Tad Stryker: Somebody Made a Play

"We made the winning play in the winning moment when we had to have it,” Rhule said. “We’d like to make a few more.”

It was technically a home game for the Bearcats, but the Sea of Red traveled to Kansas City and made a huge difference. You could’ve forgiven the Bearcat players and staff for wondering if their school’s big payday was really worth it.

It was worth it for Nebraska, which now has two consecutive one-score victories. This is getting habit-forming. And it finally got Rhule to the .500 mark in Lincoln.

Don’t worry about the lack of style points, at least, not at this point. It’s early.

The Nebraska offense looked like it hadn’t gained much ground since last December, and often looked like it was still playing with treacherous footing on a rain-soaked Yankee Stadium field, but that’s OK. The one-score win was pretty much the same, but that’s OK. It was a classic Big Ten slugfest.

The only problem is that the opponent was Big 12 Cincinnati, and the Bearcats were every bit as physical as the Huskers. The unsettling question of the week, of course, is, “Just how good is Cincinnati, really?” That probably won’t be answered to anyone’s satisfaction until November.

This was no triumphant, decisive breakthrough win to start Rhule’s third season in Lincoln. This was desperation survival mode. How often lately have the Blackshirts allowed a gut-wrenching, improbable, last-minute score to turn victory into defeat? On second thought, don’t answer that question, because this time, somebody made a play. And that could start something big.

Dylan Raiola executed much of Dana Holgorsen’s careful game plan well for much of the time. He completed 33 of 42 passes for 243 yards and two touchdowns with no interceptions. He looked for easy throws, and hit most of them. He converted 10 of 18 on third down. He did a great job of selling the play-action fake on his 3-yard slant pass to Dane Key with 10:36 left in the fourth quarter to put the Huskers ahead 20-10. But he couldn’t put the game away when given a couple of other opportunities, and frankly, he didn’t have a lot of help at times.

Nebraska’s offense is still incapable of salting away a close game in the fourth quarter with its running attack. This is not yet a physical offense. Cincinnati nearly doubled up NU in rushing, 202-110. That edge was an embarrassing 83-6 for the Big 12 team in the fourth quarter. The Blackshirts were in the process of giving away the game when Hartzog bailed them out. Yet Nebraska nearly doubled up Cincinnati in time of possession due to the effectiveness of Raiola’s short passing game.

NU had 78 offensive snaps to Cincinnati’s 55, which is right on pace with what you want, but the inconsistent Huskers had too many empty plays.

The Husker offensive line, which was dominant at the end of the second quarter, seemingly had Cincy on the ropes with a 13-3 halftime lead. Yet it didn’t finish. I thought the Bearcats were going to run out of gas. Their highly touted nose tackle, Dontay Corleone, was not much of a factor and finished the game with just one tackle and one quarterback hurry. Things seemed to be setting up well for the Huskers to slowly crush the Bearcats in the second half.

Instead, the Husker o-line, among the most experienced in the nation, came out of the locker room with a disturbing lack of focus and its tank strangely empty, and frankly disappeared for much of the second half. Predictably, the Husker offense shrank along with it. NU finished with a puny 3.1 yards per rush, which sounds crazy when you think about Emmett Johnson putting together his second career 100-yard rushing day (25 carries for 108 yards). Maybe someone will step forward to help him out, but nobody was ready to do that with the bullets flying Thursday night. Five other ball carriers gained a total of two net yards on 11 attempts. Raiola scrambled for one important third-down conversion, but he’ll need some rushing depth to get very far once Big Ten play begins.

But on the other hand, consider this: Huskers had not beaten a Power Four/Five conference team in a season opener since a 17-7 win over Oklahoma State in 2003. And they hadn’t a beaten such a team in the opener away from Memorial Stadium since 1999, when Eric Crouch trucked Mikkel Brown in a 42-7 win at Iowa City. So it’s a lot better than the alternative.

Defensive coordinator John Butler owes a debt of gratitude to the Cincinnati play-caller for two major miscues. Late in the first half, Cincy’s untimely screen pass on second and short was stuffed by Javin Wright, which enabled NU to take a timeout, setting up the game’s second-biggest defensive play — Vincent Shavers’ fumble-forcing hit, and Williams Nwaneri’s recovery at the Cincy 24, which in turn set up Raiola’s 5-yard TD pass to Nyziah Hunter on second and goal with 11 seconds remaining.

Then, after Sorsby used his legs to shred the Huskers on a pair of second-half touchdown drives, the play caller asked him to throw deep from the NU 33, when it seemed obvious that all he had to do was have Sorsby drop back and scramble through the Husker defense yet again to get the Bearcats into easy field goal range.

If the Blackshirts allow 200 rushing yards to Cincinnati, how many will they give up to Michigan? But that’s three weeks away. Nebraska is 1-0 and its young defensive front can learn a lot from this game. There just may be some other budding playmakers on this team. If they make them in big moments, who knows where this season will lead?