Giving Thanks for Dan Jenkins

Superior article here from Ivan Maisel on the legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins.

If you're a fan of college football and superior writing you probably already own Saturday's America. (And if you don't, what are you waiting for? Don't wait for it to be reissued, get a cool used copy. Merry Christmas to you.)

Jenkins, a lifelong TCU fan and neighbor of Gary Patterson, seems to cast his vote for Nebraska's new head coach in the article. While watching a game the Frogs are losing he says in the article, "We need a turnover, or we need Nebraska to make an offer."

I haven't really considered Patterson seriously to this point, but if he has Jenkins in his corner and Jenkins would be ok with seeing him leave TCU then that's enough for me.

Jenkins also once had this to say about Nebraska football in a much different time and a much different state, a powerhouse on the rise under Bob Devaney...and I quote...at length...

Missouri's Dan Devine looked like a man who had just learned that his disease was incurable. He was leaning against a table in the silent gloom of his locker room, a towel around his neck, a paper cup in his hand, whip-dog tired, and his large brown eyese fixed vacantly on a lot of things that could have happened. He talked softly and very, very slowly.

"I don't think...I can remember...a team of ours ever playing this well...and losing," he said. "But, well, they...they just..they somehow do a number of things real well."

They were the ponderous, relentless, ill-attired Cornhuskers of Nebraska, and this is how they left you after a football game.

Indeed, this was the kind of team Bob Devaney had put together out in Lincoln: big, mobile, deep, patient, mysteriously unemotional, workmanlike and confident. Nebraska was so big that when the Cornhuskers ran out there, you could see the field tilt. Their uniforms were ugly with skinny numerals and their socks slipped down, and they stood around a lot at times, but there were moments when the ball was snapped that wild, wonderful things happened. They were headed for a 10-0 season, and when a young man named Larry Wacholtz place-kicked the winning field goal, a couple of Nebraska players were actually seen jumping up and down on the sideline.

Upstairs, Don Bryant, the Nebraska publicity man, was startled. "Look," he said. "They almost look like students."

Ahh, the good old days. They don't write'em like that anymore. But then again, Nebraska doesn't look or play like that anymore either.

Of course, the above is excerpted from Saturday's America.