Ouch!

Watching your favorite teams lose is hard. Watching your favorite teams end their seasons in defeat is like getting kicked below the belt. 
It happened time and again for this sports fan last week as High Plains’ volleyball and football teams lost heartbreaking postseason games, coming up short of their lofty end goals.
The Storm volleyball team lost a stress-inducing five-set heartbreaker to Exeter-Milligan/Friend, coming up oh, so short of a possible district final game and missing a chance to play for a spot at state.
The HPC football team played smashmouth football Friday night and came up a play or two short in a loss at Overton, ending its season in the second round of the D2 playoffs. 
Both could have easily won and moved on. They didn’t, though. That’s sports. 
What nobody can question, however, was the effort. Didn’t matter if it was Courtney Carlstrom, Rylee Ackerson, Gage Friesen, Haden Helgoth or anyone else on those rosters. 
The Storm fought. They were punched in the mouth and responded. It doesn’t make the end result any easier but it surely does show the type of kids HPC has in the halls.
What I absolutely cannot fathom and has cost me a good bit of sanity is why, every time without fail, the Nebraska football team over sells and under delivers.
Once again, a first-year coach and football team that just does not match up on paper comes into Lincoln, pushes the Huskers around, and the Big Red doesn’t do anything about it. 
No, I’m not selling all of my Matt Rhule stock just yet. But it gets really difficult to sell patience to a fan base who sees other programs have quick success, like Indiana. Even harder when those teams come out and boat race the Huskers.
Twice in the last three weeks, needing just one more win to qualify for bowl eligibility, the Huskers have played uninspired and quite frankly, look lost. Two times in the last three weeks, Nebraska was out-coached, out-played and out-prepared.
Saturday was the worst loss of the Rhule era, by far. The Indiana game was bad, but the UCLA loss is unexplainable. The Bruins are a bad football team, undisciplined really, and made Nebraska look dumb.
Entering a second bye week, something has to change. I understand if Rhule doesn’t want to fire offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield midseason, but you have to do something.
Someone else needs to call the offensive plays. You brought in Glenn Thomas this year, who is by title the co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. 
You have two weeks. Make the change now and let’s see what happens in the final three weeks. Does changing the offensive play caller fix the effort issue? Surely not, but finding success offensively can band-aid a lot of things.
The Huskers rank 107th offensively in yards per play. Nebraska has still not won under Rhule when it allowed more than 14 points. 
I don’t want to totally let the Blackshirts off the hook, because they didn’t look great on Saturday, either. But it gets super frustrating having to go onto the field time and again, knowing you can’t allow a score because your offense can’t get anything going. 
And Saturday was not relatively close. On three of Nebraska’s TD drives, those were extended by 15-yard UCLA unsportsmanlike penalties. 
How quickly things change. Another swift kick down south. 
RICHARD RHODEN can be reached at sports@hamilton.net.