The Double Extra Point was founded by Patrick Runge, as a home for his life-long obsession with Nebraska football. Here, you’ll find Patrick’s thoughts and analysis of Nebraska (under “Patrick’s Points”) as well as a regular collection of interesting links from around the Web about Nebraska (under “Extra Points”). You can follow the Double Extra Point on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, as well as get regular e-mail updates by clicking the link on the side of this page.

Patrick has watched Nebraska football for about as long as he can remember, going back to a cold November day in 1978 when he saw Billy Sims fumble the ball and give NU’s Tom Osborne his first win over the hated Oklahoma Sooners. If you look close at the YouTube video after the game, that’s a very young Patrick on the frozen AstroTurf of Memorial Stadium after the game, catching a rolled-up stocking hat thrown by his father that had become a makeshift football. (DXP Legal Department – Patrick does not actually appear in said YouTube clip, and the “if you look close” bit was added solely for dramatic effect.)

Patrick has also covered Nebraska football professionally, as a featured columnist for Bleacher Report. In addition to Bleacher Report, Patrick’s writing has appeared in print for the UNO Gateway, the Omaha CityWeekly, the Omaha Pulp, the Nebraska Lawyer, and Millard Avenues magazine, and online for ESPN and the Guardian.

In addition to sportswriting, Patrick is an attorney with a private practice in Omaha, Nebraska. You can see his firm’s website here. He is also the Chief Judge of the Winnebago Tribal Court, and an adjunct professor at the Creighton University School of Law (which, if you’re wondering, does formally make him a Jaysker).

So what’s up with the name?

The Double Extra Point is an homage to Kent Pavelka, the voice of the Cornhuskers when Patrick was growing up. When Pavelka would become particularly excited, a two-point conversion for Nebraska would become in Pavelka’s nomenclature a “double extra point.” The generally-accepted berth of the call was the 1994 game against Oklahoma State, where a bad snap on an extra point led to this call:

“Erstad will try the PAT. The snap and the placement, it’s … they blow it, and Vedral picks it up and runs with it, Vedral, finally going to be … oh, he throws the ball into the end zone, Erstad, double extra point! Double extra point! Double extra point! Holy cow!”

Other sportswriters, such as Dirk Chatelain and Brandon Cavanaugh, have referenced Pavelka’s unique call and embraced it as part of Nebraska’s history. If you want to hear the call yourself, you can check out an MP3 of Pavelka’s call here and see a YouTube video of the play that berthed the call here.

So in addition to the Pavelka homage, the name refers to two of the primary areas of the website, “Patrick’s Points” about Nebraska football and “Extra Points” collecting information about Nebraska from around the Web. Two different “points” to be made on the website, and therefore a “double extra point.”

Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Complaints? Recipes for a killer peach cobbler? You can forward them all to the DXP via e-mail at thedoubleextrapoint@yahoo.com.