Ed Puskas: Pelini still good for YSU

Regrets? I’ve had a few.

Not buying Apple stock in the 1980s: But I’ve made up for that by spending countless dollars on the company’s products.

Falling in love with the Kardiac Kids in 1980: It was great at the time and I still know all the words to “The 12 Days of a Cleveland Browns Christmas,” but what has that done for me lately?

The nice nice thing is that the Jimmy Haslam-owned Browns are only five drafts and four front-office bloodlettings from being competitive.

Not developing better study habits: I still have that recurring dream that I have a huge test right now and haven’t spent a single minute studying. Or that it’s finals week and I somehow skipped every class to play basketball and tennis.

Is that a dream or a memory? Both, as I recall.

There can be regrets in this business, too.

Writing first and asking questions later: If I could go back 30 years or so, I’d never have suggested that a girls basketball game consisted of more bricks than a construction site and more turnovers than a bakery.

For the record, the teams combined to shoot 11 percent from the floor and had 82 turnovers between them, so maybe I was right.

But for the most part, if it appears in this space under my smiling face, you can be sure I’ll stick by it.

We don’t tend to revisit columns a lot, but thanks to social media and followers with long memories, sometimes we’re reminded of things we wrote, whether we want to be or not.

A few Nebraska fans were feeling their oats last week — before Friday’s game against Iowa, of course — and decided to check in on Twitter to see if I still felt the Cornhuskers’ loss of Bo Pelini was Youngstown State’s gain.

I wrote just that — and more — in a column after Pelini’s first season with the Penguins.

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: With a few more timely plays, YSU could have made the FCS playoffs in 2015. As it turns out, the Penguins arrived a year later, but the point is that they’ve arrived.

YSU (9-3) qualified for the playoffs by winning its final two regular-season games after an up-and-down ride and some offensive struggles.

Most of those were related to an unsettled quarterback situation, but Hunter Wells — who started the last two years — regained his job and appears to have eased concerns about the passing attack.

YSU has always had a strong running game and its defense has been stellar all season. The downfield threat and some consistency in the passing game was all that was missing.

Now the Penguins are preparing for a second-round game at Jacksonville State on Saturday. I felt good about YSU’s situation with Pelini a year ago and — if anything — the Penguins are in even better shape now.

Beating third-seeded Jacksonville would only cement that for even more observers.

Some Nebraska fans are just never going to move on from the program’s divorce from Pelini, but that says more about them than it does about him.

Or the rest of us here in Youngstown.

Write Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas at epuskas@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @EdPuskas_Vindy.