Tad Stryker: Blood-Red Passion From Garrett Nelson

Good things await the Huskers if this college football romantic can somehow infect the entire team

Robert Goddin-USA TODAY Sports

There was passion and blood and honesty in Garrett Nelson’s words this week at Big Ten Football Media Days in Indianapolis.

Bleeding for Nebraska, wearing his heart on his sleeve, both those clichés are true about Nelson, a young man who grew up in the Nebraska Panhandle during The Slide, the two-decade downturn in the Cornhusker football program. Thankfully, he’s not buying into it. In fact, he seems to possess ingredients that are key to breaking out of it.

Good heavens, what Husker Nation would give to see Nebraska football players willing to bleed for coach and country once again.

Forced fumble vs. Ohio State, 2021 / Dylan Widger-USA TODAY Sports

Nelson, an outspoken junior edge rusher from Scottsbluff, is someone who represents much of what was once good about college football. He’s not happy with current trends.

“There’s no loyalty to programs; there’s no loyalty to teammates,” he said. “You see a guy who’s transferred three or four times, you don’t really trust that guy. He could be up and gone in the next year or so. That’s not a good idea about life. If you don’t like something, you can just leave or quit; I mean, that’s just ... that’s not how you go through life. You’ve got to deal with people. You’ve gotta build relationships, you’ve gotta understand why teams are the way they are, because people have cared and put in time, stayed loyal and have done anything for those guys on the team.”

That can certainly be applied at multiple levels, especially by a program like Nebraska, which absolutely must learn such lessons from Big Ten West programs like Wisconsin and Iowa who, if nothing else, have achieved stability.

Is there really anybody like that around the game anymore, uttering refreshingly traditional heartland notions about loyalty, perseverance and paying the price? The son of a two-time wrestling All-American at Nebraska, Nelson seems to think that for a college football player, pursuing championships and building lifelong memories with friends is more important than racking up big bucks. How quaint. How refreshing.

Somebody better check this kid. He still believes college football is a romantic adventure. That runs counter to the prevailing opinion of national media, who believe that’s crazy talk from the dark ages before NIL. Listen to this guy, who still thinks you start by forging a band of brothers. You walk through the pain, acknowledging and taking responsibility for the sins of commission and omission that have kept the Husker program egregiously underperforming in the Big Ten. Where is that kind of thinking going to get him?

Hopefully on the right side of .500, for starters, especially if this mindset spreads to his teammates. There is enough talent on the Nebraska football team to win eight games, and has been for some time. The big question is, can someone — most likely, Nelson — get his buddies to reject the spiraling “Here-we-go-again” mindset that crippled this team the last three seasons whenever it came up against some adversity? Because so far, coach Scott Frost has not succeeded in that quest.

"Everything’s right in the world when you win football games,” Nelson forthrightly said, “and that hasn’t happened in my life in college yet.”

Nelson sounds like he believes in stuff that Frost has been preaching since Day One — stuff like the importance of being part of something that’s bigger than yourself — but for whatever reason, has been unable to build into his players.

Sure, it takes more than big talk and big hearts to win Big Ten football games. It takes a few players who can make game-changing plays. Except for Deontai Williams’ strip-sack-and-score in front of an empty Memorial Stadium to make the difference in the Huskers’ win over Penn State in 2020, I can’t think of any such plays since Ameer Abdullah graduated. I can think of half a dozen times where a Husker missed by inches on a play that could have closed the deal on any particular game. I contend that far too often, far too many Huskers play half a step slow, and have not yet bought into that phrase which Frost has been known to utter: “No fear of failure.”

Coaching is vital, and new strategies can help. Will Donovan Raiola’s aggressive blocking scheme — which emphasizes explosion first and fine-tuning the details later — achieve a breakthrough? It surely could, at least at the college level, where making an occasional mistake at full speed will not doom a team the way tentative play at the point of attack most assuredly will.

It helps if you have some all-conference talent sprinkled in, but it doesn’t take a field full of superstars, not even in major college football. Mostly, it takes an entire team of players who can execute fundamentals under pressure, over and over again. Just do your job. That’s what happened back in the day, back when Husker walk-ons like Billy Legate and Ryan Terwilliger from places like Elgin and Grant viewed winning conference championship rings as an achievable goal. Some of them probably thought of it as a birthright.

There I go, hearkening back to the Golden Age of Husker football. Those days are gone. Aren’t they? They certainly are if you stop striving for them.

Nobody’s expecting a national title, but guys like Nelson aren’t satisfied with just anything less than honor achieved on the field. Now he’ll have to go out and back up his words with deeds. I look forward to watching him do just that. Nelson, like everyone else on the Husker roster, has plenty to prove.

If he’s elected a team captain, it will be a good sign, a sign that just maybe, a larger circle than his fellow defensive linemen are buying in. If you’re one of those Husker fans who believe that Frost-ism:  “Player-led teams are better than coach-led teams,” well, you hope and pray that Nelson succeeds. That alone would make me feel better about this year’s edition of the Huskers than I did about Frost’s first four.

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