Nebraska Football: Adrian Martinez treated fairly in Rivals QB rankings
The Nebraska football quarterback has tough competition in-conference.
Nebraska football quarterback Adrian Martinez has to have a bounce-back year. There is no doubt about that. Heading into the 2020 season, he is being ranked relatively highly in the rankings of top quarterbacks in the Big Ten.
In a list compiled by Robin Washut of Rivals.com, Martinez is ranked fourth on the list. He is behind Sean Clifford of Penn State, Tanner Morgan of Minnesota, and Justin Fields of Ohio State.
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Personally, I think he is in the right spot. The thing with Adrian Martinez is that we know what he can do. We saw it a little bit during his freshman season of 2018.
He was able to be an effective dual-threat quarterback. Not only that, he was decisive in his decision-making. His stellar play as a freshman led to extremely high expectations in the year two. Unfortunately, he just didn’t seem to be able to live up to them.
It’s not that he had a bad year last year. The statistics he put up were decent. He passed for 1,956 yards, and 10 touchdowns. He also rushed for 626 yards and seven touchdowns.
Now in his junior season, he is going to be faced with a difficult year. In terms of the schedule, it’s not favorable. However, he does have an opportunity to really leave his mark in the first half of the schedule.
I will be interested to see what he does during the back half of the schedule. Games against Ohio State, Penn State and Minnesota will put him up against the quarterbacks he is ranked below.
If Martinez is looking for some easy wins to help his case, this is definitely not the conference to do it. Even still, he should be able to have a bounce-back season. Expectations were extremely high for him last year, and he just couldn’t live up to them. Now, he will have a loaded backfield, some young wide receivers and some tight ends that will hopefully be able to make plays in the red zone. Hopefully, that will lead to better results this year.
Compared to last year, the preseason hype seems pretty modest for Adrian Martinez and Nebraska football. That is definitely a good thing. If we learn anything from last year, it’s that preseason hype does not mean a thing. Hopefully, Nebraska will be able to put together a solid season and put the rest of the country on notice. They certainly have enough big-time games on this year’s schedule to do that.