The Nebraska football team is preparing for the 2019 season. One way they're doing that is to get their fans all the way hyped up. There is at least one national writer who has a real problem with the way the team recently went about trying to get that done - a video.
— Scott Frost (@coach_frost) June 20, 2019
David Hookstead, a writer for the Daily Caller and the Editor in Chief of the Smoke Room is also a very big Wisconsin Badgers' fan. That means, of course, that he's not a Nebraska Cornhuskers' fan. He's so very much not a Huskers' fan that he's taken great exception to that hype video.
The video, released on Scott Frost's official account, shows the team working out during a "team building" outing where they go through a military-type training regimen. It appears this was, at least in part, the idea of one of the players, a walk-on who is also a former Navy SEAL, Damian Jackson.
An insult to the military?
Despite the fact that Jackson - again a former Navy SEAL - came up with the idea to have the team go through this training, Hookstead had more than a few words on the subject.
"If this isn’t a slap in the face to the military, then I just don’t know what is. We’re talking about a team that won four games last year trying to hype themselves up by using Navy SEAL training. Give me a break.
Actual Navy SEALs are puking at the idea of a sub-.500 team going through their drills in anticipation for the season."
Further on down the article, Hookstead claims that the military doesn't lose and that appears to be the root of his offense at the Nebraska football team's inclusion of this military approach. To be fair, it's hard to know how much of his words are actually him really being insulted and how much of it is him trolling Husker fans.
Wisconsin fan writing a rant
Hookstead has done this before. Earlier this summer, he took umbrage at the Nebraska Cornhuskers being named as a favorite to win the Big Ten West. He wrote a long screed about how the program is nowhere near as good as it used to be.
He also wrote as he did again recently, that the Wisconsin Badgers are the team to beat.
It appears his main goal when writing about sports, it to pick a fight. Some might even say that goal means people should ignore what he has to say.
The flipside of that is that whenever says something silly, people need to know just how little credence should be given to what he has to say. Hookstead seems to have a real problem with the Nebraska football team in general.
It seems unlikely that he's really as offended by a team that has been doing this program for a couple of years now, doing it again. This is about the attention the Huskers got when that video was released. It's also about the excitement the Cornhuskers are generating in general.