UTEP coach says his team was thinking 'too much' vs Nebraska football

While some of UTEP’s fans didn’t show Nebraska football nearly enough respect leading up to the Week 1 matchup, give the Miners’ head coach this credit. Scotty Walden has only said glowing things about the Huskers in the weeks before the two teams faced off.

In fact, several of his comments read like was legitimately jealous of what the Cornhuskers have and what Matt Rhule is doing when it comes to trying to turn the program around. In particular, Walden said last week that he thought the Huskers culture was “elite.”

It’s safe to say, he was not convinced otherwise on Saturday afternoon when the Nebraska football team absolutely dismantled Walden’s squad, 40-7. After the game, the UTEP coach had several comments that shed some light on his thought process during and after the season opening tilt.

Among those comments were that it was possible his defense was having to think a bit too much instead of just reacting to what was in front of them. He also said some of that was to be expected considering how much more talent NU has.

Nebraska football made UTEP think too much

“Certainly it felt like with playing a team the caliber of Nebraska, we couldn’t just go out there in 10 and 11 personnel and just run base plays,” Walden said during his post game press conference. “We felt like we were going to have to be unique with our approach.”

“That leads to your guys having to think a little more. That’s okay, but when you have too much of it, then that hurts you,” he added.

There was one other big factor that Walden said played a part in the lopsidedness of the game. That was just how long the Huskers held the ball.

“[Nebraska] obviously had double the time of possession. Normally that’s a stat I don’t care about, but if you’re not scoring points then it matters a lot,” Walden said. “They had close to 80 plays to our 40 plays. That may be as bad as I’ve ever seen.”

It was a bit worse when you consider that UTEP’s only scoring drive consisted of three plays and then Nebraska football was able to immediately go back out on the field and keep controlling the time of possession.