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LINCOLN, Neb. -- Tom Banderas has lived the Nebraska football dream as a player. For four years, hes lived it as a dad.Tom was a rugged tight end with sneaky good hands -- a glorified guard, he calls himself -- for Tom Osborne-coached teams from 1985-87 that were fixtures in the top 10.His son, Josh, never wanted to go anywhere but Nebraska, and now hes winding down his senior season playing some of the best football of any linebacker the 17th-ranked Cornhuskers have had in recent years.Tom, a longtime Lincoln insurance agent, shows up at practice at least once a week, usually on Tuesdays. Afterward he and Josh, still in practice gear, meet on the field to discuss football and life.I love it, Josh said. Having him around, its always good to have family close. A lot of other guys dont get that. For Thanksgiving I get to go home. Other guys are from eight hours away. I love him coming down and talking, and he gets to learn a little about whats going on and get the inside, which I know he likes.When Josh started playing flag football in grade school, Tom instilled in him that putting on the Husker helmet is an honor thats earned through hard work, and lots of it. Josh never took his eye off the prize, developing into a four-star recruit at Southwest High in Lincoln .Tom and Amy Banderas celebrated senior day with Josh last Saturday and then watched him make nine tackles against Maryland. Josh will start his 30th game when Nebraska closes the regular season at Iowa on Friday, and he said hes never forgotten what his dad told him.The way I put it, Tom said, is that 60 percent of that crowd in the stadium, whether 80 years old or 5 years old, would give two toes on their left foot to go down there and play a single play, Tom said. Thats the responsibility you have to those 92,000 fans, to give 250 percent on every single play. Thats your responsibility, take it or leave it.Josh has taken it and run with it. He was voted a captain in August, and his 80 tackles lead the team. Hes averaged 10.2 tackles a game from his middle linebackers spot since Oct. 15, the best six-game stretch by a Nebraska defender since Lavonte David averaged 11.5 in 2011.With 219 career tackles, hes in position to crack the top 15 at Nebraska if he keeps playing, as coach Mike Riley says, like an all-star.Hes really emerged even more this year as a real leader, and then his preparation is just about perfect, Riley said. Hes made not only tackles but really decisive kind of defining-type tackles.Josh credits his defensive linemen and fellow linebackers for keeping blockers off him, allowing him make all those stops. He said his confidence has never been higher.As a freshman he was forced to play right away because the Huskers were thin at his position. He said he wasnt ready. Even as a sophomore he struggled, which caused anxiety because he knew coach Bo Pelini had him on a short leash. He would look over his shoulder because if he made a mistake, he would go to the bench. He considered transferring.I look back, and I didnt like playing football, he said. I wasnt playing confident. I was playing scared. If I would have redshirted, that would have benefited me. That would have been good to get a year under my belt, learn the system and get a little stronger.His turning point came at the end of his sophomore season, the 2014 Holiday Bowl against USC. Pelini had been fired about three weeks earlier, and the assistants stayed on to coach the bowl game. Josh made a career-high 14 tackles.It was kind of like, `Im going to play, and I dont care. This is the last game of the season. Maybe this is going to start a new phase for me, he said. So I went out and played football like I did in high school. That flipped things.So did the hiring of Riley and linebackers coach Trent Bray. Josh wouldnt criticize how he was handled by the previous staff. He said he meshes better with the style and system of the current staff. But Tom said the importance of the coaching change cant be overstated.It was a resurrection, in a way, for his career, Tom said.Nebraska was a model of stability when Tom came to Lincoln from Oak Grove, Missouri. He appeared in 28 games and got as much joy from knocking down defensive ends in Osbornes triple-option offense as he did from catching passes. Toms time to shine came whenever quarterback Steve Taylor caught opposing defenses loading up to stop the run and saw him running wide open. Tom caught 16 passes in his career, 10 for touchdowns. In 1987, he was second in the Big Eight with six TD receptions.So who had the better career, Tom or Josh?I defer to the boy on that, Tom said, laughing.With Joshs college career two or three games from being over, Riley wonders what Tom will do come January.I just see a picture of a dad, a former player, all that, really enjoying watching his son, Riley said. We talked about it the other day when we were walking out, that the hard part for Toms going to be Joshs graduating. Hes just going to have to come down and watch the other guys practice.As it turns out, theres another Banderas, Anthony, and he would love to live the Nebraska football dream, too. Anthony just finished his junior season at Southwest High. Hes an outside linebacker whos getting looks from Kansas State and, yes, Nebraska.Tom said Anthony will show whether he has what it takes to play for the Huskers during his senior season. Meanwhile, Tom is soaking up these last few weeks of the season with Josh, who as a toddler would bumble around the house in his dads old helmet while wearing a Nebraska jersey and football pants.Thats thousands of kids in this great state of Nebraska, Tom said. But how neat is it that he was able to go ahead and earn that right to go do what I did?