Ben Stille was discussing his entire college career, but he might as well have also been talking about 2020 earlier this week when he tied a bow on the last five years and the last nine months all at once.
“Honestly, it’s not even close. Not even close to anything I envisioned,†he said.
Yeah, you can say that again, Ben.
Here is the simplest rundown of the situation in front of Stille and 17 other seniors — 13 of them scholarship players — as Nebraska enters its final scheduled home game of 2020 on Saturday against Minnesota.
It may or may not be the last home game the team plays this year, depending on what the Big Ten decides to do with the Dec. 19 weekend setup. It also may or may not be the final home game for some of the seniors regardless of what the league decides, because every senior has the opportunity to return for an extra year of eligibility thanks to an NCAA decision in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
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When they run out of the tunnel Saturday before the game, there will be no Sea of Red waiting to thank them, only a couple hundred parents and family. When the game ends, there will likely be less lingering on the field and admiring the cavernous stadium for one last time on a gameday.
Nebraska’s coaches and seniors over the course of the season have been essentially entirely unwilling to talk about who might leave and who might come back, insisting that their focus is solely on the Golden Gophers.
“I love all these seniors,†coach Scott Frost said this week. “It’s a great bunch of kids that have stuck it out through a lot, but I don't want to start talking about next year. We have a big game this weekend and we will have all those discussions after the season.â€
“The senior group is just really focused on finishing this season that we're in right now, being present in the moment,†Stille said. “All of that will kind of take care of itself later.â€
Senior cornerback Dicaprio Bootle said he didn’t want to talk about Senior Day at all, lest he might cry on a Zoom call with a bunch of reporters looking back at him through their computers.
That sentence would have seemed awfully foreign in early March when this group and the rest of NU took the field to begin spring practices, hell-bent on making sure Year 3 of the Frost era at Nebraska took a big step forward after two losing seasons to start it.
Instead, of course, the world got turned upside down by the pandemic. Spring ball was canceled. Kids were sent home. Classes at UNL migrated online. A 12-game schedule became a 10-game schedule, which became a canceled schedule, which eventually became a nine-games-in-nine-weeks schedule.
This group of seniors went from plotting a grand finale to wondering if, perhaps, they actually would ever take the field as college athletes again. Now nine months later, they’re thankful for the soon-to-be seven games so far this fall, but really, essentially in the same position.
Maybe they’ll play more games as Huskers, maybe they won’t.
That’s been perhaps the oddest part about 2020. When a high school player signs on the dotted line to attend a college and play football, he either knows or eventually will learn that college football is full of uncertainty. Coaches are hired and fired. Schemes change. Injuries happen. Attrition happens. Transfers are more common than ever. The player who stays at the same school for four or five years, plays for the same set of coaches and moves on with his degree and an entirely contiguous college experience at this point is a rarity.
“One of the first things they tell you when you come into a program is, ‘Look around, a lot of the guys you see right here on day one aren’t going to be with you when you are leaving on Senior Day,’†Stille said. “You don't really believe it. You don't really think too much about it, but it's crazy.
“This group of seniors, I love them all to death. I think all the adversity we've faced has brought us all really close together. One word, I'd say, is really resilient. The resiliency these guys have shown over the last five years has been impressive.â€
Time, though, has always been the one constant. The clock is always ticking toward the end, and the end is definite. You run out onto the field on Senior Day and you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it’s the last one.
Not even that is certain for this group. The pandemic has upended the clock itself.
That, more than anything else, explains why this is a senior class that has zeroed in on Minnesota and shut out pretty much anything else.
The game clock? That hasn’t changed. It’ll show 60 minutes when the ball gets kicked off, and, in a year where everything else is subject to change, it will feel quite normal.