Stryker: Husker Loyalty Tested

Loss to Purdue is latest blow as Nebraska fans see paltry return on time, emotion, money invested in football team

Dylan Widger-USA TODAY Sports

Nebraska football fans are supportive. They’re forgiving. They’re patient and resilient. But with more than half the fourth quarter remaining, they started walking out of Memorial Stadium. They’d simply seen enough.

It was one of the saddest sights I’ve seen in that proud old ballyard, which has beheld so much competitive greatness over the decades. Unfortunately, over the course of nearly four seasons, Scott Frost and his coaching staff have not yet found a way to instill that quality into their Cornhusker teams.

Whether Nebraska fans are truly the greatest fans in college football could be debated, but here’s what I see. Rarely in the history of amateur athletics has a fan base invested so much time, energy and money in a team, only to get so little payback as Husker football fans have experienced over the past decade. Yet they come back time and time again and invest more. They don’t expect championships now, the way they used to in the 1980s and 1990s. They came into Frost’s fourth season anxious to watch and cheer as a redemption story unfolded. They walked away silently Saturday with that opportunity ripped away from them once again.

Who knows if they even expect competitive greatness anymore, but they still know what sound, disciplined football looks like, and they’re not getting it from the Husker program, not from their offense, anyway, and certainly not from the kicking game. (One bright spot that may one day make a difference was the emergence of Chase Contreraz, the Iowa Western transfer who kicked a 33-yard field goal and two extra points.)

Actually, all three phases of the game regressed Saturday during Nebraska’s 28-23 loss to Purdue, which was even more bewildering and frustrating than usual, because the Huskers should have been well-rested and well-prepared coming off their bye week, while Purdue was coming off a thrashing at Madison, Wisconsin.

A team that should have been fighting for its postseason life came out of the halftime locker room with a three-point lead, and just went out and laid an egg on offense in the second half. Much of the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of fourth-year starting quarterback and multiple-year team captain Adrian Martinez. Equal amounts of blame can be laid at the feet of Frost, who refused to even consider replacing him.

Martinez personally blew several precious opportunities to salvage this season and keep the way open to a bowl game. He threw a catastrophic four interceptions. First came his pick-six, when linebacker Jalen Graham jumped a sideline route and returned the ball 45 yards early in the second quarter to tie the game 7-7. (Truth be told, the Boilermakers dropped another likely pick-six on Martinez’s very first pass of the game.)

Martinez made three other huge mistakes at critical points in the game. The first: with the Huskers leading 17-14 with 20 seconds left in the first half, just after the Blackshirts stopped Purdue on fourth down at midfield, Samori Toure broke free and clear down the right sideline, but Martinez overthrew him. A touchdown there gives the Huskers a two-score lead and the ball coming out of halftime, and the ESPN announcers were beside themselves with astonishment that the Huskers could not make that play.

Possibly his worst miscue came on NU’s second drive of the third quarter, when the Huskers still led by three and had a chance to go up two scores when they took over in Purdue territory. Martinez moved up in the pocket trying to escape Purdue’s pass rush, and was grabbed by the back of his jersey. He tried to shovel the ball forward through traffic to Travis Vokolek, but Graham picked off the ball for a second time. With good reason, the ESPN announcers again were astounded, calling it a “horrific decision by a player who’s been playing for four years.”

Then, trailing 28-17 halfway through the fourth quarter, with enough time to stage a comeback, Martinez badly overthrew Toure as he ran a slant pattern, putting the ball squarely in the hands of a surprised safety Cam Allen, who was playing a deep center field for the Boilermakers, allowing them to bleed more time off the clock.

At that point, hope left the stadium. A steady stream of fans leaving turned into a full-fledged evacuation.

I talked to a lot of those fans shortly before the game, before Nebraska did what it has done throughout far too often during the Frost era — fritter away another one-score game to a team it had the talent to beat. These are smart, football-savvy people, and they truly want Frost to succeed. They have given him the benefit of the doubt and as my pregame survey indicates, they plan to continue to do so.

There are a lot of things I’m not sure of regarding Nebraska football. But there’s one thing I’m very sure of. Frost and his staff are getting way more than they deserve from the supportive, loyal, never-say-die football fans that fill Memorial Stadium and follow them on the road week after week. Frost acknowledged this in his postgame press conference.

“I’m grateful to the fans,” he said. “I’m grateful for an opportunity to coach at my alma mater. I'm impatient to have these games turn out a different way. I was just as frustrated as them in the second half.”

I didn’t talk to any fans as they left the stadium. I speculate that the majority are still in Frost’s corner. However, I can tell you about the one who emailed me right after the game and said, “Scott bet his future several years ago on Adrian Martinez. He lost.” Hard to argue with that one right now.

As for the things I’m not quite sure of?

I’m really not sure why you stick with Martinez at quarterback at this point. He has proved over his career that he’s not capable of closing out tough games against good teams, and frankly has a devil of a time doing it against mediocre teams. You can blame his offensive line for some of his woes, and I have over the last few years, yet he just doesn’t seem to have it in him. He’s not a tough-minded winner, not even close to the level of Tommy Armstrong Jr., another quarterback who was criticized for his erratic passing. Armstrong won 30 games as a starter in Lincoln. Martinez is 14-22 as a starter. Would Frost be better off using the running abilities of Logan Smothers to build an option-based attack, shooting for at least 50 rushes a game, playing the last three games close to the vest and hoping his defense could carry the day? The results could scarcely be worse than they are right now.

Martinez passed Armstrong as Nebraska’s all-time leader for pass completions, but he doesn’t turn those completions and yards into points like Armstrong did. Frost said after the game that he never considered replacing Martinez. He should have, because the fourth-year starter from Fresno, California, has shown only slight improvement since his freshman year. Lack of quarterback development is death for a football team.

If I’m wrong about Smothers, and nobody in the quarterback room was ready to come in to help the Huskers against either the Gophers or Boilermakers, I’m not sure why you would want to keep quarterback coach Mario Verduzco on your full time staff. If Verduzco could have helped the indecisive, thoroughly confused Martinez figure out the Boilers’ second-half coverage schemes, he would have. I can see no reason to keep Verduzco employed in Lincoln at all, but hey, if Frost thinks he absolutely needs his advice week by week, he’d at least gain a lot by making Verduzco a consultant and bringing current consultant Bill Busch onto his full time staff as special teams coach.

I have no idea why you stick with Greg Austin as offensive line coach. The Husker o-line is underperforming this season, as it did last season. Cam Jurgens, Turner Corcoran and Nouredin Nouili have above-average talent, as does Teddy Prochazka, who’s out for the year with a knee injury, but it’s not being developed well. The Husker front is not improving steadily, like a talented young offensive line should. The gains I saw in the first half against Purdue were erased by the better-adjusted Boilermaker defense in the second. Lack of offensive line development is double death for a football team.

In this case, continuity is not producing positive results on the Nebraska offense, which has enough talent to do much better than it has. It has failed to build off what seemingly were launching pad wins in 2020 (over Penn State) and 2021 (over Northwestern). The Frost/Oregon spread attack has sputtered ever since Devine Ozigbo and Stanley Morgan left the program after the 2018 season. Either a change of assistants, or a change of philosophy, or both, is needed.

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• Related: HuskerMax game page

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