dn 8 the
Spring season success
First breath of spring
Volleyball team comes back twice to beat Iowa State
Photo coverage from April’s First Friday artwalk
dailynebraskan.com
5
monday, april 8, 2013 volume 112, issue 132
leading rusher
Jack Hoffman runs down the field for a touchdown during the spring game at Memorial Stadium on Saturday. Jack ran 69 yards for the touchdown.
7-year-old Jack scores winning touchdown, standing ovation from fans s t o r y
b y
z a c h
A
question was posed, at the press conference following Saturday’s Red-White Spring Game, to Bo Pelini about where his team’s running backs stand on the depth chart. Behind the horde of reporters eagerly awaiting Pelini’s answer, a white plastic football helmet with a red ‘N’ lies on its side on the carpet of the Nebraska football team’s strength complex. A boy with no hair and a scar across the left side of his head tosses a football back and forth with quarterback Taylor Martinez about 20 yards away from the corner of the complex where Pelini addresses reporters. It was the game ball he had just been presented. The boy, Jack Hoffman, wears a makeshift football uniform with a No. 22 jersey. After Martinez and some other players left to the podium, Jack tosses the ball to his sister and a friend. Jack ambles around the weight room with more inside access at Memorial Stadium than most 7-year-olds have at their own elementary schools. Jack won’t get a press conference of his own today, though to many Husker fans and spring game spectators around the country he was the player of the game.
t e g l e r
|
p h o t o s
--He was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer about two years ago. When (now former) Nebraska running back Rex Burkhead heard of Jack’s story, he reached out and made Jack part of the Husker family. Last fall, Jack helped lead the team’s Tunnel Walk before a game against Wisconsin. Now, back to the Spring Game, and the play that got Jack Hoffman featured on SportsCenter and trending on Twitter. The idea to get Jack a carry in the contest came from senior fullback C.J. Zimmerer and Jeff Jamrog, assistant athletic director for football operations. They discussed it Friday night, and Saturday, Pelini told his team that Jack would get on the field. Midway through the fourth quarter, the boy got his chance. Graduate assistant Joe Ganz, a former NU quarterback, drew up a play for Jack on a marker board. He would get the handoff from Taylor Martinez, who told Jack to follow No. 31 – Zimmerer – around the right side of the line. On the fourth-and-one play, Martinez handed the
b y
m o r g a n
s p i e h s
Jack Hoffman answers questions from the media after he scored a touchdown for the Red team during the Spring Game at Memorial Stadium on Saturday.
jack: See page 3 | more game coverage on page 10
Technology drove Obama re-election Layla Younis DN The first time President Barack Obama called Jim Messina, Messina hung up on him. Then the phone rang again. This time, Messina took the call. Obama had called to ask him to run his 2012 re-election campaign. On Friday, Messina visited the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to speak to a crowd of about 100 students, faculty and community members in the Nebraska Union auditorium as part of the Peter J. Hoagland Integrity in Public Service Lecture Series. Jeff Zeleny — a University of Nebraska-Lincoln alumnus, The New York Times’ lead writer for the 2012 campaign and now senior political correspondent for ABC News — joined him. Before becoming Obama’s campaign manager, Messina was deputy chief of staff for the president from 2009 to 2011. Messina didn’t win the first presidential campaign he ran – but that was back in fourth grade, the same year he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said he wanted to be starting quarterback for the Broncos or the president’s campaign manager.
KAYLEE EVERLY | DN
Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign chief in the 2012 presidential election, and Jeff Zeleny, former New York Times reporter who covered the 2012 presidential election, talk prior to giving the Hoagland Lecture in the Nebraska Union Auditorium on Friday. “I’ve wanted this job since the fourth grade,” Messina told Obama, but he wasn’t sure if he could take the job, so, like anybody else, he called his mother for advice. “If you turn down that job, you’ll be cut out of the will,” his mother said.
“So I took the job,” Messina said. Messina said their campaign focus was changing the game in technology. So campaign staff reached out to minorities and the younger generation through social media and new technology. “If you win the fight of the
future, you win the campaign,” Messina said The campaign spent $5 million on an app called Dashboard, which allowed users to watch a 30-second video of Michelle Obama and then connected them to Facebook friends who were undecided voters. “We used social media to organize friends and family,” Messina said. Zeleny said this was the first campaign running outside of Washington, and every time he visited the headquarters, “it got younger and younger.” No one who worked on the Dashboard app was older than 25, Messina said. Five million people used it in the last hour of voting, and 78 percent of those people supported Obama. Zeleny said although there were people who did not want Obama in office, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney didn’t succeed in reaching out to those people. “Romney’s campaign did a bad job in bringing those people to the polls,” Zeleny said. Zeleny said Obama found the people who wanted to vote for him.
campaign: see page 3
@dailyneb | facebook.com/dailynebraskan
Physicist: Football’s danger lies in science “Notice that Bell and Smith have about the same weight, but Smith is the one that goes flying,” Gay said. “That’s what football is all about. This is a picture-perfect hit. Then Bell gets a 15-yard penalty.” Gay spoke about some isLis Arneson sues with modern football, and Dn solutions, in the West Memorial Stadium Club. Gay’s lecUniversity of Nebraska-Lincoln ture was this spring’s Nebraska physics and astronomy profesLecture, part of the Chancellor ’s sor Tim Gay beDistinguished lieves there are Lecture series. “It doesn’t real problems in Gay said football today. some of the take a Some of these long-term improblems, he said scientist to know pacts of rough during his lec- that football is a football include: ture “Football: Its chronic pain, Physics and Fu- very violent game, loss of motor ture” Friday after- which is what I skills, depresnoon, are rooted in sion, suicide love about it.” classic physics. and lawsuits. His talk beSeveral former Tim GAY gan with a “little unl physics professor NFL players class in Football committed sui101.” The first lescide in the last son focused on a clip of Kenny year, he said. Gay said NFL Bell leveling Wisconsin’s Devin players are four times more Smith during the 3rd quarter of the 2012 Big Ten Championship. football: see page 2
UNL professor shows correlation between modern football, science