---More AP college football: http://collegefootball.ap.org Green Cheap Running Shoes . The return match will take place next Wednesday. Udinese leads Fiorentina 2-1 in the other semifinal. Napoli staged a second-half comeback from two goals down after Gervinhos opener and a stunning strike from Kevin Strootman. Grey Running Shoes . -- Hunter Smith scored the winner with just 12 seconds remaining in the third period as the Oshawa Generals edged the host Sarnia Sting 5-4 on Friday in Ontario Hockey League action. http://www.cheaprunningshoesforsale.com/ . -- Adam Snyder returned to the San Francisco 49ers this season because the offensive lineman thought it was his best opportunity to win a championship. Womens Running Shoes . Defenceman Yannick Weber scored the go-ahead goal early in the third period and the Canucks breathed a sigh of relief with a 2-1 win on Saturday night. Running Shoes Free Shipping .com) - The Chicago Blackhawks aim for their third three-game winning streak of the season when they host the struggling Edmonton Oilers in Sundays battle at the United Center. Cricket is a great sport to not watch.That sounds suspiciously like an insult but is far from it. Cricket is, of course, the greatest sport in the world to watch. In several ways, though, it is a sport that well suits the non-watching spectator - an oxymoronic rather than moronic term.Cricket is a game that by its very structure lends itself to reductive analysis: ball by ball, over by over, innings by innings. In the same way, however, that music relies as much on the rests as on the notes themselves, the intervals between deliveries are just as much a part of the game. Steven Smith bringing up a short leg for Mitchell Starc; Joe Root giggling at second slip; Steven Finn trudging back to his mark after another dropped catch: plenty happens in the gaps.The same applies to watching the game - its just as much about the time between deliveries. When attending a match in person, the pauses yield opportunities to relax, to argue with ones companion, to make new acquaintances and to revive old ones - literally, if they have dropped off in the Hove sunshine. Those determined to introduce the squalid note of business into proceedings may even engage in a spot of mild networking. The ultra-purist may well be able to sit and watch three sessions without exchanging a word with anyone else, eyes soaking up every nuance of the on-field drama, but that is not the only option available to the genuine enthusiast.The power of the game is such that even when there isnt actually any cricket going on, being at the cricket can be an experience in itself. At a Middlesex T20 at Lords last year, with nearby lightning preventing any play, a family member struck up a friendship with two other families seated nearby, leading to an impromptu tri-generation, tri-nationality knockabout in the upper tier of the Tavern Stand. One of the fathers later emailed to say that his young son was telling everyone that it was the best day ever at Lords, which was a mild worry to him, as no cricket had actually been seen.Even when the weather permits play, for many followers of the game in the UK, non-watching is, unfortunately, a state of affairs inflicted by the lack of free-to-air coverage. As cricket is used by Sky and BT as another chip to lure more users to their broadband services, those who will not, or indeed cannot, pay for the luxury are forced to the radio, to the web, or in extremis, to the newspaper - though the reduced print coverage these days makes the latter a harder task. It is therefore fortunate that cricket shines when it comes to radio commentary. Its surprising how even many non-lovers of cricket will nevertheless admit to having Test Match Special on for background noise. The venerable programmes pplace in cricket culture seems secure; nevertheless, having become an institution, it has come in for the criticism that organisations viewed as part of the establishment, rightly or wrongly, will attract.dddddddddddd. Listeners are less captive than before, as well, and can vote with their ears: on the other side of the boundary, online offerings such as White Line Wireless and Guerilla Cricket provide valuable alternatives. It is perhaps, however, the BBCs online county coverage that performs the most undersung service, gently lifting listeners all over the world to the Quantocks, the Yorkshire seaside, the South Downs, and beyond. The multihued variety of crickets audio commentary is surely something to cherish.Even when there is access to moving pictures, the pauses between deliveries, overs, innings, make cricket an ideal sport for multitasking - for instance, attending to some domestic chore, perhaps, if one needs to convey the impression of work to any suspicious family member who looks in. Matching socks is a good option. Ironing is a possibility, but a high-risk one, as being mesmerised by R Ashwins guile can fry your hand as well as your brain. Reading is safer; extensive testing has revealed that books that themselves reflect crickets structure of discrete items - compilations such as Martin Smiths Not in My Day and Charlie Connellys Elk Stopped Play - are particularly well-suited to this application.With a little practice you can soon learn to identify the cadences of the bowlers delivery-stride, back-foot leap coming within range of the bowlers-end stump microphone, glancing up to the screen with split-second precision. Eyes perform their trigger movement, ball is delivered, batsman plays, fielder gathers, and its back to your book. This way you can spend most of the day nominally watching cricket without any feelings of guilt. After all, the chances are that youll have spent most of the time not looking at the screen, which means, after rounding, that you havent been watching it at all.In a game that is so obsessed with statistics, and that is increasingly becoming preoccupied with the need for instant entertainment, there is a danger that we focus so much on the measurable on-field activities that we forget the game provides a basis for so much more. Its value cannot be quantified in only sixes and fours, dots and wickets. The game can pervade the atmosphere and background in a way that may only be fully appreciated when the eyes are taken, counter-intuitively, off the game.Cricket: not a bad sport to watch, but an even better one to not. ' ' '