Maine Won't Go Away

The Cornhuskers open their season this weekend against Maine and of course that brings with it repeated mentions of the debacle in Starkville last fall.

Two very depressing stats about that Maine team that I didn't know until today.

1. Maine finished last season ranked 98th in Division I-AA in total defense. (A year later it still baffles me that MSU could only muster 7 points against the 98th ranked Division 1-AA defense. If I wasn't there, I wouldn't have believed it.)

2. The NCAA Division I-AA Black Bears finished the 2004 seasons with a 5-6 record. (wow.)

Callahan was quoted in the Lincoln Journal Star:

“They have our complete respect,” Callahan said of the Black Bears. “They’re capable of generating a lot of pressure on the quarterback — I think they blitzed (Mississippi State’s Omarr Conner) about 53 percent of the time. They come at you with a lot of variations ... “They send the house. They’ll bring everybody if they can. They can wreak a lot of havoc in your (pass) protection game if you’re not sound. Watching that film, the Mississippi State quarterback got hammered quite a bit.”