No mo' woe, vows po' Bo

Our football coach apologized this week and what sounded like a gust of Nebraska wind was an entire state breathing a sigh of relief.

Bo Pelini's mea culpa was Page 1 news in the two major daily newspapers in the state, not to mention grist for conversations in offices and on radio talk shows across Nebraska, conversations that presumably will continue at Thanksgiving-dinner tables on Thursday and well into Friday when the Huskers' latest Most Important Game Ever will be played.

For those not following this drama, some background (http://es.pn/i6N7yI). Basically, Bo did his Tasmanian Devil impression on national television Saturday night during Nebraska's game against Texas A&M. He berated game officials nonstop and screamed at players, including his star quarterback. His eyes popped, his neck veins bulged, the spittle and four-letter words flew. He bit the head off a graduate assistant, heaved it into the crowd, then lifted the headless corpse above him and roared mightily as the crowd scattered like a bunch of Japanese extras in a Godzilla movie. Finally, he leapt in three bounds to the top of the Aggies' stadium and shook his fist at the blimp circling overhead.

You get the idea. I can't speak for the reaction anywhere else, but in my family room it was something like: "Damn, I hope someone there's got a Taser or some elephant tranquilizer 'cause that boy's gonna need to be put down."

By Sunday, the blogosphere was rife with rumors that the aforementioned star quarterback had quit the team. Other rumors had Bo and brother Carl being suspended for at least one game. None of this turned out to be true, which reminds one of Mark Twain's observation that a lie can make its way around the world in the time the truth is still putting on its shoes -- and that was before lies had the Internet, texting and the like as conduits. (One wonders what Twain might make of today's Internet-driven society. Actually, one has a pretty good idea what he'd make of it. For the record, though, he would have been one hell of a tweeter.)

University chancellor Harvey Perlman was mortified, issuing an unusual public rebuke on Sunday. This was significant -- the first rule of survival for university administrators is to avoid picking such fights publicly, as chancellors and presidents are much easier to replace than football coaches. (In the interest of full disclosure: I do work, at least for the time being, for the University of Nebraska.)

Which brings us to Monday's news conference, where Bo issued his apology. The chancellor didn't drag him in by the ear, plop him into the chair, and order, "now, say you're sorry," like a parent might do with a recalcitrant child. Still, that's pretty much the way it felt, though Bo did seem sincerely contrite.

Let's be clear: Most of us in Nebraska like Bo. He's a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense kind of guy, clearly a man among men, if also, on occasion, a lunatic among lunatics. More to the point, he's led the Huskers to at least nine wins in each of his three seasons here, helping wash away memories of the previous four years under a failed ex-NFL coach whose name escapes me at the moment. Most fans would just as soon see those years expunged from the record, so that 1,000 years from now, it will appear that the university simply abandoned the sport for four years. But Bo has given us the next best thing.

But for a 42-year-old coach in his first head-coaching job, the comparisons already being made to Woody Hayes and Bobby Knight are not auspicious.

Both the Lincoln and Omaha newspapers featured stories today that tried to get at the heart of What Makes Bo Tick. The Lincoln Journal-Star hardly played fair, going to the head of Nebraskans for Peace for perspective. Don't get me wrong -- it's a perfectly lovely organization but, you know, it's populated by a bunch of peaceniks; what the hell do they know about football?

It was the Omaha World-Herald that really tried to explore Bo's raging id, consulting several psychologists who surmised Bo suffers from situational anger, not an anger-management problem. If he had the latter, they explained, he'd be angry all the time, in every aspect of his life, which he's clearly not.

I can offer some perspective here. Bo's family and mine happen to worship at the same church, and I can confirm he seems no more impatient, angry or annoyed during Sunday Mass than the rest of us. Of course, there was one time I was behind him in line for the confessional and when he was done, the panic-stricken priest half-sprinted and half-stumbled out in tears, immediately dropped to his knees and said 100 Hail Marys. I don't know what that was about, but presumably Father threw a flag, if you will, for a particularly flagrant sin, and Bo lost control. Again, though, that's "situational anger."

In any case, we're rooting for Bo here in Nebraska, though nervously. "It won't happen again," he promised Monday. Many of us are skeptical.

For starters, though, we want him to just make it through Friday's game with Colorado without punching that annoying Ralphie the buffalo mascot in the mouth, a la Alex Karras and the horse in "Blazing Saddles."

Baby steps, Bo. Baby steps.