Stryker: Operation Updraft Executed

Explosive plays and a retooled offensive line catapult Nebraska to a 56-7 wipeout of the defending West champs

Kenny Larabee photo, KLIN

So is that what Scott Frost’s offense can look like when it manages to avoid hitting the “self-destruct” button?

Where did that come from? I was sitting in the press box, and the game-time weather announcement reported a 12-mph wind from the north-northwest. I might need someone in the stadium to confirm it, but it appeared to be a prodigious updraft.

A few weeks after Frost talked about his team’s need to get some “wind under our wings,” he got it and more in a 56-7 walloping of the Northwestern Wildcats.

Nebraska finally got the decisive home win over Northwestern that has been so elusive since joining the Big Ten. In fact it was the Huskers’ biggest conference win since Eric Crouch and his teammates smashed Big 12 foe Baylor 59-0 in 2000. This one was an early knockout. It was 14-0 with more than nine minutes left in the first quarter and 21-0 at the four-minute mark.

With the Huskers holding an insurmountable 35-7 lead at halftime, Matt Millen of the Big Ten Network sat in the press box, engrossed in a phone call. “I’ve never seen Nebraska play this well,” he said. He looked a bit shell-shocked. About a furlong away in the Wildcats’ locker room at the south end of the stadium, Pat Fitzgerald, the best football coach in the Big Ten, must have felt the same way.

As happy Nebraska fans walked out of Memorial Stadium late Saturday night, they seemed ready to sign up for more of whatever they had just witnessed. Was that a foreshadowing or just a false positive?

It was one game, according to Frost. Just one game. And that’s a good way to look at it.

On the first play from scrimmage, Nebraska’s playmakers made a play. Samori Toure adjusted to a slightly underthrown pass from Adrian Martinez, snatched it away from a Wildcat defensive back and sprinted all the way to the 5-yard line before anyone could stop him. That 70-yard thrust on the game’s first play set the tone, slashed the Wildcats to the bone, and the Huskers were off and rolling. They never derailed themselves, playing nearly error-free until they started substituting liberally in the fourth quarter. They committed no turnovers and had only two penalties for 9 yards at the end of the third quarter before committing two more 5-yard penalties in the final period. That’s right, Nebraska had about one-third the penalty yardage that a Fitzgerald-coached Northwestern did.

Frost’s offense works better when it gets explosive plays, like the perfectly-blocked 83-yard option pitch carried by wide receiver Zavier Betts, who motioned into the backfield and lined up behind Martinez in a two-back formation. It also works a lot better when it has a running back that roars out of the backfield like a runaway truck. That’s what Jaquez Yant, a redshirt freshman from Tallahassee, Florida, looked like at times Saturday night. Yant was the Huskers’ second running back, entering the game on the Huskers’ second series after Rahmir Johnson handled the first. Yant has advanced a step beyond “spring game wonder” status. After being challenged by his coaches, Yant sat out until he lost more than 20 pounds and gained some speed. Against Northwestern, he took a lot of pressure off Martinez with 127 yards on 13 carries, including a 64-yard burst to set up Nebraska’s second touchdown.

“Let’s not make him Mike Rozier right now,” Frost cautioned afterward. “He had one good game. He can still really improve, and he is a lot quicker at 232 than he is at 258.”

It won’t take long to see how the Big Ten adjusts to Frost’s Martinez/Yant/wide receiver version of the triple option, the scheme Fitzgerald said his team prepared for but couldn’t stop. Undefeated Michigan is up next. One thing’s for sure, their defensive coaches will quickly notice in their film study that Nebraska’s running game works better when the Huskers use a lead blocker, a role filled admirably by Johnson on Martinez’s sweep-action touchdown runs in the first quarter.

Omens and updrafts aside, the first place we should look for an explanation of the 3-3 Huskers’ sudden success is the offensive line, where Frost and Greg Austin made some bold moves, benching redshirt freshmen Ethan Piper and Bryce Benhart, shifting Turner Corcoran to right tackle, and giving  Nouredin Nouili his first start at left guard. And just like that, gone is true freshman tackle Teddy Prochazka’s redshirt. It looks like he will see a lot of playing time in the second half of the season.

That combination, along with center Cam Jurgens and right guard Matt Sichterman, looked promising. The Big Red running game shredded Northwestern with 427 yards, which works out to 8.1 yards per carry. They allowed no sacks and only one quarterback hurry in 21 pass plays. Certainly, this Northwestern team lost a lot of firepower from last season’s Big Ten West champions, but it’s something to build on for the Husker o-line.

A native of Germany, Nouili played his high school ball at Norris as an exchange student, then went to Colorado State before transferring to Nebraska in 2020. Prochazka, who played left tackle, is straight out of Elkhorn South, where he helped his team make the state Class A finals last fall. No doubt Michigan's defensive coordinator will have something cooked up for him less than a week from now, when the Wolverines come to Memorial Stadium for another night game.

Athletic director Trev Alberts, dapper in his black suit, gave Jurgens a bear hug as he walked off the field. The former All-America defender can recognize a significant momentum shift when he sees one. The 87,364 fans who packed the old ballyard kept the intensity ratcheted up all night, even before they roared at the blackout version of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” at the end of the third quarter, apparently a surprise event judging by the way Frost and several of his players referred to in their postgame comments.

Among them was super senior JoJo Domann, who may have played his best game, getting eight solo tackles, three of them for losses, and forcing two fumbles. Early in the second quarter, he crashed into Northwestern quarterback Ryan Hilinski at his mesh point with his running back on an all-out run blitz on second-and-goal at his own 1-yard line early in the second quarter, and Deontre Thomas recovered the loose ball to end any hope the Wildcats had of getting back into the game.

Domann’s postgame comments indicated he had experienced a significant updraft.

“I was saying in the locker room, we are going to recover better, like your body recovers better after a win,” Domann said. “Just emotionally you are in a lot better place and it feels good to reap the reward of all the work we put in. This one feels good, but next week is going to feel better.”

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Related: HuskerMax game page

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