The Rice And Wrongs - A Plea For T.O. To Stop Sucking It Up

Story by Dan Nguyen 

| Published Oct 6, 2009

Let me just start by saying, Tom Osborne, if given the chance, I would birth your children. I would go through the agony of labor for you. If the opportunity arose, I’d feel the torrential pain of a squirmy baby leaving my flesh — of course, only under the condition that the creature was yours.

T.O., I love you. When you were coach, you were Husker Nation’s living incarnate of the Holy Spirit. But, T.O., you suck as an athletic director. Why? Because you don’t give a fuck about the students!

Who are the students of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln? We are students who plow themselves into massive amounts of debt for tuition, we are students who work countless part-time hours for UNL Bookstore bills; we are students who exhaustively beg Daddy to pay our Ncard for unlimited access to the UNL Bakery and Dairy Store.

Yet, with all the potential employing power students have for handing out their money to the University, I can’t think of another University-affiliated group that gets pissed on more than the student body.

And, T.O., you’re a part of this discriminating prejudice toward students. Anyone at the 300th sellout game who was sitting in the student section was witness to this. All we are to you are dollar signs. You stare down at the student section from your skybox seat, and what do you see? You see a pile of coke money smashed into the corner of a box spring mattress.

Yes, I know that these days, college sports are nothing more than a money game, and I understand for you to be a good athletic director, you have to financially provide for the athletic department. Honestly, you’ve done a hell of a job, but why the hell does that money laundering have to come out of the pockets of students?

Who knew that after doing nothing in the affairs of government, you could do so much as an athletic director. Unlike during your political term, you’ve stayed true to your Republican ways and actually accomplished overtly hoarding money, unfortunately at the cost of students. First, you take away our block seating — the only semi-comprehensible means that I’d get a chance to sit joyfully around my fellow Husker friends — not some fat 40-year-old lady who takes up two seats and smells like salty snacks.

Then you move an entire section of seats from East Stadium so that we don’t cause annoyance to the other, more mature sport spectators. Sorry the students that actually make up the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are such a nuisance to the true Husker Nation.

Then this year, just after you shoved us in the corner like a shit-soaked, poorly house-trained child, you got rid of an entire upper deck of student seats from East Stadium. Yet, I didn’t hear anything about you selling fewer tickets. In fact, right before you rammed us into the southeast corner, you promised that the number of student seats would remain the same, yet you evidently got rid of an over abundant amount of student seats this year.

What is your plan next year, T.O., get rid of the student section altogether, yet sell five times as many “student seats”? Hmmm … doesn’t sound all that different than the current situation. Last game day, not a seat was free. In fact, most seats were occupied by three half-turned student occupants, with additional groups of freeloaders wandering aimlessly between rows.

I know I will receive a hefty amount of flak for writing such nasty words against T.O., but I can’t keep going to football games and not notice the exploitation of students and the over-selling of football tickets for seats that don’t exist. I hope the die-hard T.O. fans can forgive me. I still believe he is a legendary coach and will remain one for the rest of his life and well beyond his departure from Husker Nation. With his fame, he has done extraordinary things for our community; T.O. is a good man. It just sucks that, as of late, the only effect of his legacy that concerns me is the double-teaming I get from two other dudes trying to sit in a seat allocated for one.