's been the head coach of quit on him much like the Raiders did. The Cornhuskers had improved every year since Callahan had arrived in 2004. 5-6, 8-4, 9-5, and then 5-7?!

Don't attempt to convince me the Huskers did not give up on this season! Yes, they did put up 70+ points one week late in the season against Kansas State, but I can honestly say that seems to be the only time during the season following a win 35-17 against Iowa State September 29 the Huskers played a full four quarters.

At one point during this season Nebraska was 4-1. They would lose 6 of their final 7, while giving up a pathetic 46 points per game!

I know that sticks out the most about Callahan's resume; he builds teams of men who occasionally quit. Check that: EVENTUALLY quit. I would be very surprised if Callahan ever got a major college coaching job again. Much less ANY head coaching job.

His reputation is cemented...and so is his head coaching career. Enough said.

The Ultimate Wish

I was thinking the other day of what I would do if I had three wishes. First would be for more money (of course), second would be to run out with the LSU football team in Tiger Stadium (that's a given), and thirdly? Well, that's the newest dream.

My dream would be to fire a ginormous machine gun. Plain and simple: I want to fire a huge machine gun. No, not a sissy little handheld pistol. I'm talking about one John Rambo would fire. This dream gun is known simply as GAU-21 or M3M. This device of destruction is mounted on helicopters for the Navy and Army, as well as inside the new V-22 Osprey. The price for each turret is $7.3 million. What only makes it better is the GAU-21 fires .50 caliber ammo.

Now don't accuse me of being mentally disturbed, if anything accuse me of showing off my masculinity. Listen, I do not want to shoot this craft of pain at people. I would simply like to sit back and fire it for a good 20 minutes as it vaporized whatever laid in my path.

The sound of a 1000 bullets coming out a second, the adrenaline pumping in your veins, the ear-piercing noise that!....okay, okay sorry got a little carried away.

So, anyone out there capable of granting this wish of mine?

Awful Similarities

Within the past week big news came out again from the Atlanta Falcons' organization. But for once he was not dealing with Michael Vick.

Bobby Petrino the first year head coach for the 'Cons darted back to the college ranks. Petrino recently accepted a position to be the head coach at the University of Arkansas. Petrino's exit from Atlanta was nothing short of pathetic and sickening, but if anything it is, oh so, very familiar with another incident of this magnitude one year ago.

Remember the fellow Nick Saban and his cowardly exit from the Miami Dolphins? How can you!?

Well Petrino and Saban are two coaches who were both successes in the NCAA, but both failures in the NFL. Lets not forget the word "quitter" either.

To add to the sting these two fellows created you have to emphasize the manner in which they left their NFL jobs. Saban repeatedly denied any interest in Alabama and then went there after proclaiming 2 years earlier his "deep" love for LSU. Petrino left Atlanta after the owner had called him the CEO of the team. Oh, but Petrino did really leave like a "champ". He did not even have a final talk with the players. Just fled like a fool.

(Let me state there are similarities, but I do find Saban's more disgusting considering he a) repeatedly lied about the situation and b) went to LSU's arch rival. That's excusable.)

There was something my dad told me about Saban last year that I have to say goes along with Mr. Petrino as well.

"When someone does what he did it will stick with him. People do not forget that."

Indeed they won't. Indeed they won't.

By the way I can not wait for the Georgia/Arkansas game next year. I'm pretty sure a lot of Bulldog fans are also Atlanta Falcon fans as well. I can hear the blood boiling already.

War and the Media

(This was written by Dominic Anderzack, a friend of mine I had graduated high school with. This note he had written represents something I agree with 100%.)

One way the media distorts America’s' view of the ongoing war against terrorists is by focusing on just one side in the conflict: ours. Whether it's the daily body count or alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, the public could be forgiven for thinking the U.S. is not only losing the war, but behaving badly in doing so.

But neither is true. This year, for instance, the U.S. has killed roughly 650 terrorists a month, according to published reports and Defense Department estimates. That compares with about 37 U.S. combat deaths per month, through May.The ratio, thus, is about 18 terrorists killed in combat for every allied soldier killed.

And that doesn't include the offensive in Diayala Province, Operation Arrowhead Ripper, which dispatched 159 enemy combatants in just the first five days.Since the war began, we've lost about 70 troops a month. This compares with 526 a month in Vietnam, more than 900 a month in Korea and 6,639 a month during World War II.In other words the U.S. is winning this war.

But it will never be reported that way because of all the liberal anti- Bush media. Even the democrats are jumping on this wagon. All any of the democratic presidential candidates have done is bash President Bush and have not declared a strong platform for themselves. It’s becoming the Anti-Republican party instead of remaining the democrat party.But lack of media support is nothing new. Go back to Vietnam. Remember the "five o'clock follies," when the press routinely ridiculed Pentagon casualty reports? The Vietnam syndrome continues to this day.Only now it's the media misreporting the numbers.

Just weeks into the war in 2003, we started hearing the now-oft-repeated canard that Iraq was worse off with the U.S. than with Saddam. This is so plainly wrong that it must be called what it is: a lie.And yet, it's repeated to this day. Here again, the numbers tell the tale. In his 24 years as Iraq's Stalinist supreme leader, Saddam Hussein killed at least 2 million people. That averages out to about 6,944 a month for the better part of three decades.Most responsible estimates show that, at most, 60,000 or so civilians have been killed since the war started, about 1,200 a month.Moreover, no one doubts that Saddam was responsible for all 2 million of his deaths.

In the case of the U.S., most of the civilian deaths come from al-Qaeda and other terrorists, not U.S. troops.We got to thinking about this as a result of Operation Arrowhead Ripper, which involves some 10,000 U.S. troops trying to rid Diayala Province of al-Qaeda terrorists. It's one of the biggest, if not the biggest, operations since the war began.And yet, when we looked for news of how this huge effort in the war on terror was going, the focus was all on American fatalities.

Since Vietnam, the media have approached each military conflict with the same template: "U.S. Wrong, Foe Right." And they've reported accordingly. That's why unjustifiable murderers of women and children are generously called "fighters" by our own media, while errors by our own troops are tarred as war crimes.In conclusion in a sense we are losing a war, the war for Americans' hearts and minds, fought daily on America's TV screens and front pages. But in the real war, our troops are fighting bravely and well, and it's about time someone started keeping score.

All the media wants to do is turn everyone into a victim, and it’s disrespectful to all those fighting for us.