[Husker] Surprised; not surprised

[Mark Landin]

Thenarse let gilbert convert a 3rd down by not wrapping him up AT ALL
there early in the first. I think that gave the horns a lot of
confidence.

On 10/17/10, Nick Chevance <nickchevance at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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"He's old enough to know what's right and young enough not to choose
it. He's strong enough to win the world and weak enough to lose it." -
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