Nebraska football: Former Husker sees ‘buy in’ with current squad

As the Nebraska football team goes through Spring Practice, one former Husker has noticed it appears the squad is buying into what the coaches are teaching.

If there has been a sense of consistency in the Nebraska football program, it’s that there hasn’t been much consistency. A large part of the struggles have been the number of changes that have taken place at the head coach and assistant coach positions.

When most people look at last years’ Cornhuskers team, they see a team that quit, to one degree or another on Mike Riley and his coaching staff. There could have been a lot of reasons why that happened, but the most obvious one is that the players stopped believing in what the coaches were telling and teaching them.

When a player does that, it can be hard to come back from it. This is especially the case when you’re talking about kids who have already been taught several different ways to do things over a short period of time.

Now the Husker players are having to deal with yet another new system and another new set of coaches. With all that’s happened in the last few years, it would be easy to understand if the players were taking a bit of a wait and see attitude.

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While that might be understandable, it appears that’s not what’s happening this spring. Jermarcus “Yoshi” Hardrick paid a visit to spring practice Thursday morning and liked what he saw.

Hardrick posted to his official Twitter account that he saw quite a bit of enthusiasm. More important than that, he saw players buying into the program.

Hardrick certainly knows about struggles and strife. He played during the Bo Pelini era. While there was winning, there was also plenty of strife surrounding the program.

It was rather obvious, especially when a tape of Pelini talking to his players after he was fired came out, that not everyone was buying in during that period of time.

Hardrick is also someone who has called Nebraska the “best thing that ever happened” to him. He’s someone who loves the University and still pays attention to it. He’s someone, despite having a career in the CFL wants to come back. He wants to come back despite the fact that he’s not from Nebraska.

Hardrick is, in short, exactly the kind of player you want to see very happy about what’s happening to the Nebraska football team. He seems rather happy today and that could be a very good thing tomorrow.