Happy "Dig us" day!!!

If ever there was a holiday to celebrate self-congratulations and false encomiastic myopia, today would be the day. Yes, better than Christmas. Better than the 4th of July. Today’s Husker spring game has reached a point where it goes beyond a simple day to make fun of people with foam pieces of corn on their heads.

I understand you people like your team. I understand that your only other sporting options during the fall is Doane Cross Country and UNO softball. I understand if not for your football team, nobody would even know where Omaha is. Hell, except that it's the hometown of Warren Buffett, which always seems to be mentioned, mostly because nobody can fathom how a billionaire can be from a cowtown like Omaha.

Anyhow, today’s event…despite what many of you think, the event itself is not unique. College basketball teams hold glorified scrimmages. Kansas holds lame skits at their midnight madness celebration so pathetically stupid they would make Tom Green roll his eyes. Other big-time football programs hold spring game celebrations that not only give their fans a nugget of football during the slowest time of the sporting year.

Yet in no other place, no other city, no other program on this or any planet is it exactly like Nebraska. Oh, not because you do anything different. Dragging 80 high school kids on your field and fawning all over them like the King of France doesn’t make you different or special. Hosting Edna and Clive Huckleberry from McCook one Saturday a spring doesn’t make you special either. What makes you special and different is the pure volume of self-indulgent, self-celebratory, “dig us, we’re special” bullshit that oozes out of every single corner of that stadium.

I’m surprised you people don’t have “greatest fans on earth” plastered to the side of your popcorn boxes down there. (You probably do, I haven’t been for a long time.) I wouldn’t be shocked if the memorial stadium medical teams weren’t flooded with broken arms from fans who kept patting themselves and each other on the back. The whole thing is so absolutely rank with self-indulgence it makes me want to vomit. And the part I don’t get is….why?

Why do you people give a shit if somebody recognizes how great you are? Why do you fly off the handle so quickly when people like me bash you for being a fraud. (Why do some of my readers type replies between hits of meth, rambling on about the same argument over and over? Coughbhgcough) You do this because you have an inferiority complex the likes of which mankind has never seen. Yes, this is shocking, considering the amount of time you spend telling others how great you are. However, simple psychology tells you that the kid down the street who keeps telling you how tough he is and how he can rip apart a phone book with his bare hands, is probably the first person to run like a little bitch if he’s stung by a bee.

You get the idea.

So what does all this mean? Absolutely nothing. Like those those giant May Day parades in Moscow, that were actually paper mache models of missiles. The show of support, love and slobber that will be on display this weekend is nothing but a sham. A complete and total farce that doubles as a highly calculated spectacle to convince a group of people that they still matter to somebody..somewhere...anymore.

But that’s not to say there won’t be comedy. The whole “Joey Ganz vs. JC Keller” thing is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life. He’s JOEY F’ING GANZ. And he’s going to overtake the great JC Keller? The same QB who would be a Pro-Bowler on 30 NFL teams right now if he would just declare? The same guy who makes Peyton Manning look like a 4th string hack on the Chadron State Sigma Phi Epsilon intramural team?

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

Enjoy sticking your tongues in each others ear this afternoon. I’ll be napping, thinking of how much fun it’s going to be to watch you start the season 3-3.