[Husker] Surprised; not surprised

[Nick Chevance]

Man, I cannot believe the moaning and griping on this list today.
Yes, Texas owns us.  That's nothing to be happy about.  But give them
credit.  They were able to come in and remain focused.  They stacked
the line of scrimmage and made it difficult for our zone reads to find
room.  I disagree with the suggestion that it was bad reads.  It was
no holes.  They plugged up the holes pretty well.  We did fairly well
with our running game when we weren't running the zone read (Helu and
Burkhead had 20 rushes for 82 yards), but we couldn't complete passes
when it counted.  End of story.  I think if you check the stats,
you'll find that things weren't nearly as bad as you might remember
from the game.

And no, the officials had little impact on this game, no more than
usual.  We weren't jobbed by the officials.  That's just the pain of
the loss coming out.  The out of bounds catch should have been
reviewed but wasn't.  Nebraska had a chance to review it - the booth
had a replay, but I think they all thought it was out of bounds too.
It sure looked out of bounds to everyone, including all of us until we
saw the replay.  The facemask penalty was within the rules - though
I'll admit there didn't appear to be a grasp and pull on that helmet,
the rules are intended to protect a player's head and neck, and if the
roles had been reversed, I'm pretty sure we'd be screaming the other
way.  Where penalties hurt us was we had twice as many as Texas, many
of them bone-headed, and preventable.  Texas got more yards from us in
penalties than we gave up to them passing.

Where we were lacking in coaching was the failure to consider Gilbert
as running the ball.  At Washington, we knew Locker would run and we
had a provision for that.  We also adapted to Coffman at KState
running the ball.  With Texas, it didn't appear that we had provided
for that, and it hurt us, especially in the first half.  He was second
on Texas in rushing (71 yards).  That I see as a major failure.

The second failure of major proportion was the failure in the
defensive backfield to wrap up.  Not calling out any particular
players, but I'm sure they'll see it on film this week.  Lots of
really good hits that don't bring a player down is as effective as
playing flag football.  Tag, you're down doesn't work here.  Texas got
extra yards on several occasions because the hits weren't made with
the arms open.  That's just bad fundamental football, and I suspect
its been a problem all year - we got exposed on that this week.
There's also been a tendency this year to try to strip balls from
behind rather than tackling, wrapping up and bringing down the runner.
 I only saw it a couple of times yesterday, but that contributes to
the problem of poor tackling.

Finally, the catching of good balls and bad balls.  Some of the passes
were off the mark, but most drops were "catchable."  Texas defended
well in the backfield but we had more than our fair share of
opportunities where our schemes exposed Texas as out of position or
our receivers out-played their backs.  We missed most of those
opportunities.  That's just plain lack of consistent execution -
though you gotta wonder whether its something that happens when
players are just trying so hard not to fail.

And keep in mind, those of you wanting to throw the defense, or the
whole team, under the bus as over-achieving pretenders with a soft
schedule, had we made just one of three or four catches that we
missed, the game's outcome would likely had been very different.
Texas came in with nothing to lose, I think we came in too tight.  We
choked early, but we had real chances to turn that game around.  Our
running scheme wouldn't work as long as we couldn't consistently move
the ball through the air.  We ran and passed at Washington and KState,
and ended up running because that's what worked.  But when we needed
to pass to move the ball, the passes and schemes worked.  Everything
except for the catching part.

I'm mad and sad all at the same time, but this game wasn't taken from
us.  We gave it away.  We failed to execute in a few critical areas,
and it bit us.  Texas made fewer mistakes and no critical mistakes.  I
thought we'd be able to move the ball - I think we had that
opportunity but failed to cash in on those.  And there's always those
intangibles with Texas.  You just can't make mistakes and hope to
squeeze by.  Not against Texas.

Nick
-- 
“It isn't necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.”
          Groucho Marx