If Melvin Gordon, eventual Heisman Trophy winning running back of the Wisconsin Badgers, needs a nickname, we suggest calling him “The One Man Gangbang” because he ran a filthy, nasty train on the Huskers.
Gordon jammed the ball down the throats of the Huskers’ defense to the tune of 406 yards, or just 26 feet less than the friggin’ Empire State Building, if you prefer to have your record breaking yardage totals presented in terms of skyscrapers.
Seriously, the Huskers would have had an easier time containing Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson than Melvin Gordon.
In his Heisman Trophy winning season, Jackson ran for 1,786 yards and averaged 6.6 yards per carry on 278 rushing attempts. After his plowing of the Huskers, Gordon has amassed 1,909 yards on only 223 carries, an average of 8.8 per.
He still has at least three games to go.
Sure, you could try to spin that and say, “Well, the Huskers went up against a special, once-in-a-lifetime player and came out on the wrong side of history. Them’s the breaks.”
Except for the fact that Gordon put up the following numbers in his other games this season-
LOUISIANA STATE – 16 rushes/140 yards/9.0 YPC
WESTERN ILLINOIS – 17 rushes/38 yards/3.0 YPC
BOWLING GREEN – 13 rushes/253 yards/19.5 YPC
SOUTH FLORIDA – 32 rushes/181 yards/5.8 YPC
NORTHWESTERN – 37 rushes/259 yards/9.8 YPC
ILLINOIS – 27 rushes/175 yards/6.6 YPC
MARYLAND – 22 rushes/122 yards/5.6 YPC
RUTGERS – 19 rushes/128 yards/7.1 YPC
PURDUE – 25 rushes/205 yards/8.4 YPC
Then there’s his line against the Huskers-
NEBRASKA – 25 rushes/408 yards/16.4 YPC
Gordon’s record setting night was so brutal to watch in real-time that this nutshot compilation only scratches the surface of the pain the Huskers and their fans endured at Camp Randall Stadium.
It’s one thing to get your ass kicked but an entirely different story to get whupped up on in the same manner as the Huskers in that 52 – 24 pasting. It doesn’t matter if you lose by a single point or four touchdowns, a loss is still a loss but there comes a point when you just gotta ask, WTF is wrong?
Even if the Huskers would have lost by a field goal, the fire Pelini because he can’t win the big ones train would still be chugging along at full steam. That’s a given. The only time the guy ever caught a break with a loss was against Texas in ’09. But still, there comes a point when you gotta wonder why so many of the signature losses involve total woodshed ass kickings where the team and coaching staff just shutdown.
Even a day later, tying to put what transpired into words that aren’t an incoherent mess of all caps swearing is proving rather difficult so we’ll just let the YouTube do the talking for the rest of this recap.
Last night, the Badgers and Melvin Gordon were King Kong Bundy and the Huskers were Little Beaver.
The only difference is Melvin Gordon’s avalanche looked more like this.
Exhibits A and B for putting a better fight than the Huskers:
The Black Knight
Scratchy
Exhibits A and B for not melting down as bad as the Huskers
Richie Tenenbaum
The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark
Until the Huskers can (hopefully) find some redemption against Minnesota, it’s going to be a long week. Remember, you weren’t on the field. You weren’t calling the plays. You had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the game.
It’s not your fault.
