If Mike Locksley wasn’t on the hottest of hot seats entering Saturday, I can’t imagine allowing Nebraska to outscore his Maryland team 34-0 after the midpoint of the second quarter would quiet his critics.
Locksley has had plenty of no-good, very bad days in his career with the Terps, but Saturday might go down as one of the worst,especially since his pregame comments made sure to wake the Husker fanbase if they were planning to sleepwalk into their seats.
Of course, Mike Locksley also ran into a Nebraska program that is better than any he has certainly run across. Even if they didn’t look it, the Huskers went down 23-14 thanks in large part to a combination of bizarre calls by a bad officiating team and poor play on both sides of the ball.
Nebraska also came out of the gate looking extremely off-kilter, largely because quarterback Anthony Colandrea simply didn’t have his A game for most of Saturday. He finished with a very pretty 26 of 39 for 238 yards and 3 touchdowns. However, he also threw his second interception of the year and, especially in the first three quarters, missed plenty of open receivers on simply bad throws.
Nebraska football storms back with 34 unanswered points to reach first 5-0 start since 2016
He’ll likely admit as much when he’s asked about what went right and what went wrong. But Colandrea is also a major indicator that this Nebraska team is different. Despite struggling through the air for most of the game, he helped his team with his first Husker career 100-yard rushing game (108 yards on 10 carries), including a 51-yard run that felt like the dagger in the heart of the Terps.
Perhaps the biggest thing about finding a way to take a 23-14 deficit and turn the final score into a 48-23 victory is that this version of the Huskers is exorcising the ghosts of the teams that used to roll over and die when things didn’t go their way in the first half.
That could be especially important in the next few weeks as the schedule gets much tougher, starting with No. 6 Indiana in Lincoln and then No. 16 Oregon. Maybe this is the team that finds itself down early, but knows how to battle back. There’s at least hope not just because Nebraska is 5-0 for the first time since 2016, but how they got to 5-0.
Add us as a preferred source on Google