MINNEAPOLIS– Cam Taylor-Britt had his worries from the time the Huskers were leaving the hotel lobby Saturday morning.
“We had to flip the switch and wake up – the whole defense, man. I’m not just even talking about myself. I’m talking about everybody on the team. Everybody just has to wake up. We’ve been playing the night games and everybody got to sleep in and this and that. I don’t feel like everybody was awake and just ready to play this 11 o’clock game. Coming out of the second half, I was just on everybody’s head, like, ‘Wake up. Let’s go out there and play our football.’ And it showed.”
By that time, however, Nebraska was trying to move the wheelbarrow uphill, and the wheel would get stuck in a crack every time it looked the Huskers had a burst of speed to get to the top.
Minnesota won the game 30-23 because it owned the first half, leading 21-9. It seemed worse than that, frankly. The Huskers owned the second half largely, but had three offensive drives which reached the six-inch-line, the 9-yard-line and the 29-yard-line that resulted in zero points.
Those drives will be this week’s haunting piece to revisit of another win somehow avoided. The first half, though, was troubling, as Minnesota’s offense ripped off touchdowns on three of its four possessions, and might have had more had the Gophers not run an ill-advised trick play when they had the Huskers spinning.
The locker room talk was intense, according to Taylor-Britt, one of Nebraska’s co-captain.
As for the lack of juice early, “I saw it when we woke up this morning. That’s when I saw it. Even Coach saw it. He called it out, tried to address it ahead of time. … I wouldn’t say anybody was late or anything. You could just feel the energy of team. Once you have a lot of brothers around you, you know when your brothers are up. Some of us weren’t up.”
Husker senior defensive lineman Ben Stille wasn’t sure it was a lack of juice so much as Minnesota just winning individual matchups.
“No, I mean clearly the result on the field in the first half looks like we weren’t ready to play. I don’t think that was necessarily the issue,” Stille said. “There was a tone of one-on-one plays out there and we’ve got to make them. They made them all and we didn’t. I think that’s what it came down to.”
Nebraska is now 3-5 as it meets the bye week. While the Huskers have been close in games against top-10 teams, it now has losses to two squads in Illinois and Minnesota that are decidedly not in that category. The wins so far are only against Fordham, Buffalo and Northwestern.
Leading into this game against the Gophers, Nebraska head coach Scott Frost had stressed the importance of jumping out in front and playing the game on your teams against a Minnesota team he knew would work the game clock and limit snaps.
“When you play a team like this, first of all, if you’re ahead you’re in good shape. The game didn’t start very well for us,” Frost said. “We had a couple guys open on the first drive and didn’t connect, and punted to them and they went down and scored. So we were playing catchup the whole first half. They’re going to snap the ball with 2 on the play clock and you’re not going to get a lot of opportunities. So we’ve got to as a staff get them a little more juiced to play.
“I didn’t feel we had quite the same energy, and that’s on us. Yeah. And we had every opportunity to be in control of the game after the third quarter.”
Frost wasn’t quite sure how to read his team this week as it played one more important game before a bye week, after some emotional clashes with Michigan, Oklahoma and Michigan State in recent weeks.
“I didn’t know whether to be worried about that or not. The guys have been so professional and working so hard, and preparing so well, and they did that all week again,” he said. “It felt business-like rather than a lot of hype. And I didn’t know whether to be concerned about that or not, because the guys have showed up ready to go all year. Probably other than the first game. But they were mentally ready to go in that one too. There wasn’t as much juice, but we’ve got more of a veteran team now that I figured it looked business-like. It just wasn’t as much juice as we had the last two weeks. We needed more juice obviously in the first half.”
Frost also said, however, that there were also just a lot of one-on-one battles lost: a missed tackle here, a missed protection there.
A hole. It wasn’t so big Nebraska could’ve and should’ve still climbed out of it. But the score is what it is, and the record is what it is.
“Honestly, we got to get better,” Stille said. “That’s the difference is we’ve got to get better, and we got to get that much better to be making these close losses into wins. It’s not going to get done by sitting around.”
